Every year our community turns out to support the Boilermaker 15K Road Race, a race we helped turn into the nation’s largest in middle distance running. This amazing regional and national event holds a special place in our agency history, since we created the original logo and branding, and worked PR and promotions for the race for many years. Our client Saranac hosts the huge annual post-race party and is a founding sponsor. We’ve also worked on running event and product promotions for clients like adidas and the Boston Marathon, so running is part of our agency DNA.

We decided to make running more fun by giving away four iPod nanos along with Nike+, the running-to-music system from Nike that has turned into a worldwide phenomenon. That’s one nano for each quarter this coming year. With Nike+, a small chip fits into a custom-designed niche in compatible running shoe soles, and “talks” to your iPod nano, keeping beat with your natural rhythm as you run. It also stores your route, speed and other information to upload to Nike’s website, so you can keep track of your progress and share with friends (great motivation).

How can you win? If you’re currently on or join our email list, follow us on Twitter, or “Like” us on Facebook, you’re in the running! We’ll choose a winner at random from all our online friends, once each quarter throughout the year. That’s it! So make yourself a promise, get out there to run, and connect with us today using the buttons below.

We’re proud to share with you two new television spots for a client close to our hearts: Mohawk Valley Heart Institute. MVHI is a successful model of a concept we love—collaboration—between area hospitals to offer some of the best cardiac services in Central New York and beyond. We shot and edited both spots in HD, something we’ve been doing on all our broadcast work.

The phenomenal results belie the challenging shoot: near record heat for the time of year (well into the 90s all day for our offsite work), a large cast, and a tight shooting schedule over two days. Spots were filmed at a local home and at the Institute’s facilities, where we were constantly on alert for emergencies, any of which would require us to vacate our “set” quickly for patients. The professionalism, organization and generosity of MVHI’s staff, which serve them so well in their work, made our jobs much easier.

It’s always rewarding when planning, preparation, hard work and great people come together to create great work. Enjoy.

Bernie and Ryan share 5 big ideas reinforced at the SXSW interactive conference.

We’re having an amazing time at SXSW and are overwhelmed by the amount of great content and great people that we’ve met. We’ll be doing more comprehensive recaps soon, but here’s a quick taste of our impressions so far.

This past week I had the chance to sit down with Rick Short, director of Marketing / Communications at Indium Corp. Rick has been blogging and using social media to help Indium build contacts and grow its business well before social was on the map. The conversation was so good, we had to break it up into parts. You can also connect with Rick by visiting his blog or following him on Twitter.

This will be the first in a series of interviews we’ll be conducting this year with folks who are leveraging the power of social networks as a part of their overall marketing strategy. Enjoy the videos. (more…)