Like all of Don Francisco’s coffees, this exclusive collection was sourced and selected by Gaviña Family members. However, the Family Reserve single-origin coffees and blends are, by far, their most distinctive. Family Reserve coffees are among the Gaviña Family personal favorites – they’re the coffees that they enjoy at home with family and friends.

We congratulate the Gaviña Family and we are thrilled for the launch of Family Reserve.

Want to see a few of the billboards? We would love to know if you have seen any for yourself and what you think!

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• Users prefer headlines to be short, direct, and revealing.
• Underestimating the importance of headlines almost guarantees the failure of the submission.

Being an agency with our roots in more traditional media that includes writing headlines for copy and display ads, we understand this practice well and we apply the same practices to our social media campaign. However, this new data reinforces the fact that social media pros have known for a very long time; How critical good headlines are for generating clicks. The new research data provides some additional understanding of how users visually process them. Here are some tips for writing good headlines for the web:

• Is the headline message actionable?
• Does the headline as a question or invite people into a conversation?
• Does the headline convey an overall message?
• Is the headline optimized for search (i.e. specific keyword call-outs)?

Please add to the list if you have any ideas or thoughts.

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We pride ourselves on our aesthetic and design, and it is nice to see that our hard work and efforts have been recognized.

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Facebook buys FriendFeed and takes lifestreaming to a new level. Tumblr emerges as an all-in-one website and blog communication platform. Posterous enters the scene as an email-enabled blog network doing the work of content aggregator and thought sharer. Twitter, as we’ve known all along, has direct messaging – and we’re seeing a healthy transition away from the more traditional means of sending a note.

Why? Because we can. More importantly, because email isn’t an open mailbox. It doesn’t connect people. And this is the central thrust of the social web.

Now of course, there are a whole host of issues with social correspondence or ‘we-mailing’.

For one, privacy disasters have reared their ugly head. TechCrunch reported earlier this year that direct messages were being exposed through 3rd party apps. Facebook has had its own headaches filtering out viral spam from inboxes – seen those random ‘videos’ your friends have been sending you? FriendFeed is now starting to see its own skulduggery in the form of sexual deviants and internet marketing scammers.

But we haven’t seen this type of stuff before?

The value of social utilities in this regard is that they provide an opportunity to pre-screen content and endorse correspondence through ‘friends’ that are truly yours. Further, they could be the answer to the ongoing debate over IP sharing and privacy that has mostly been attributable to junk mail and spam blasts.

Think about it: by operating through degrees of conversation, we can help each other keep correspondences alive, or shut them down in an instant.

What are your thoughts on this, and what are some of the ways you see this transition evolving?

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 Project Natal is an alternate reality game (ARG), which is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants’ ideas or actions. The point of this remote-free technology would theoretically allow someone to experience himself or herself as a controller and in turn allow them to have a very “natural” interaction and also a natural entertainment experience.

 The more advanced alternative reality capabilities become, the more difficult it becomes for us as humans to have a clear distinction between “our world” and a “virtual world.”  There is a reason that video games have always been developed as whimsical, supernatural, and fantasy. If we take the elements that separate virtual reality from true reality and muddle them up, we are left with a video game that runs the risk of attempting to be so realistic that one could possibly develop an emotional attachment to it.

The single point of advertising is to create interactions in the REAL world. This game creates a world for you.  Humans need to maintain the small amount of social interaction with one another that we have left. Here are some things to consider…

We have the responsibility to utilize media to explain the disconnect between these two worlds just as major tobacco companies produced anti-smoking campaigns and casino’s posted resources to contact if one has a gambling addiction. The tobacco and casino companies qualified their positions and perhaps we should follow suit.

 People have a hard enough time with new technology in general, let alone something that is several steps ahead of everything else. As advertisers, we must use media to explain how to use technologies in responsible ways. 

 If we start developing relationships with video game characters, I think we are in huge trouble. If we are developing aspirational qualities from these characters and then applying them to true relationships, that is one thing; if we are pulling qualities out of these characters and then applying them to a relationship with that character, it is a another. We as advertisers must be responsible about the things that we say when promoting. What information we give consumers to pass along must be thought out. 

Where do you think we (as advertisers) would go if the understanding of human interaction and connection becomes extinct?

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            It comes as no surprise that people tend to favor others of the same in-group. What is an in-group, you ask? “An in-group is a social group towards which an individual feels loyalty and respect, usually due to membership in the group. This loyalty often manifests itself as an in-group bias.” Now that we have defined in-group and out-group, we can now move on to the core of this conversation. How many times have you instantly denied a friend request on Facebook? I know first hand that I have instantly denied numerous people for reasons unbeknownst to me. 

Why in the world would we trust one stranger any more than another stranger if you don’t really know either one? Luckily, this question was addressed in a recent study by the Association for Psychological Science. The study began by establishing two possible bases for group-based trust. The first is stereotyping – people tend to judge in-group members as being nicer, more helpful, generous, trustworthy, and fair. The second is expectation – people tend to expect moderately better treatment from in-group members because they are thought to value other in-group members’ interests.

            Each study participant was offered a choice between an unknown sum of money from an in-group member or an out-group member (and were told that the in-group and out-group members controlled the amount of money to allocate as they desired). The initial result was that participants overwhelmingly chose the in-group member option. Also, surprisingly, this result held true even when the stereotype of the in-group was more negative than that of the out-group. Good, bad or indifferent, the stereotype was ignored in favor of group identity. But, when the participants were told that the in-group money giver did not know they were part of the same group, the situation drastically changed. Participants resorted to making their choices on the basis of stereotype. If the in-group was portrayed negatively, then the participants were much more likely to choose the out-group member option, and visa versa.

            What does this all mean? The study suggests that when members of the in-group are mutually aware of their commonality, there is an expectation of better treatment than would be received from someone in the out-group. When there is not a clear understanding of commonality, people rely on stereotypes much more frequently.

            Why am I even talking about this? It gets really interesting when focused on electronic communication. Online, most people are not aware of whether others’ are a part of “in” or “out” groups unless they do some research and find background information. Based on the results of this study, in online cases that do not provide instant feedback about possible commonalities, I would expect most people to rely on group stereotypes when deciding who to trust (follow, read, bookmark, tweet, etc).  These social networks have the ability to establish group commonalities, interests, and dislikes intuitively, but and it is a big but, one must be equipped with the knowledge and desire to search for these characteristics. Furthermore, if the social networks have the ability to define groups, how can we make sense of these connections? How can we take a common interest and establish a much more successful way of using this data? Given the current extreme popularity of social media and networking, we have the perfect grounds to test this hypothesis with up to the minute information. Regardless of the amount of commonalities found, and research in online interaction, at the end of the day, human interaction always wins.

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Case and point: the Manhattan View project. Manhattan view is a new residential condominium building that is located in the Mid-Wilshire area. Our solution involved tying niche print, publications, and social media into our grand opening message. We also teamed up with the Kogi truck, capitalizing on their growing fan base in order to extend the reach of the grand opening message of Manhattan View. Through the cooperative effort of Scott Anastasi Realty and One Eighteen, the ability to spread their grand opening message of Manhattan View effectively across potential buyers that would be in the area that day was a large success. Coupled with Facebook event postings, this was an efficient and cost effective way to notify people of the grand opening. This resulted in over 200 people and multiple contracts signed on that Saturday. Manhattan view is expected to continue to sell based on the momentum created by this kick off effort.

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Giant Solar Flowers

The marketing campaign is in an effort to raise awareness and interest in the 2010 Toyota Prius. The campaign called, “Harmony Between Man, Nature, and Machine”, will be traveling around the US and stopping in New York, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. As if the new Prius commercials were not engaging enough, Toyota continues to go above and beyond the spectrum of creative marketing strategies. What if the next campaign consisted of Toyota setting up portable solar heating stations at large public swimming pools to heat the freezing cold pool? Of course this would only make sense if it were getting cooler outside. What do you think would be a great future campaign?

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