SIGMA::BLOG

The slapping began this fall, and not just in the political arena, but also through our work for BRUT.  The new fully integrated multiplatform campaign for BRUT includes a new website, TV commercials, print ads, an online application (slapplication), media events, direct mail, FSIs, social engagement as well as a sweepstakes.

The BRUT brand has represented a classic, American definition of masculinity for over 40 years, positioned in the market as “The Essence of Man.”

“(BRUT’s buyer has) been around.  He’s the kind of guy who sees fragrance as part of his daily grooming routine,” said Marc Broccoli, Marketing Director at Idelle Management Company.  “This campaign is basically almost a homage to him, and we tried to make it younger without walking away from the brand.”

Only two days out in the market, the BRUTslap campaign is quickly gaining traction with consumers.  The comedic execution utilizes a variety of social media and digital elements to celebrate the differences in everyone and being true to yourself.  To find out who is being BRUTslapped right now, visit the brutslap.com, facebook.com/brut and @BRUTworld.

For more details, below are links to the buzz around town for the BRUTslap campaign:

-  BRUT Slap-Happy For Younger Guys, Real Men, MediaPost

-  Slap-Happy Site Focus of BRUT Campaign, Response Magazine

- The BRUT — BRUTSlap Ad Campaign Launch Party, Examiner

-  Re-emerging Brands, Newsworthy Trends:

-  Twitter Buzz,  #BRUTslap

One of the core groups here at Sigma is our web-development team—that’s right we have an in-house web-dev team here in the heart of Oradell, NJ fully integrated with our planning and creative units allowing us to identify, develop and deploy digital properties that build meaningful experiences and relationships. What sets us apart on the development side is not just our full suite of technical skills, experience and intelligence, but more importantly the close relationship we have with software/platform providers (e.g., Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, etc.) as well as developers from all facets of the business. Without them, infusing innovation to our work would be like skiing on grass.

To give back to the web-development community, we are proud to sponsor Flash and the City. The brainchild of our web-dev leader Elad Elrom, this four-day, out-of-the-box conference will bring the Flash community from around the world together in New York City and redefine the way we share and marry artistic creativity with technological ingenuity.

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Some might think a morning with 100 children all under the age of five is not their idea of a good time. However, if you add some new faces, a couple of Dr. Seuss books, and a funny hat you have a successful recipe for smiles and laughs.

On March 2nd Sigma Group’s Team Hercules proudly partnered with Read Across America.  We gladly celebrated the birthday of beloved children’s author Dr. Seuss by reading to several groups of children at the YMCA of Greater Bergen County.

Dana, our Associate Media Director, said it best when she noted her favorite part was, “Captivating the children’s attention and taking their imaginations for a wild ride through storytelling.”  With Dana manning the ship the children were indeed treated to quite a ride.  She spent over an hour reading story after story to a group of three-year-olds who sat with wide eyes and open mouths through it all.  Dana provided a voice for each character in her story and with an animation that rivaled even the most dramatic Disney character.

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Last week, marketers from all around the tri-state area converged in New Jersey at our Fuel for Thought conference to learn, share experiences and develop ideas to get a handle on social media marketing.  There’s a lot we covered/learned from each session and we’ll be sharing key highlights and materials here on our blog.

We’ll kick-off the first conference recap with John Battelle’s (CEO/Founder, Federated Media) keynote on “All Media is Social.  Now What?”  John’s keynote was brilliantly right-on-topic to get us all kindling new ideas.  Here are four key areas he covered:

1.  The Rise of Conversational Marketing: First we declared our intentions (what we want) through search.  Then we declared our relations (social graph — who we are as defined by how we are connected to other people) on sites like Facebook.  Finally, during the past year we declared our utterances (what we are doing, what we are interested in, etc.) on sites like Twitter.  When you put all these declarations together — intention, relations and utterances, you have an economy of conversations. (more…)

A year ago, we launched the Fuel for Thought Series with the goal to create a forum for marketers where we could share the most relevant trends, insights and smart practices that would fuel growth and innovation for their brands.  We made a promise to keep all content unbiased and free of sales pitches to ensure an authentic, no-strings-attached environment for marketers to engage.

Our first event last year focused on finding the optimum digital marketing solutions.  Geoff Ramsey, CEO/Founder of eMarketer shared his Seven Strategies for Surviving the Downturn and it sure got our attendees engaged in various discussions to help them jump-start planning in the right direction for the coming year.  Today, we’re thrilled to see that many of the attendees have implemented steps built from those insights/conversations into their marketing programs.  We as an agency also applied those insights and it helped us innovate and grow during the downturn. (more…)

Why should I?  What does it matter?  How can one person change the world?  We’ve all heard the phrase, “Think globally, act locally,” but how often do we actually heed the meaning of that phrase?

The needs of the world just seem so overwhelming, right?  We find ourselves saying, “Why bother? We can’t fix everything!” and then doing nothing.  I think that’s probably a very logical solution according to our selfish, perfectionist, overachieving natures –  “If it can’t be done right, why do it at all?“  Sound familiar?

While it is true that one person can’t solve all the troubles of the world, we at Sigma have realized that everyone holds great power to make a big difference.  The power that one person has to improve the quality of life for a few, or the ability that one person has to lend a helping hand, is tremendous.

We recently created a community outreach program called Team Hercules (we have a tradition that lends itself to all things Greek).  There were two reasons we created Team Hercules.  Reason #1: It’s a program that empowers all of our employees to reach out beyond themselves and beyond the confines of these office walls to give back and better our community.  And Reason #2: I’ll get into that in a minute, at the end of this post. (more…)

One of the coolest things about Twitter is all the creative applications and tools that are out there to further profile, search and engage with this micro-blogging platform.  There are over 1900 Twitter clients available as Twitter’s open API makes it easy for anyone to build their own client and the list grows every day.  Below are some of the favorites we use to enhance our Twitter experience.  Let us know if we’re missing your favorite Twitter tool.

[Never forget to safeguard your Twitter password and only use it on sites you trust.]

Twitter Search, Trends & News

Search.Twitter – Twitter’s own search engine (formerly Summize).  Type in any search term and see what’s happening on Twitter for that keyword.  You can subscribe to a search via RSS.

Twazzup – An alternative Twitter search engine.  It has the basic functionality of search.twitter.com, but is faster, has a better UI and offers additional useful resources. (more…)