Matthew McCarthy is now our production coordinator. Matt earned an associate’s degree from Champlain College in Burlington, VT, and a bachelor’s in communication design from Buff State. His previous experience includes freelance graphic design and five years in digital printing. He works on M&T, ESAB, Praxis, Phillips Lytle, You and Who, pro bono and all other client work. Basically whatever we at Crowley Webb/our clients want done, he gets it speced, created, produced, printed, or made. His hobbies include fly fishing, travel, playing music, 4x5 photography, and hockey.

Laura McFeely joined Crowley Webb as an assistant account executive. Her accounts include ESAB, Niagara University, and Family Justice Center. She spent some time at SKM Group in production and accounts before landing here. Laura earned her bachelor’s degree in communication from UB, and currently resides in her hometown of Orchard Park. She loves playing softball and off-roading in her Jeep.

Maria Toro is our newest assistant account exec. She helps plan and execute campaigns for a variety of clients, some of which include ESAB, Niagara University, Phillips Lytle, and Project Flight. Maria (or “Mia” as she’s known around these parts) relocated to Buffalo from Maine where she worked at a boutique promotional marketing agency. Prior to Maine, Maria spent three years at Harvard Business School in Boston doing marketing and event management.  She earned a bachelor’s in communication from Auburn University and studied abroad in the South Pacific with St. Bonaventure. Maria hails from Marietta, GA, and enjoys skiing, dancing, and travelling.

Welcome to the workforce.

I’ve noticed a slew of these real-people ads recently, and one predominate theme is that of the real person being surprised or shocked in some way. Ford’s “Drive One” campaign features average men and women buying a car and then being quickly ushered through a door into a room where they are suddenly the subjects of a press conference. TV crews question the buyers on why, exactly, they chose a Ford. Does anyone else find it strange that, in this case, the subject is real and the press is phony?

The new Febreeze spots make me a little squeamish. We see a crew of Febreeze-ites spraying a room full of, allegedly, putrid food and moldy sweat socks. Then real people are grabbed off the street, blindfolded, and left alone on the set. I mean room. They’re asked to describe what they smell and it’s always something like, “It’s fresh, clean. Some kind of flower? Mmm, is that a rainbow I smell??” And then the blindfolds are removed and they find themselves in a hovel, shocked. I guess the good news is that you can live in filth and squalor as long as you spray it all down with weapons-grade artificial fragrance. (Meanwhile, if I found myself with my nose unknowingly pressed against a stained, moldy, and possibly disease-ridden pillow, I’d start throwing punches.)

Does watching a real someone at a fake press conference make me want to buy a Ford? Not really. Will I spray my house with fragrance rather than clean it? Probably. While the commercials certainly are amusing I, myself, hate to be unpleasantly surprised, but I enjoy seeing it done to others. Are consumers going to identify with these “real” people and buy more products? I wouldn’t be surprised.

Now Target has upped the ante with The Shops at Target – an ongoing program in which Target will partner with specialty stores and boutiques across the country to bring exclusive collections to you and me. And the lucky stores kicking off this fabulous marketing initiative are: San Francisco’s The Candy Store, Cos Bar cosmetic boutique, Polka Dog Bakery in Boston for the doggy crowd, Connecticut home goods store Privet House, and The Webster fashion shop in Miami.

Kathee Tesija, Target’s Executive VP of Merchandising said it best, “The Shops is all about the thrill of discovery and we’re delighted to bring our guests a curated collection of home, beauty, fashion and pet products from these specialty stores right to their own backyards.” Not convinced? See for yourself. I know where I’ll be Sunday afternoon!

The You and Who team has also been quite busy since we gave their brand a facelift. They’ve really embraced our work, and have brought it to life at events across the country. Here are a few highlights.

February was a busy month. First, the team attended (and hopefully struck a pose at) the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in New York City from February 9–16. They also launched a new initiative called Who’s Hungry. Through the program, You and Who provides businesses and organizations with t-shirts for events, and in return, donates a meal to a local shelter for every shirt sold.

The first Who’s Hungry participant was the Achieving the Dream conference in Dallas, TX, from February 28–March 2. A contest was held to decide the shirt’s design. After 100 submissions from students around the county, two winners were selected. Each student was given $1,000 for their efforts, and You and Who donated 1,000 meals to shelters in each of the winner’s hometowns. But the fun in Texas didn’t stop there. You and Who also announced that Dallas will have a featured t-shirt in 2013, with sales supporting Promise House.

Next up was the big website launch at SXSW in Austin, TX. You and Who’s founder and president, Dan Gigante, worked day and night (now you know how we felt, Dan) to program the site by March 12. At the festival, You and Who partnered with the Buffalo blog, The Good Neighborhood, to showcase Western New York bands. They also hit the streets, giving out You and Who temporary tattoos, as well as promoting the new website with Social Media Club and through their own networks. And they rapped on stage with Snoop Dogg (OK, that part we made up).

On April 10, the You and Who team supported a fellow buy-one, give-one company by participating in TOMS’ One Day Without Shoes challenge. As the name suggests, the event encourages people to walk around sans footwear to raise awareness for TOMS’ mission of providing children in third-world countries with new shoes. Good thing the event wasn’t in January, or our friends would have had some cold footsies.

Finally, it was back to the Queen City for another Who’s Hungry event – Buffalo State College’s Runway 5.0 show. Once again, You and Who hosted a design contest, and the winning shirt will soon be for sale at YouAndWho.com. For every shirt sold, You and Who will donate one meal to the Buffalo City Mission, as well as $1 to the Buffalo State College Fashion Technology Scholarship Fund.

As you can see, You and Who has sold a whole bunch of shirts, but more importantly, have helped just as many people in need along the way. Keep up the good work, guys.

Pantene is brining back some of its discontinued products and in honor of this “Back by Popular Demand” campaign, the company partnered with the comedy website Funny or Die to create a little movie, “The Weird Science and Big Business of Working Girls in the Breakfast Club.” The video features three Pantene products, Anti-Dandruff, Ice Shine, and Silver Expressions, which Pantene’s Facebook fans begged them to reissue.

Never was hair bigger than in the 1980s (except maybe during the French Revolution). It’s so rad that Pantene and Funny or Die hooked up. Everyone benefits, the video drives viewers to the FoD website, which, in turn, offers Pantene product placement.

It’s a positive thing when a company or product doesn’t take itself too seriously. And it looks like this trend of companies using video sites to promote products will continue. Totally bitchin’.

For Les Mooney, RIP apparently stands of “raking in prizes.” First, The Wake – a fundraiser event for the Irish Classical Theatre Company – was nominated for a Webby. Now, the event’s poster has been recognized in Communication Art’s 2012 Illustration Annual. In case you’re not familiar with CA, it takes more than Irish luck to earn such an honor.

The man behind the work is our associate creative director, Pete Reiling. As usual, Pete reacted to the news with unbridled enthusiasm and bravado, “I never considered myself an illustrator, so being included in the CA annual with so many people I’ve admired for years is kind of surreal. I think working in an environment that has encouraged me to try new things has a whole lot to do with it.”

So raise your pints to Pete and the Irish Classical Theatre for another impressive feat.

Fortunately, Google is a tad more reasonable. Back in March, they announced their intentions to penalize websites that appear to be overly optimized – sending the SEO world into a tizzy. While nothing has been official, changes to Google’s algorithm seem to be imminent.

It really shouldn’t come as a surprise that Big G wants to crack down on people gaming the system. SEO has always been a moving target (remember when meta keywords were all the rage?). But this isn’t so much of a game-changer as it is a reminder that content is king, not crafty site manipulation.

Here’s a nice video about the over optimization Google is looking out for. In summary – don’t be a creep. Write your site for humans, not search engine spiders. After all, even if you SEO the heck out of your site and you’re #1 on every search engine in the world, your customers will be scared away by pages and pages of keyword gobbledygook. So play nice with Google, and maybe they won’t smite you.

For instance, I just read this article about how mothers are the “dream demographic” from Time’s Moneyland: “Marketers have always wanted to reach moms, of course, but now these moms are easier than ever to reach, 24/7, no matter if they’re at home, the office, on a train, or at the pediatrician’s office.”

Quit stalking me, weirdos!

BabyCenter.com, sponsored by Johnson & Johnson, is sort of a clearing house of all things baby. From pregnancy to child rearing, this site offers advice (and products) for every conceivable (pun intended) situation. But the language is kind of creepy. Like this copy from the About section of the site:

“BabyCenter is the voice of the 21st Century Mom® and modern motherhood…BabyCenter reaches over 78 percent of new and expectant moms online in the United States, and 7 in 10 babies born in the United States in 2009 were BabyCenter babies.”

Can you register “21st Century Mom”? And what does it even mean to be a BabyCenter baby? Are the babies trademarked? And how did they get that statistic?

Working mothers constitute a rich resource of consumerism. A recent story on NPR, stated that two-thirds of women with young children work, and half of them are the primary earner. Which means that they likely hold the purse strings, if not the apron strings.

However, marketers would be wise to note that someone needs to care for the children of these Moms and that cost of daycare can eat up nearly half of a woman’s paycheck. So maybe the demographic is not as rich as they think. Maybe we can see women in a more holistic way, not just as moms with a baby on one hip and a bag of money on the other.

Yesterday we heard the news that the website we created for the Irish Classical Theatre’s Wake, partytodiefor.com, is up for Best Event Website in the 16th Annual Webby Awards. Pretty big deal. The Webby Awards are nominated and selected by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. This prestigious group is made up of names like media mogul Arianna Huffington, Skype CEO Tony Bates, and Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom. Oh yeah, and the Thin White Duke himself, David Bowie.

The Wake is up against some tough competition, like Tribeca Films and the Sundance Channel. But to have our company in the same conversation with these guys – as well as the best digital shops in the world – is honor in and of itself. Plus, we adore Aladdin Sane, so there’s that.

One more thing. As a nominee, the Wake site is also up for a Webby People’s Voice Award. That’s where you come in. This is an online selection process voted on by people around the world. So take a couple seconds and show our site some love right here.

Coincidentally, we are voting for our favorite Bowie albums around the agency. Hunky Dory is currently out in front. Stay tuned.