This photo, from a presentation I recently attended, speaks the truth. And you know what they say about the truth:

1.) It hurts.

2.) It will set you free.

Today, brands need to focus on engagement and connection. People don’t like advertising for a reason. I see this as an awesome opportunity.

A small crew of Red Square kids hit San Francisco this week, and among other business, we had the good fortune to attend and participate in the 4A’s Transformation 2010 Conference. No question communications is experiencing a renaissance, as Arianna Huffington stated on the first day of the conference, “we are living in the golden age of engagement.”

Nick Brien, soon to be head of McCann Worldgroup, gave a great presentation that I feel sums up where we stand as an industry. Bottom line: it’s still about the big marketing idea, but we’re going to have to become more adept at executing concepts across multiple emerging platforms.

I’ll share more thoughts and take-aways from our meetings soon. Oddly, no one from Rice-a-Roni spoke at the conference.

Hey Mom, look! We won some more trophies for our advertisements. Yesterday, the American Advertising Federation—Mobile Bay held their 2009 ADDY Awards.

The kids from the Square needed two trips to get the awards back to the office. We took home:

-Best of Print for our Senior Bowl posters

-Best of Broadcast for “Nuclear” for Van Kampen Investments

-8 of 9 Golds awarded

Good stuff. But perhaps the nicest recognition was that our man Stephean Grimes was named Art Director of the Year. Well deserved for a guy who works like a maniac and has a great attitude. (FUN FACT: Stephean can also grow a beard on command.)

One half of our in-house photography team (Rowe & Kiel) captured some of this year’s Mardi Gras celebration. Yes, we have Mardi Gras. In fact, we invented it. Boom. How you like us now?

Here’s some photographic evidence.

I like to properly digest Super Bowl ads. And here’s my review of this year’s batch: they were largely forgettable. Overall, most spots lacked strategic thought (advertainment arguments aside).

There were two that stood out, for me. Google’s “Parisian Love” and Snickers’ “Betty White.” Both felt on brand and had a clear strategy. And I believe creative execution of a solid strategy leads to better ad recall.

Let’s do a little experiment: four days later, what ads do you recall or like and why? Tell us.

MTV changed their logo. So what? Fine. I admit I haven’t cared much about MTV in a long, long time, but I still feel a little funny. MTV was my Sesame Street. I was raised by Martha Quinn, Alan Hunter, Headbangers Ball, Kurt Loder, Pauly Shore—all of them.

I loved MTV.

So the logo feels like my cooler older sister just got a facelift. It’s still her, but she kind of looks off. Very simply, it’s a refreshing of the mark rather than a redesign. And a facelift is just a nip here and tuck there, right? They’ve dropped the “music television” descriptor, which is appropriate. The “M” has been cropped and widened, and the stroke on “TV” has been cleaned up, which is nice. Creative Review notes the updated logo allows MTV to house imagery within the widened “M” letterform:

The space in the new logo will be used more to push its programming and its endless procession of reality TV micro-celebrities than as a canvas for artists, and animators as it once was.

Sweetness! I was hoping they’d figure out how to incorporate Snookie in their logo.

Bobby over at Kitsune Noir has some good observations regarding the evolution of a 30-year-old brand:

MTV has become a household name, those three letters alone. I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone call it Music Television before and I grew up in the 80’s. It’s the same as other major networks. You don’t get your news from the Cable News Network, you don’t tune into the Home Box Office to see True Blood and you don’t hate the National Broadcast Company for screwing over Conan. These three letter acronyms are culturally built-in at this point and after almost 30 years MTV deserves the same treatment.

Fair enough. I do think that many people will feel like this is absolute admission of a betrayal of the channel’s initial and core philosophy—playing music videos. Not that anyone has the patience to watch an entire music video these days.

Tina Exarhos, executive vice president of marketing and mulitplatform creative projects at the network, sums it up best:

I’ve been at MTV a long time, and as it was reinvented over the years and maintained sort of a fluid nature, we never touched our logo, which is sort of ironic. It’s a fantastic, iconic logo, but it wasn’t working for us in a way that we needed it to anymore. It needed to express more about what MTV is today, not what it was in 1981.

In other news, I am officially old.

There’s really only one day a year when people anticipate advertising—Super Bowl Sunday. That makes it a kind of television Mecca for adnerds.

So kids, it’s poll taking time: what’s your favorite Super Bowl commercial?

I love 2003’s Terry Tate: Office Linebacker spot for Reebok. “Hey Janice.”

On my Sunday search for inspiration on the Interwebs, I found this photo and laughed. Then I thought immediately of the most obsessive detail man in our agency, Willie. The dude completes a crossword puzzle every day. Not just occasionally. Every day. He knows words and rules.

In communication, words tend to be important. The classic less/fewer rule is a good example of a grammatical error that many of us make on a daily basis.

Thanks Willie. You help the agency operate more affectively. Kidding. Just kidding.

Football fans know awesomeness when they see it. According to today’s ESPN Sports Nation poll, 65% of Americans are more pumped up about the Senior Bowl than the Pro Bowl this weekend.

You may be thinking yeah, but is that statistically significant? With over 80,000 votes from all 50 states, yes.

The kids at the Square would like to think it’s the advertising, but we’re willing to admit that the game, the players, the organization and the sponsors make it great. We’re glad America agrees. Hooray for football! Hooray for democracy!!

Building a new website is one thing. Building a new business model is another. With NDI, manufacturer of the finest floral and botanical reproductions in the world, we did both. Here’s the story.

NDI had previously only sold product through high-end retailers, such as Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom. They came to us with a challenge: build a site that sells direct to the consumer without alienating our trade customers. And make it awesome.

We’re happy to present to you our solution: NDI’s new storefront.

Visitors can shop the entire inventory (over 4,000 products) in a very intuitive manner; products are organized by five different filters. The store recommends similar items and optional upgrades for products like trees and greenery. Customers can come back and quickly reorder previous purchases or update their information. The site also serves trade customers, with trade-specific content for logged-in trade users.

From a management standpoint, the site is built with a custom CMS (content management system) that allows NDI to update everything in their online store: track orders, edit individual items or multiple items at once, and reorganize categories for seasonal promos. They can also access their customer database for real-time info on each customer.

In the two weeks that we’ve been live (and debugging), the site has already seen good results. Sales are happening—66 percent of the visitors are new to the site and the average site visit is almost 9 minutes.

Take a look around, buy some flowers. And if you see any bugs in the site, holler at Janine.

As we continue to develop the site, we’ll keep you updated.