Bush Marketing and Branding

Having good clients is the single most important factor in the success of an advertising agency. I make this statement without hesitation based on my 20 years of agency and client experience.

Finding and keeping good clients is paradoxically the single most difficult thing in advertising, which leads me to the subject matter of this blog: Outsourcing your creative requirements.

Bush Marketing has worked for other advertising agencies over the years and we have loved the work so much we have decided to specialize in it. Advertising Agencies, Business Consultants and Web Design Companies have come to us to help them help their clients. Without exception the experience has been delightful: clear briefs and no grief.

Our 3rd party work has brought us to lofty heights including web development for South African Airways through Griffin Advertising and most recently DDB Sydney. What a pleasure it is to get be able to transcreate brilliant ads and get praised from your peers for fast turn around. Here is a banner ad that we churned and burned out for DDB last month.

Bush Marketing also practices what we preach: copy writing, media relations, photography, web applications and entrepreneur coaching are 3rd party services we use to help our clients get the biggest bang for their buck.

When I was in Canada one of the highlights was a visit with our writer Kaleigh who lives in Vancouver and is finishing up a creative writing degree at UBC. Kaleigh is also my oldest daughter and one of my life's highlights.

Whenever I see Kaleigh she always passes on some of her unique wisdom to me. This time it was in the form of a book, which I have discovered is more then just a book, it's a movement.

The 100 mile diet. From the moment Kaleigh told me about it--I got it. Now I want to live it and pass the good word on. It was a no brainer to apply this paradigm to a party we had planned to celebrate the opening of our new studio in the Byron Bay Arts and Industrial Estate. If you happen to be in within 100 miles of Byron Bay on Thursday August 29th please contact us (grow@bushmarketing.com) and we will add you to our guest list. Here is our working map for discovering our local culinary treasures.

Sending out newsletters to your customers has never been cheaper thanks to the Internet. Sending out newsletters to your customers has never been more frustrating, complicated and ineffectual thanks to the internet.

Take me back to the good old days. Printing out labels from a list of customers using a mail merge in Microsoft word. Sticking labels onto envelopes and licking stamps. Hard to believe that I could long for this old fashioned way of keeping in touch with customers--but I do.

Here I sit pondering how to get myself out of S_it with one of our most important clients. Here is some background. Way, way back in time we introduced our client to b-central, yes another Microsoft solution. B-central served us faithfully for over five years. In that time we built a database of over 6000 customers and faithfully sent them emails about events, new products and of course SALES. It was pretty easy to use and relatively cost effective. But Bill decided to pull the plug and we were left searching for a new email newsletter solution.

Always keen to promote open source solutions we migrated our client to PHP list. A great bit of software that we have successfully used since 2002. It all went smoothly. We imported our massive list of clients, set up templates, tested and tested again. Then we even sent out a few newsletters. Then last week it went pear shaped. Our host, ironically Pair, shut us down. Here is what they had to say:

Hello,

The permissions were removed on this directory because it contains mailing
list software that was being used to send out several thousand messages at
once. Mailing list software is not permitted on shared hosting accounts as
explained in our resource usages policies:

http://www.pair.com/policies/resource.html

Further investigation revealed that bulk emails are the bane of web hosting companies everywhere. Here is what my mentor Brad Baker from XYZulu has to say on the subject:

This 'problem' is becoming a universal issue due to rises in spam. It's a long story, but to be brief, if hotmail say, receives a certain number of incoming emails from a single ip address, their spam blocking software swings into action, and blocks the entire server.

It's a huge deal now, and one server's admins spend lots of time on keeping email under control and not getting blacklisted.

So much for an open source solution...bye, bye php list. Now the search is on for a pay as you play hosted email newsletter solution. Here is our short list:

campaignmonitor
mailchimp
verticalresponse
constantcontact

Our web developer likes mail chimp. My mates at Steam Whistle Brewing, who turned me onto bcentral, have since moved onto vertical response. Another one of our clients, Crystalight, loves vertical response too. Stay tuned for an update on our clients response to this conundrum.

London-Newman Arms Pie Room

Patrick Hunt of therefore design and Greg Cromwell partner in Coffee Prince have sealed a three year exclusive distribution agreement for the Presso in Australia and Canada.

Coffee Prince, founded by Cameron Prince and Greg Cromwell has been distributing the Presso in Australia since May 2006 and have added Canada to their domain. "We had been working on a verbal agreement, a sort of hand shake over email" said Cromwell. He added, "it's nice to finally meet Patrick and not only shake hands but to formalise our Presso partnership. The agreement includes performance clauses with ambitious sales targets over the next three years which both parties are confident can easily be met.

Cromwell is now on his way to Canada to press some flesh with their lead Presso distributor in Toronto, the Green Beanery.

London

Today I have had the pleasure of meeting Patrick Hunt the designer of the Presso Coffee machine. Patrick is a partner in therefore design, a leading London product design company.

Patrick and I took things to the top level and concluded the formal part of our meeting with a visit to their roof. Here I am pressing one out with the Post Office tower in the background.

Time to go seal the deal with a pie and pint at Newman Arms. Can't wait to try a pie at a pub that you need to make a reservation for...we missed out on lunch here even though we were the first in.