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Agile Methodology: The First Four Years of Starmark’s Journey

Well, that happened fast! Sprint 104 marks four years of Starmark being an Agile Agency. That’s four years of learning, four years of trying new things and four years of improving our approach. And we’re not done yet.

As one of the nation’s few full-service Agile agencies, we’re a bit of an oddity. Based on numbers from the 4As, out of 18,000 full-service agencies, only about 1,000 (0.5%) follow some sort of Agile practices. And the fact that we’ve been at it for four years does give us a bit of elder statesman status in that regard.

That’s probably why our President, Jacqui Hartnett, was asked to speak about how we operate at the 4As Management Practitioners Forum this spring. It’s also why The Wall Street Journal interviewed Starmark this August for an article on Agile as an emerging movement within the business community.

Obviously, we were honored by these opportunities, and we appreciated having a platform to talk about what we honestly believe is a far better way of working for agencies and marketing departments. So much of the conversation about Agile is dominated by software specialists and web development firms, but the marketing world has as much, if not more to gain from going Agile.

As we’re reflecting on four years of learning and growing, we feel it’s time to share our experience in the hopes that other Naturally Occurring Chaotic Organizations (NOCOs, as Jack Skeels of AgencyAgile dubs marketing outfits and other lightning-in-a-bottle-type companies) can benefit. So, if you’re an in-house agency or marketing department that’s curious about how you can become Agile, this is the article for you.

So, without further ado, enjoy a bit of our gonzo journalism as we take this trip in reverse, charting our biggest learning milestones from 2019 all the way back to 2015 when we got started.

Lesson learned: Make specific commitments every single day

We call check-in the most important meeting of the day — and it’s how we start every single day at Starmark. It’s nothing magical — just a quick stand-up meeting that gives the team a forum to report on accomplishments and make commitments with each other for the day.

Managers observe the meeting to get a rundown of every project for every client — in 20 minutes or less. That’s way better than a series of hour-long internal status meetings peppered throughout the week.

Our focus in Q1 2019 was to optimize check-in to improve the value and relevance. So, let’s talk a little about what check-in is not:

Check in is not:

Run by managers
A status report
A place to talk about how busy you are

Check-in is:

Focused on my team-relevant accomplishments since the last meeting
Creating a plan for the day
A discussion of collaboration, resources or help needed to get it done

In our most recent optimization in 2019, we focused on improving the value and relevance of our daily check-ins — more of what it’s supposed to be and less of what it’s not. Here’s what we learned:

How we make our commitments more specific:

Here’s an example: I’ll have 80% of the homepage styling implemented today so we can complete the button behaviors together tomorrow. Here’s another one: If we spend the morning on the third campaign concept, it will be finished enough to user test this afternoon.

We all coach each other constantly, but our commitments are getting more specific every day.

What we’ve seen is that our handoffs and collaboration happen more seamlessly throughout the day because we’re being specific about when, how and why it matters. Collaboration and co–work are deliberate processes that happens better and more frequently when we plan for them and and share responsibilities.

Lesson learned: It ain’t about the status. It’s about the work.

We split our morning meeting into a check-in using the rules above followed by review of the Kanban board (our version of a status board) to discuss where stories are in the workflow. Doing things this way, the team stays more engaged, and the meeting moves along more efficiently.

Fun fact: Toyota invented this type of status board for lean manufacturing in the 1970s. In Japan, it’s called a Kanban, and that’s still what we call it today.

Each team member walks into check-in each morning with super brief, highly relevant statements that answer three big questions: what I accomplished, what I plan to accomplish, what I need in order to do it.

As a result, our check-ins are not about what everyone worked on, it’s about what we accomplished and plan to accomplish. It’s not about the status of the work; it’s about how to create progress on the work.

Lesson learned: We had to stop treating our clients with kid gloves

Agile is about radical transparency. It’s a tough pill to swallow when you’re an account manager who has spent a career acting as diplomatic go-between for a client and agency. Putting this lesson into practice has been a long-haul process. But getting over the hump has changed our behavior and our client relationships for the better.

To do this, our account managers and agency leadership had to learn to trust. This optimization cycle has been all about opening the client relationship to be a more transparent and inclusive relationship between our clients and the entire Starmark team that serves their business.

What that means in practice is that everyone at Starmark is client-facing. Every team member roadmaps with our clients — from the newest back-end developer to our most seasoned creative director.

We all present our work in progress. That means we share work product with clients earlier and in a less polished state. It gives our clients the ability to shape the direction of the work more effectively, but it also means we need to be a bit unguarded with what, when and how we share work.

Lots of agencies present themselves as a magical box where the client inserts a brief in one end and gets beautiful, completed work out of the other side six weeks later. Perhaps it happened this way once—on a perfect, balmy Wednesday in 1996 when the planets lined up in perfect syzygy on the vernal equinox. But, seriously, it never works like that in the real world of real, complicated marketing problems. We’ll take the transparency and collaboration of our approach over the old way of doing things, any day.

The outcome of accepting a little bit of discomfort and vulnerability is that we now enjoy more earnest and respectful relationships with our clients that are based on trust and mutual understanding with a whole team—rather than a single point of contact. And now our account managers have more time to dedicate to providing strategic direction and stewarding our clients’ brands.

Lesson learned: Healthy retros make us a learning organization

Sprint Retrospectives are an essential part of our philosophy of continuous improvement. It’s a concession that we’re not perfect and that things can always be better, which is what defines any learning organization. The arbiters of what’s better are the team members who work here.

In the Agile environment at Starmark, we end every two-week sprint with a retro — a time to reflect, celebrate the work and talk about ways we can improve our approach in the future. During retro, team members and managers make recommendations that fall into one of four categories—Start, Stop, Speed Up and Keep On.

In late 2018, we felt our retros were getting a little stale. The number of recommendations from the team was dropping, and our get-togethers had devolved into a recitation of birthdays, anniversaries and client announcements. In short, our retros weren’t very retrospective.

Getting back on track started with a frank discussion about what retro is supposed to be—run by the team for the benefit of the team. It was eye-opening for all of us. Since management was doing most of the talking about completed work and client wins, many new Starmarkers didn’t realize it was a team-owned meeting.

The team consensus was to change the order to start with a team-curated showcase of work, then a quick retro followed by announcements. Since then, things have improved. Retro participation is on the upswing, and someone’s showing off great current work at almost every retro.

Lesson learned: Progress isn’t a straight line

Being Agile is part of our larger commitment to be a learning organization. The suggestions from our retros become sprint goals and pilot tests that we use to improve our approach.

We try things all the time based on suggestions from retro. Sometimes we pilot an idea with a single client or in a single workstream. Some give us that a-ha moment where there’s an undeniable improvement in how we work. Some ideas need refinement before they’re rolled out. And some ideas we abandon because they simply don’t work. Hey, that’s what trying stuff is all about: learning as much from the failures as you do from the successes.

TargetProcess is the software we use to manage our workflow. As an Agile organization, they tracked their retro optimizations for 50 months and reported on the results here. It’s a great read and a great example of the twisty line toward progress that learning organizations can expect.

Lesson learned: Planning is our greatest competitive advantage

Roadmapping is the collaborative, team-driven planning process we use at Starmark. Based on client input, the team involved in the project plan the specific deliverables—called stories—that will achieve a successful project.

In 2017, the time was right to refresh our roadmapping skills. Our team had the basics down and was doing a good job getting new members up to speed. It was the perfect opportunity to focus on some specific tune-ups to our approach.

A major part of this session with AgencyAgile was improving our understanding how each of us processes information and learns in a different way. It was a reminder of how important the Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic (VAK, for short) memory triggers are for creating a memorable roadmap.

The point of roadmapping in person, physically writing cards, reading them out loud and tacking them to the wall is to create three distinct processing and memory cues for both our team and our clients. So whether a person is a visual, auditory or kinesthetic processor, he or she will get the appropriate triggers to commit the material to memory.

We made some changes to the way we write, present and organize stories (a story is a discrete deliverable within the scope of work) on the wall to improve the VAK value for everyone involved. We also focused on writing better success criteria. Every story in a roadmap has success criteria. That’s exactly what it sounds like—a list of attributes that will ensure the story is successful. We focused on coaching to make sure we weren’t trying to solve the story with the success criteria or creating a to-do list of tasks. It was a good opportunity to reset our approach to focus more effort on broadly defining what the successful completion of the story looks like, without resorting to jargon.

After this, we noticed our client walkthroughs were going more smoothly with more back-and-forth discussion. Ultimately, this addressed some remaining sources of scope creep by learning to write for understanding.

Lesson learned: Every large successful project is the product of many small successful projects

In Summer 2016, our focus was on improving our sprint planning to create more focus and more value for our clients. A sprint is a discrete period of time dedicated to completing work, and at Starmark our sprints are two weeks long. Remember—part of what makes Agile so different is that our teams commit to deliver completed work every sprint.

Every two weeks, we focus on completing a group of stories for each of our clients. The goal is that, by the end of the sprint, the client has reviewed and approved a grouping of stories (actual deliverables) that meaningfully progress the project. It’s a core element of our Agile approach—and it takes a lot of planning to get it right.

Now, whenever we roadmap a project, we project plan the resulting stories into sprints. Then, at the start of each sprint, the team examines the candidate stories for the sprint and makes an achievable plan to deliver completed work. Managers represent the clients’ priorities, and the team sequences the work in the way that makes sense. After all, the outcome of sprint planning is a plan for success.

Lesson learned: One size doesn’t fit all

Maintaining an Agile team structure means keeping things tight. In Fall of 2016, we had added new accounts and new team members, and sprint planning was becoming painful. We realized the time was right for Starmark to undertake a rite of passage for any Agile organization—splitting into two independent workstreams that serve different sets of clients.

The workstream split helps us structure teams in a way that best meets the needs of our clients. Keeping them small means that we’re able to sprint plan and deliver more reliably. Every sprint each workstream delivers completed work for its clients.

Splitting the workstreams dramatically reduced the complexity of sprint planning for both managers and the team. Think about it: instead of navigating 100% of the work and uncertainty for the agency, for each workstream, the problem became half as complicated. What a relief!

The workstream split helped us move past a mindset of scarcity to one where we were able to make realistic commitments each sprint to deliver a body of work that makes sense for each client.

Lesson learned: There Is No Agile Without Roadmapping

In August 2015, Starmark shut down the agency for four days while AgencyAgile trained the whole staff to roadmap. This was a big, scary investment of time and energy, but it was the only way to learn.

Roadmapping was — and still is — the most important and fundamental part of our Agile transformation. It puts the team doing the work in the driver’s seat—because we are the ones who plan the work. Without that foundation, there is no Agile team.

What we learned is that Agile is challenging. Agile takes commitment. But it’s something everyone is capable of being. The biggest barriers are letting go of what the past has taught us and committing to constant improvement.

This training also shed light on how often we talked past one another or communicated without creating understanding. Eliminating jargon and going at the speed of the slowest person were two massive changes that improved our ability to create mutual understanding within the team and with our clients.

Each day, when our heads were full to bursting from hands-on roadmap training, AgencyAgile gave us breaks with discussions of the science and philosophy behind Agile. They shared anecdotes about X versus Y management styles, how people adapt within each system, firefighter syndrome and the psychological benefits of the team doing the work being invested in the work. Understanding the why behind Agile Methodology is ultimately more important than understanding the what.

Why Starmark went Agile

And that leads us to why Starmark wanted to be Agile in the first place. We look for and hire people with unique perspectives and entrepreneurial inclinations. Prior to 2015, the digital team had been using Agile to manage their workflow and team dynamic for about a year, so we had a first-hand understanding of the benefits for our clients: higher satisfaction, reduced costs, greater flexibility. We also had a better understanding of the benefits for the team: greater transparency, less noise and less waste.

The result was higher morale and investment in the work. Basically, more was getting done — more efficiently and with more satisfaction for everyone.

We see those benefits today company-wide. They just get stronger and more entrenched as we continue this journey, but it is a journey, no doubt. We know that without constantly challenging ourselves, Agile just doesn’t mean as much. After all, what’s the point of being capable of bigger and better things unless we actually chase those aspirations.

How to get started

In our experience, it was beneficial to discuss and plan for our Agile transformation as part of our annual planning cycle. It’s a big change that requires significant planning and commitment.

Personally, we recommend starting with roadmap training. It is absolutely the cornerstone skill for any Agile team. After all, the team that plans its own work is a team that’s equipped to plan successful sprints and run high-value check-ins.

Better planning is what roadmapping is all about, and it’s a surefire way to see results quickly by eliminating waste and misunderstandings while improving team ownership and transparency.

If you’re an in-house agency or marketing department looking to go Agile, we recommend working with an outside consultant. Get in touch with us, and we can either help you ourselves or connect you with the right resources.

Unlock social media power with 6-second videos

Reprinted from South Florida Business Journal

Whether it’s sports, fast cars, rockets into space or puppies playing fetch, movement is what excites the human spirit and inspires interest. Our response to motion is what kept our ancestors safe from predators, and it’s that same biological predisposition that determines what we respond to on social media today. It’s no surprise, then, that video accounts for a majority of social posts these days. Videos are 70% more likely to be viewed by the 18-49 age group. Video marketing is no longer just about millennials.

Companies are investing significant time and budgets on their social presences. To accelerate results, it’s important to create more content that will move us, the viewer. With the ability to use auto-fill lead capture within your ads on Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram, you can literally move prospects through the sales funnel faster.

The most affordable

Busy customers prefer videos that deliver the message at lightning speed. In fact, the decision to watch or to click away takes place in the first 3 seconds. According to research, mobile users will click away in a mere half-second if they don’t know or like the brand.

The 6-second format not only fills the customer need for speed, but is more affordable to produce—and more affordable to place in social media and other channels.

You can say a lot in 6 seconds

Make sure your social messaging supports your overall media messaging strategy, but with a more personal touch. Showing a person within the first 3 seconds increases your opportunity to capture the viewer’s attention and create an emotional response.

Consider short customer comments that show how you addressed a need quickly or introduced a solution they had not thought of. Show your thought leadership by having a staff member give a product or service update. Introduce a new employee or announce an award for the company’s work.

A company outing—an employee recognition luncheon or charity event—can provide content for a series of 6-second videos that illustrate company culture.

Your call to action will lead the viewer to more information, so don’t think about the video as the whole conversation; It’s just the opening line.

Tips and stats that impact video

A large percentage of video ads are viewed without sound, so words on the screen fulfill an important role in communicating the message, especially the call to action.

When creating longer videos, it may be a good idea to plan for the ability to edit out smaller 6-second clips that can be used, as well. Preplanning for these uses makes separate productions unnecessary and provides continuity in your final product. This approach is less expensive and more effective.

It is also important to consider producing square (1:1 aspect ratio) video formats. Square videos perform 60% better than horizontal videos, fit mobile screens better and stay on screens longer. Make sure you have a hashtag to get 10% additional engagement.

And while we have spoken mostly about Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram, there are 1.2 billion video views a year on Twitter. The platform claims that tweets containing video receive 10 times more engagement than those without. And, of course, YouTube, which helps populate all the others, offers tons of targeted advertising options that specifically require 6-second videos.

Platforms provide helpful tools

Every platform has a vested interest in helping you make video ads successful. That’s why they provide free how-tos, training, format templates, testing tools and analytics to advertisers. All the platforms are working hard to help increase the power of video for companies by setting you up for success with viewers.

Now is the time to take advantage of the affordability and excitement of 6-second videos. Doing it right can definitely be a competitive advantage.

A brand to support and connect families throughout the hospice journey

Starmark just completed the brand refresh for the L’Chaim Hospice program, and the brand is prepared to launch as an independent business unit. The client is thrilled with the new brand direction, and based upon pre-market testing with real users and expert stakeholders, we expect big results.

The Challenge

The L’Chaim Hospice team approached Starmark to help refresh its unknown brand to better serve the Jewish community in South Florida. L’Chaim Hospice is a specialized team of rabbis and staff who offer palliative care, spiritual support, community and connection to patients with terminal illnesses and their families. It’s an essential part of the Jewish community of South Florida, but a legacy brand position, logo and tagline didn’t accurately reflect the reality or importance of L’Chaim’s mission.

The Starmark team roadmapped a comprehensive rebrand program. Starting with stakeholder interviews and a North Star branding exercise, Starmark helped the L’Chaim team define their core brand experience in simple terms. This allowed us to articulate the brand experience that truly reflected the relationship between L’Chaim, its patients and their families.

A mark to embody the spirit of the brand

L’Chaim is a traditional Hebrew toast — a reminder to celebrate and appreciate life. To capture that sentiment, as well as the personality and identity from the North Star exercise, Starmark established a tone and voice for the brand to inspire logo design exploration. Many logo variations were compared side by side. After multiple rounds of testing with L’Chaim’s audiences, the winning mark was selected.

Meaning and context

The Starmark team developed a slate of tagline options that helped add context and meaning to the brand mark. Based on insights from the stakeholder interviews and user testing, it was clear which elements of the position would need reinforcement in words. We tested top tagline options alongside the logo for preference and comprehension. We determined that a version containing the service category, as well as a reinforcement of the religious focus performed best.

Developing flexible, helpful guidelines

With the approved design, Starmark developed a straightforward guidelines document to create brand consistency in all communications. It explains the brand philosophy, desired experience and how to use the elements successfully across different media. The guide now helps both new and current L’Chaim team members stay aligned in their communications and branding approaches.

New branded web experience

The Starmark team created a personalized user experience for L’Chaim’s Jewish community in South Florida. Using stakeholder interview insights and user testing, the team created a dramatically simpler information architecture and navigation structure. The goal is to live the mission of compassion by helping patients and family members find information more quickly and intuitively. Photos and written content were revised to match the direction of the brand’s personality and identity.

Next up, an integrated marketing campaign

With a well designed brand approach, L’Chaim is ready for the marketplace. Starmark and the client team are preparing to roadmap the go-to-market strategy and integrated campaign approach for L’Chaim. We’ve already started the ideation process to help provide a cohesive brand experience from first contact with a patient’s family, the journey through a helpful website and the ways we surround and substantiate the L’Chaim brand promise for families throughout the hospice end-of-life journey.

See the Future: AR and VR in Fundraising

The possibilities for augmented reality and virtual reality in fundraising are huge. After all, allowing donors to see your vision come to life, quite literally, is a powerful way to win allies and big donations.

Put architectural renderings to use

Facilities that are building or expanding will have architectural and design renderings as part of the planning process. Taking this 3D artwork and turning it into 2D marketing is kind of a waste. Allowing donors to explore a new space before it’s built is a perfect application for immersive VR at fundraising events – or for phone-based AR that makes a big impact while being more portable and accessible.

Stand out from the crowd

When raising money, a big part of the challenge is getting donors to relate to your project. AR and VR are great ways to add impact to you story. Our last eTip covers how AR effectively stands out in social feeds, which are notoriously cluttered environments. Conversely, most fundraising efforts are, let’s face it, still fairly analog in an increasingly digital world. Because these technologies are not yet widely used in the sector, they provide an effective way to stand apart from other organizations and causes vying for attention from donors.

The economics make sense

We covered the fact that AR and VR aren’t as expensive as you might think in our article about how to sell your first AR project. But we’re happy to discuss it here, too, because it really is a no-brainer. Tools like this absolutely will help you secure extra funding. And when closing just one additional donor equates to six or seven figures of additional fundraising, the investment in a reusable, refreshable AR or VR fundraising platform makes excellent sense.

For more on this topic, you can also check out our South Florida Business Journal article on how to start small in AR, VR and 360 video.

How businesses can profit from a ‘brand purpose’

Reprinted from South Florida Business Journal

Today’s businesses and consumer companies are discovering that connecting brands to a higher purpose than profits can impress their customer base and deliver significant financial results.

Marketers who have promoted “cause marketing” in order to demonstrate corporate responsibility might say they’ve been doing that for years. But the requirement of purpose-based marketing is more than cutting a check to a worthy charity. It is defining how your company and your employees help make a difference to your industry, customer base and community. It entails making a long-term commitment to align business, corporate culture and marketing under a higher purpose. What does your brand and your company stand for? Why does it exist in the first place? What is its mission? The answers lead to a journey – not just one print ad or television spot, or a check.

Recent research has shown marketers that buyers under 30 are leading the way in proving their willingness to buy from companies that “have a point of view and stand for something.”

The power of purpose

In fact, the Association of National Advertisers named “brand purpose” the ANA 2018 Marketing Word of the Year. And this year, CampaignUS gave out the inaugural Power of Purpose Awards. As an example, one of the winners was “Mastercard brings ‘Start Something Priceless to Life’ leading into the 60th Grammy Awards,” which showed a young musician following his dream incorporating Mastercard’s “Priceless” campaign. This video shifts the focus from selling to engaging with purpose.

Among the corporate leaders embracing purpose-based marketing are two top companies that consult with many other corporations – SAP and KPMG. Both have incorporated purpose into the fabric of the operations. KPMG has developed a user-friendly design program, inviting employees to create posters answering the question “What do you do at KPMG?” in an effort to capture the passion that connects to the organization’s purpose. “Inspire confidence. Empower change.” is the ever-present poster tagline.

Square, a growing tech company, states its purpose not as credit card processing, but as economic empowerment by helping entrepreneurs to start, run and grow a business.

Defining your higher purpose

How can your business change with a more energized and inspired workforce? Employees are the foundation of a company’s purpose, and their buy-in is a critical step in creating a purpose-based organization and culture.

Why is your company successful, and how does that relate to improving the lives of employees and customers? Many companies that have worked to identify their purpose often find it in the original vision of their founders, and articulating it can energize employees, as well as provide a point of view and purpose that upcoming generations demand.

What are proof points underpinning the company’s purpose, and how can you communicate and enhance them in the future? The purpose of a company needs to be timeless. The ability to continue to align the business, culture, community and marketing for the long term is the critical assignment of a company’s chosen purpose.

Aligning purpose with community

There are many opportunities to align your company’s purpose to the community. South Florida’s major universities have meaningful research relating to industries that can help connect what you do to enhancing, sustaining and improving lives. An example is the Marine Research Hub’s support of collaboration with universities and business to commercialize solutions for sustainability of oceans and reefs.

Businesses that haven’t embraced a higher purpose are missing out on the insights offered by a younger generation that will soon become the majority customer base. And, as more companies get onboard with purpose-based marketing, their businesses will benefit, as well. Brand purpose is definitely a competitive advantage.

How to Make a Brand From Scratch

The five-star experience of Nickelodeon™ Hotels & Resorts Punta Cana includes the Gourmet Inclusive^® Village, a diverse hub of 10 delicious culinary and beverage venues. But before any venue could start serving, each needed an individual brand identity to represent its personality and offerings.

Creativity with a Side of Collaboration

Since Gourmet Inclusive Village is shared with Karisma’s neighboring Sensatori resort, Starmark partnered closely with teams in Food & Beverage, Interior Design and at Viacom — the worldwide media company behind the Nickelodeon network — to present identities that would work for resort guests coming together at this collection of hotspots.

We designed each brand mark to shine across a diverse array of uses: exterior and interior spaces, signage, menus, uniforms, cocktail napkins and more.

From the floating, fork-carrying astronaut for Spacewalker Interstellar Cuisine to the stylized espresso basket for Doppio Coffee and Tea, the creative backstory and appeal of each distinctive venue visually came to life.

Designing the Food Truck Experience at BRGRS.PH

In branding BRGRS.PH, we took inspiration from the Sensatori color palette as well as the singular deliciousness of its namesake food.

The “PH” looks as if it is written in ketchup. The food truck seems to be splattered with ketchup and his buddy mustard. And with burger choices this enticing, why hide them inside the menu? “The Dominican,” “The Oxtail” and other burger names line the top of the food truck.

10 Logos with Flavor

From concept to fine tuning to final vector, creating the restaurant brands for Nickelodeon Hotels & Resorts Punta Cana was an exciting collaborative process, and we could never play favorites. But which one is yours?

Brand value is hidden gem in MMA research

Reprinted from South Florida Business Journal

Well-known brands’ mobile ads deliver more than twice the motivation to take action within the first second of viewing, according to the Mobile Marketing Association’s recently released neuroscience research study.

This may seem to be an unfair advantage since well-known brands can potentially deliver twice the results for the same mobile ad placement costs as their lesser-known counterparts.

The good news is that any brand can build this kind of recognition with their select audiences. You don’t have to become known throughout the world like Coca-Cola in order to get the cognitive benefits of brand recognition. You just need to be known and understood by your key audiences.

The study, thought to be the largest of its kind, shows “the brain is faster on branding.” So the efforts and investments to become a well-known brand among key audiences pay off in the first second of display in a mobile ad. And this type of immediate reaction on a small, scrolling screen must have broader significance in other advertising, as well.

Develop a first-second strategy

These findings excite branding experts who have noted a preponderance of companies’ emphasis on the results of online platforms versus their brand’s impact on those platforms.

However, even if your brand is well-known and, of course, also well-liked, there are additional creative considerations that can support its performance in the first second.

Creative that gets attention, emotion

Mobile ads with complex, interesting angles and contrasting colors stimulate emotions well – as long as the mobile platform on which they appear is not also complex and competing for attention. Since programmatic buying means the ad may run in many different environments, ad creators may need to walk the line on this one.

This neuroscience study also showed that the brain responds quickly to human faces, whether looking directly at the viewer in a demanding way or looking toward a featured product picture.

And then, as most advertisers are already aware, motion drives emotion. But they may not realize how fast. This means video ads achieve high emotional responses within the first second, often faster than static ads. And here the study points out that a faster emotional response cuts both ways. It’s great for a brand with a positive perception, but it also may mean ads simply fail quickly if viewers hold a negative perception of the brand.

Test for the best, save time and money

While the study focused on the first 3 seconds an ad is viewed for attention, cognition and motivation stages, your pretesting should go beyond the motivation to response and action. There are many professional service organizations that offer timed-exposure testing to measure ad effectiveness to make sure that what you put out in the market is tailored for success.

Another consideration is to possibly adjust your media buy, especially video, to the number of seconds you need, versus what you may have been buying.

Brand value builds business value

Building brand value offers two other important business advantages. When you have built a strong brand among key audiences, expanding product or service offerings should take advantage of that brand. Creating brand line extensions versus different names for these product or service additions leverages the strong brand perception your company has already built.

As your brand value grows, brand equity becomes an important factor in the value of your business. Strong brands can command increased margins and negotiating power. As witnessed in this study, a strong brand has demonstrable benefits for faster recognition and cognition.

This study proves that an investment in brand equity will pay dividends for years, both in your mobile advertising and all other media you might consider – definitely a competitive advantage.

Capture more attention with augmented reality social posts

Using augmented reality (AR) in social media is a great way to get social audiences to spend more time with your brand. Facebook and Instagram have AR built into their platforms, and we want to make sure your campaigns are making the most of it.

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How to celebrate progress while changing traveler behavior

As 100,000 people and thousands of vehicles navigate the airport on any given day, pedestrian safety among the congestion became a major concern. Infrastructure updates and a communication plan were needed to change people’s behavior, in order to support years of future airport growth to come.

FLL and Starmark have launched a comprehensive new communications campaign, along with upgraded airport brand identity, to spread the word throughout South Florida about major safety upgrades every visitor will experience on their next visit. (more…)

Starmark’s Agile approach featured in the Wall Street Journal

According the the 4As (American Association of Advertising Agencies), there are roughly 13,000 integrated marketing agencies in the U.S. Starmark is one of 1,000 or fewer who are Agile. Today, one of those agencies was featured in The Wall Street Journal. Hint: it’s Starmark.

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A university brand makeover the community can rally behind

Starmark helped NSU Florida (Nova Southeastern University) take their new brand to market and increase their national reputation among prospective undergrad, graduate and professional students.

Starmark met the challenge of updating a 50-year-old brand head on. From capturing the fundamentals of what it means to be a NSU Shark to guiding the digital rollout to various schools within the university, Starmark successfully introduced The NSU Edge to the world, rallying students, faculty and alumni behind the brand.

Brand Essence Video

Starmark captured the essence of NSU in a video that brought the new brand to life for prospective undergraduate and graduate students. The music and VO-driven video follows an NSU student from her freshman year all the way to her successful career.

As the camera moves through these situations, viewers catch glimpses of her “inner Shark” by her side every step of the way. In addition to their site, the video was used for social media and other promotional tactics as part of a bigger arsenal of storytelling pieces. Starmark also created other stories versioned for different audiences. For the first time, NSU has a moving, living embodiment of the spirit of their school, and the Starmark team is proud to have been a part of it.

It couldn’t have happened without being Agile

An important part of the challenge for NSU and Starmark was using Agile Methodology to break down a massive branding assignment into a series of roadmap phases that could be vetted with students, faculty and prospects throughout the process. The work also needed to be sequenced to create some early wins to keep momentum up over the length of the 18-month project.

'At Starmark, we like to say that any large, successful project is made up of a series of small, successful projects. Those small projects are what we deliver each sprint so that we stay flexible, aligned with our clients and open to change.' - Brett Circe, Chief Interactive Officer

The Starmark team created multiple mini roadmaps covering all aspects of the assignment. This allowed us to start the foundational digital work and brand guidelines much sooner. At the same time, we were able to begin the concepting, planning and pre-production work for the brand essence video.

Later in the project, we were able to use that foundational brand guidelines and digital work to guide the time-intensive but less time-sensitive rollout to microsites for each key school within the university system.

New Homepage and Landing Page

To make a big impact sooner, part of the roadmap was creating a quick turnover of the NSU homepage and web presence. Starmark created a temporary landing page that informed the public about the rebrand, hyping them up for the big transformation.

At the same time the landing page was being constructed, the team was hard at work modernizing the layout and functionality of the homepage. The result was a clean, new homepage, complete with new copy and a shark fin header design. Starmark made the page modular, allowing all aspects of the design system to be repurposed throughout the NSU site over time for consistency and efficiency.

Digital Brand Guidelines

Internal PR communications, academic departments, apparel vendors and student organizations all touch the NSU brand in some capacity. With so many moving pieces and players involved, it was important for everyone to be on the same page. Starmark created an online brand guidelines site to assist each player in knowing how to accurately convey and communicate the brand. NSU now has a new way to tell the NSU story, complete with a brand promise and directions to execute tone of voice, wordmarks, photography/video, editorial copy and more. Easily accessible and convenient, the guidelines ensured the brand will live on.

College Microsites

Since recruiting and increasing international and domestic nationwide applicants is at the core of NSU’s growth plans, Starmark developed a series of 4 college microsites that addressed and appealed to prospective students.

Each microsite implemented the new brand’s tone of voice into concise copy that entices and empowers users to apply. The microsites included new downloadable information, success stories, course curricula, faculty pages, degree descriptions and more. Students seeking degrees from the Ron and Kathy Assaf College of Nursing, H. Wayne Huizenga College of Business and Entrepreneurship, Fischler College of Education, and the NSU College of Engineering and Computing were able to find all relevant information in a simple way.

Moving NSU into the big leagues

The rebranding effort is already paying dividends. Both faculty and student groups are praising the new campaign as it rolls out.

There’s no way we’d be this far along without a roadmap that allowed us to tackle several different initiatives at the same time. We stayed flexible and stayed in touch with all our stakeholders from the various departments and colleges. We were able to keep everyone aligned and excited, while still giving ourselves room to account for change. – Brandon Hensler, Executive Director, Public Relations and Marketing Communications for NSU Florida

Phase two is coming soon, focusing on work that will up the game of NSU’s athletic department.

How to start small in AR, VR and 360 video

Reprinted from South Florida Business Journal

When Apple’s ARkit hit the market a couple of years ago, the excuse that AR had no audience would, seemingly, have disappeared. Expensive goggles were no longer needed. Now smartphone owners everywhere became augmented reality (AR) enabled. And, while some industries have found applications and become early adopters, marketers’ budgets and applications have grown much slower than anticipated. (more…)

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