The New New McKinney.com

Over the past month, our new agency site has made some big waves. The development process not only made me rethink how to get interesting work done, but apparently, the site made others rethink the relationship between their mobile and dot-com sites.

Typically, mobile sites are watered-down versions of their dot-com brethren. I pushed my team to create one site that delivered the same experience on mobile touch devices and on computers. The key was to stay focused on the experience we wanted the user to have not the technologies we might use to create it.

We essentially designed for the human finger first and the mouse-click second.The result can be seen at www.mckinney.com.  Try it on your iPhone, Android, iPad and laptop.

So far the site has received loads of positive feedback from the design and development communities. It's also received several awards including CA Webpick of the Day, as well as, Mobile Site of the Day from FWA. It also made the FWA public shortlist. I think there are more to come for the site.

Congrats to the entire 6-person team!

Souvenirs from Advertising Week

While I didn't get to attend the ceremonies (got the nose firmly planted against the grindstone) a handful of projects I was fortunate enough to have had a hand in got some recognition this week.

We picked up two category wins at the 2010 OMMA Awards for a project we did for Qwest Communications called Protect Ur Rep. It was a campaign that focused on Xbox Live gamers. Participants could play for the right to have their Xbox Live avatars cover up our in-game ads.

We also notched a gold at the 2010 MIXX Awards for a social media campaign we did for Travelocity, and both a silver and bronze for an integrated campaign we did for Qwest Business.

The Qwest Business campaign included a LinkedIn forum, an interactive iPad ad and iPhone app all centered around a problem solving competition for IT professionals.

Congrats to all my teammates!

Roadster. Reinvented. Resurrected.

This piece has been a part of my body of work for years now and it still feels fresh. I just never had a way to showcase it very well. It's a vehicle brochure we did for the redesigned Boxster back in 2005. The amount of real estate we were allowed to dedicate to imagery was a bit of a coup considering their typical brochure at the time. These images came from a friend's site. I was the writer and ACD on it while at Carmichael Lynch. Unfortunately, these snaps just give you a flavor for the book and don't showcase my unparalleled command of the English language. I'm kidding. Okay, the writing's decent. Wish you could see it in person. It also included a CD-ROM in the back. I'll post some stuff from that as well.

Holiday Wrap Up

This past holiday season, Qwest asked us to quick come up with a little online thing they could promote in their offline catalog. And we had about 15 minutes to tell them what we would create. Without thinking we blurted out "custom gift tags". Anyone giving a gift generally likes to wrap it. And everyone hates shelling out for gift tags. I'm cheap so I usually cut a piece of scrap wrapping paper, fold it into a mini card, write the "to-from" in it and then tape it to the gift. So we thought other cheapos would appreciate being able to customize and print their own fancy schmancy gift tags for free. The application lets you choose a style, customize it with an uploaded photo, and then download a pdf of your tags set up to print on sticky labels or on plain paper. Once downloaded you can print as many as you like. The response was phenomenal. Where's the branding you ask? It was embedded in a Qwest.com page.

The Value of Reliable Information

You wouldn't consent to surgery without having as much good up-to-date information as possible. Hell, they put "born on" dates on beer so we know if we're getting the freshest frost-brewed buzz. So why rely on stock pricing info that's 20 minutes old when making investment decisions? This online campaign for NASDAQ's Last Sale product tries to drive home the importance of good real time info. We ran video banners featuring a confused financial report as well as banners that looked like confused stock tickers (not shown yet). They lead users to a landing page where they could link to sites featuring NASDAQ Last Sale quotes and even try them on their mobile right there.

Mythbusting Myths

If I told you that you can make money when the market goes down, you'd think I was full of it, right? The truth is you can. As long as you know how to pull off a short sell. Or if you have ProShares short funds in your portfolio. To introduce people to this concept and the ProShares short fund product, we enlisted the help of some legendary mythological creatures. What you see here are three banners and a landing page. Now, only if I had invested in ProShares about a year ago.

New McKinney.com

Last week we officially launched our new agency website, mckinney.com. The soft launch came a few weeks earlier. It's received some good reviews. It is a representation of our commitment to deepening the "conversation" with current and prospective clients, potential recruits, and industry folk. The back end is pretty cool (3D, papervision, flash, and AI). Content is dynamic and the site allows for deep-linking. The use of freesites enables us to create customized experiences for certain visitors without digging into the core site architecture. The conversation engine lets visitors find content via a sort of natural language search. Questions we can't answer are logged and the info is posted at a later date. So the conversation can evolve. Oh and when viewing work, the site offers visitors HD video and imagery. The PR push was simple. Send an e-mail with a keyword and a link to the site. When the user entered the keyword, they were taken to a customized freesite with a special video welcome from our chief officers.