With well over 600 million Americans active on Facebook every month, big brands consider it a very important marketing tool.  The Facebook team set out to evaluate the best and most innovative efforts over the past twelve months.

In a week long campaign for Saint Martin’s Press, GVP partnered with LivingSocial’s Visual Bookshelf application for the book release of Plum Spooky, a mystery thriller by Janet Evanovich.  The campaign achieved record scores in the areas of Content, Interaction, Design and Virality from Facebook’s discriminating team of judges.

Featured as Book of the Week on Visual Bookshelf, Plum Spooky garnered a lot of attention from users in a natural way that did not disrupt the application experience.  “Our goal was to quietly and seamlessly integrate a promotion into an application.” says Paul Gigante, founder and creative Director of GVP.

Users were encouraged to add the book to their own bookshelves, specifying whether they were “currently reading” or “already read” the book, as well as rate and review the book.

During the campaign, users actively participated in sharing and promoting the book to their friends: 1,186 users added Plum Spooky to their visual bookshelves, and 123,750 News Feed updates were made.  Sharing continued after the campaign, with 103,000 more News Feeds sent.  A substantial number of  reviews were written, and five-star ratings given.

By partnering with Visual Bookshelf, GVP was able to effortlessly reach the target audience with the application’s existing user base.  They leveraged one of the most popular book applications to help drive social action in a cost effective, high reach manner.

See the report here.

CHALLENGE
By 2009, most brands had gotten to the point where the economic climate demanded that ROI become the main criteria for marketing expenditures. We were challenged to develop an online plan for Ricoh that could deliver value way beyond the banner.

SOLUTION
With an average monthly audience of over 2 million visitors, the CBS Interactive properties represent the largest share — a full 46% — of the Enterprise Technology segment online. Of all the major editorial areas that were being spearheaded by one or more designated writers in what had become essentially a network of blogs, no one had yet taken ownership of the topic of Document Management.

We developed a 360-degree marketing approach combining branding, social media, original content, and traditional banner placement, all designed to make Ricoh the authoritative voice of document management. We positioned Ricoh to participate in — and shape the discussions regarding — everything happening in the space.

We even personified the voice by creating a character named “Doc,” who became a figurehead for the topic, and sported his own blog and profile page.

Elements of the year-long campaign included:

• Regular Blog Posts written by RICOH, GVP and CBSi
• Curated links to top-rated and most-recent posts
• Relevant Resource articles and posts from around the web
• White Papers, both CBSi-produced and RICOH-sourced
• Interactive Quick Polls
• Videos and Podcasts
• RSS Feed alerts
• Ad banners as traffic drivers to content areas
• Ad banner campaigns for branded products & services

RESULTS
Ricoh received a library of sophisticated content — critical currency in today’s B2B marketing environment — along with positioning as the leader in their category at the most important online destination for the end-user and key-influencer market.

We built a totally scalable, fully-trackable program that has the scope to be the cornerstone of Ricoh’s mar-com efforts for years to come, and which maintains Ricoh visibility and presence all day, every day, throughout the year.

In celebration of Janet Evanovich’s fifteenth Stephanie Plum blockbuster, Gigante Vaz designed and produced an immersive web site experience at www.fingerlickinfifteen.com around the semi-fictional town used in the wildly popular book franchise. “The Burg” is a location familiar to any fan of the series, as well as an easy and amusing way for new readers to be introduced to the world of Stephanie Plum.

Author Janet Evanovich was for a time reluctant to have the characters or their location visualized too specifically, but when the right aesthetic was identified, and an illustrator selected to draft the ideas put forth by Gigante Vaz, Ms. Evanovich jumped on-board with great enthusiasm, even writing all of the dialogue used for the characters in the presentation.

A wide-ranging banner campaign was combined with email outreach by a number of online book retailers to alert the reader communities to the new destination. Response was swift and strong:

• Nearly double the web ad campaign average CTR;
• Average time spent was only slightly less than that for Wall Street Journal Online;
• Almost 20% of traffic from shared links, many on Facebook and Twitter
  

Key messages, benefits, tonality, and user experience were all analyzed and measured against current strategic goals and market objectives. GVP was able to identify specific areas where improvements would generate tangible ROI.

The new design is more sophisticated and the content is oriented more successfully toward Worktopia’s core business market of C-suite financial, travel, and executive management personnel. Secondary markets are also addressed in a sensible hierarchy that insures clear access to critical information. The ease and simplicity of the new visual design is not just more pleasing to the eye, it is a quiet but effective metaphor for the ease and simplicity of the product itself.

Before                                                                                                                                After

The nature of web content and communication has changed dramatically in just the last few years. Marketers are now faced with daunting new challenges as well as unique new opportunities to initiate real relationships faster and more authentically than ever before. One advantage of the user-empowered nature of the digital channel is that resource needs are substantially different than in the traditional channels, or even than in the early days of the Internet: Money is not as critical as information, know-how, and personnel.

Social Media Satellites
What does it mean to put a brand in orbit? It means creating a robust, comprehensive, interactive presence for the brand in places where prospects and customers are most likely to find it. It is becoming less and less likely for visitors to leave the comfort of their favorite network to engage with a brand at a disconnected location using the methods laid out by the brand.

Social media satellites include:

• Blogs
• Consumer review sites
• Social portals like Facebook
• Professional portals like Linked-In
• Vertical market portals like ITtoolbox and LawLink
• Real-time conversational applications like Twitter

Let Gigante Vaz evaluate your presence in social media and make recommendations for improving your ability to reach current customers and new prospects online. We’ll produce a detailed, comprehensive report that is sure to be eye-opening, and give you solid ideas for closing the gaps.

SOLUTION
Through structured analysis, market research, and creative insight, Gigante Vaz brought clarity and a new strategic brand vision to Let’s Go.

GVP’s core strategic insight was that Let’s Go needed to get better at being who they already were, as opposed to re-casting themselves into some new or revised role in the marketplace. We recommended that the brand play to its strengths and focus on attributes, values, and features they could genuinely and authentically own.

Based on existing brand executions, we recommended avoiding dated, historical attributes, and focus instead on moving the brand more successfully into the digital channels. GVP conceived an immersive, interactive web site destination centered around social networking and travel planning functionality.

RESULTS
GVP’s strategic recommendations resulted in a revised design identity for the brand across all of its product and marketing assets. The youth market was recaptured, and GVP undertook a comprehensive new web site design for the brand destination online. Let’s Go implemented a significant portion of the branding and design work, and in January of 2009 announced a new publishing and distribution partnership with Avalon Travel and Publisher’s Group West.

SOLUTION
GVP brought a critical insight to the Aiwa brand challenge.  The one simple thing that consumers looked for in audio equipment is GREAT SOUND and no other brand was claiming that position.

GVP created and introduced a branding campaign with the objective of building awareness for the AIWA brand and establishing a brand image as “The Leader in Sound”.  The campaign used the tagline, AIWA SOUND.  “You Gotta Hear This” and was designed to convince prospects that – whatever the audio product – AIWA represented the highest quality sound performance they can get.

RESULTS
The AIWA SOUND campaign produced results immediately.  In the first year of the program, awareness among the target audience increased by 44%.  And, although AIWA Share of Voice over the first 3 years remained flat and never exceeded 5% of the Consumer Audio category, awareness doubled.

SOLUTION
Advertising had to create awareness and generate trial of OP. while avoiding the need to explain Aquavit.  To this challenge, GVP’s Challenger Brand Process brought two key observations:

• Recent successful ultra-premium spirit launches had been built with a younger user profile
• Early adopters of new spirits are always searching for the “Next New Thing” that serve as a badge of their own sense of sophistication, style and cultural leadership

The intellectual curiosity of the young adult target audience led GVP to create a campaign that built trial through allusions to the unique rewards of OP.  Using cool, minimal imagery and strong package representation, the campaign positions OP. as “The Most Sophisticated Spirit” and incorporates the brands promise into its tagline, Forward Drinking.

RESULTS
In the four months following the launch, the brand exceeded the full year sales projection by 20%.  The campaign also had a strong impact on retail acceptance of the brand and distribution in Year 2 increased to almost 70% of the US.

SOLUTION
GVP’s Challenger Brand Process revealed that purchase decisions involved surprisingly strong emotional influences.  With this insight, GVP created a new positioning for Ricoh designed to “own the emotional connection” with the customer by focusing on a big idea that promises a real end benefit for their company:

Ricoh Moves Your Ideas Forward.

The advertising campaign featured the Jazz standard, “I Get Ideas” by the great Satchmo, Louis Armstrong, as background for scenes of workers in typical office tasks using Ricoh products to move their ideas forward.  The commercials acknowledge the role of office equipment in the very human tasks of everyday people trying to move their ideas ahead.  This human connection, combined with the unique joy and emotional power of the Armstrong music, elevated Ricoh and separated it from the other companies in the office imaging sector.

RESULTS
In just 6 months overall awareness of Ricoh increased by 30% among prospects.  And prospects who regarded Ricoh as “The right brand for my company” performance increased a stunning 250%.

We started in a basement under dripping pipework, and now we’re located in the swanky Soho district of New York City, in its most prestigious and historic edifice, The Puck Building. We’ve gone from delivering TV spots, media plans and account service to delivering cross-channel, integrated marketing campaigns for national and international clients across multiple disciplines.  It still amazes me sometimes to walk the halls and see the variety of incredibly talented experts we have.  From the very cutting edge of interactive to world-class traditional media creative, as well as creative media buying that crosses over everything.

Maddie and I are proud that we have built the kind of company that we ourselves would like to work in.  We’ve tried to be the kinds of bosses we would have respected and killed to please when we worked for others.  For that reason, our culture here has always been rather personal.  We’ve always been extremely open and honest with everyone here.  Which is why 5 of our first employees are still here and why newer folks tend to stick around, too.

Most remarkable on an anniversary like this, we actually have a unique reputation for maintaining client relationships whose tenure well exceeds industry averages, with one client having been with us since we opened.  They say that over time a style emerges.  Apparently, ours is to stay very close to our clients and spoil them with relentless 5-star service.

But it’s funny.  The same reason we all got together in the early days is the same reason we hold onto clients for so long.  We look forward to collaborating on the work that we all love every day. There’s just something so fun and rewarding about having an idea that solves a problem or delivers on a brief and then bouncing it off of each other, making it better. We know that our clients have put their personal faith in us, and their careers in our hands.  We respect that and hold them all in high regard for that trust.

Anyway, 20 years of experience does give us a moment to reflect… Okay, that’s enough. Back to work.