Our first campaign for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama launches today. Hey hey! It’s their first new branding campaign in over twenty years, and to prepare for it, we studied closely how they’ve advertised most recently. Campaigns have focused on specific customer stories told through well produced, documentary-style television. For instance, spots have featured a middle-aged man whose daughter was diagnosed with cancer, a young man who contracted malaria while traveling abroad and the HR manager of a mid-sized company. The implicit audience take away: because these people have Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama, they are able to be a father, to be adventurous and to be competitive, respectively.

Sound strategy. We just needed to execute against it in a fresh way. So we began the distillation process:  BCBS exists to help its customers live life to the fullest -> BCBS provides peace of mind that allows you to be whatever you need or want to be (a father, adventurous, competitive and so on) -> when your health is protected, you can focus on being you -> BE YOU.

Be You. This articulates the key consumer benefit BCBS delivers, but does so in a very open manner, such that anyone at any stage of life can identify and relate with the brand. And though the campaign utilizes traditional media (TV, print, newspaper, outdoor, radio), we’ve added digital and social media to the mix to allow a new kind of emphasis on storytelling. We want you to tell the stories.

First, have a look at a couple of thirty-second television spots for the campaign here and here.

We also produced a series of fifteen-second television spots with the message tailored to the programming in which the spot is placed; for example, we will have spots airing in Dancing with the Stars and American Idol that play off the content in those shows. And it’s football season in Alabama, so we absolutely had to produce a spot for the Crimson Tide and one for the Auburn Tigers.

Customer storytelling has been at the epicenter of BCBS’s advertising for many years, so we built a social sharing site that allows the public to share their own “Be” stories. The site is promoted on all of the traditional media (tagged with bcbsal.com/BEYOU) and through digital media placement on sites such as Facebook, Pandora, YouTube, Weather.com and al.com.

At the site, visitors can browse stories and/or share their own. The stories are rated, are searchable and can be shared via Twitter, Facebook or e-mail. Content is moderated and monitored for appropriateness.

The “Be You” campaign is unlike anything else in the healthcare insurance industry: in its tone, in its breadth and in its thoughtful utilization of digital media. Needless to say, we’re excited about the launch. Hope you like it. And be sure to share your story with us.

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We’d be complete jerks if we didn’t thank a few people who helped get this campaign birthed in a compressed period of time. First, our amazingly trusting clients at BCBS of Alabama. Just awesome. Second, our incredible production partners: Sam Crawford and Crossroads Films, Miller Mobley, Tim Vece and Jason Dettmer at Outback Editorial, Chris Bodie, Artifact Design, Struck/Axiom, New Uniform Design and Dennis Gould at Soundworks. Thank you.

Jack Rebney had a really bad day about 22 years ago. And we plan to celebrate Jack’s bad day during our next Red Tuesday event on September 7th. That’s right kids. We’re screening Winnebago Man. The documentary film explores how Rebney’s profanity-laden outtakes from a Winnebago promotional video have become a viral phenomenon (even before YouTube—the clips first circulated on VHS tape).

Here’s a safe-for-work trailer of the film. And our poster for the event.

I hope the delicate ears around our agency handle this well.

The kids at the Square have been nose-to-the-grindstone this past month, and our blog has suffered because of it. Sorry about that. But we promise to share all kinds of stuff quite soon. You’ll see. You’ll see we haven’t been slackin. Nuh uh. No sir.

Campaigns will be launched, news will be released and minds will be blown. Consider August an incubation period.

Finally a reason I might buy an iPad: Flipboard. Billed as your own personalized, social magazine, it gathers all of the social web content you care about into a single, pretty slick-looking application. Here’s an overview video.

Kind of a creepy video, though. Particularly when the half-asleep hipster dude tells me that Flipboard knows who my friends are. Reminds me of this.

You can download the app here. (P.S. Thanks to the nice people at Flipboard for sending me some press pics.)

Good advertising gets people talking. Great advertising talks back. Example: Old Spice’s “I’m on a horse” dude responds to commenters and bloggers directly on YouTube. Here, he’s got a message for celebrity blogger Perez Hilton.

Pure genius.

Great American designer and filmmaker Saul Bass once said “design is thinking made visual.” We added, “yeah, what he said.”

So when it came to our first campaign for MAX Credit Union, we took inspiration from Bass and created a series of television spots that marry kinetic type and animation. And (drumroll please) here they are: Service, Spotlight, Mattress, Loan and Climate.

Long distance high fives to our friends at Shiny Object for helping us birth these bad boys.

We’re experimenting a lot with Facebook, from the conceptual to paid advertising. As for the latter, these placements are proving to be some of the most cost effective in our arsenal right now. The ROI is pretty incredible.

eConsultancy just posted a great article on advertising via Facebook.

We are fans. I mean, we like.

A friend emailed me about an article entitled “Closing the Digital Frontier” in The Atlantic and wanted to get my reaction. Here’s what I wrote back:

I still believe the web is the modern day Wild Wild West; in fact, I call it that around the agency. What we’re seeing now is the adolescence of the Information Age. An equally awkward time for those who create content and those who sell it.

Here’s my take, from a media standpoint: the media (newspapers, magazines and to a much lesser extent broadcast) didn’t take the web seriously enough in its infancy. It was something “they” didn’t understand, and it was thus cast off. To be nice they called it “added value” to their offerings. Content was free, because that was fair market value for online content. Now they are trying to move to charge advertisers more and creating paid content sections for visitors.

The real problem is: how do you shift from an environment in which the content is free to one in which you charge for it?

Meanwhile, companies like Apple and Google were visionary enough to understand the coming seismic shift in consumer behavior. Apple and Google have figured out how to monetize the web, and it isn’t magical–they each basically framed a conduit to corral and distribute the massive amounts of content in an orderly fashion. This creates value. If I want a song, I go to iTunes. If I want anything else, I go to Google.

The move from free to fee is going to be interesting to watch. I suppose you could call the last fifteen years or so “product sampling,” but that’s probably a stretch.

I just listened to an interview posted on Harvard Business Review’s IdeaCast called “The Subtleties of Strategic Swearing.” Check out how Sarah Green starts off the interview. Unexpected from HBR.

I’ve never really thought of cussin’ in the context of sociology and business management. Pretty fascinating stuff.

P.S. Having seen Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz speak in San Francisco recently, I can attest to her vocabulary.

Who doesn’t want to be treated like a rock star? We really couldn’t think of anyone, so we created 1-Day Wonder for our friends at Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Biloxi.

Here’s the deal. By becoming a fan on Facebook, you are entered for a chance to be treated like a rock star for a day—free room, tickets to a show, dinner, drinks on the house, spa treatment, you get the idea. Each month, a new 1-Day Wonder will be selected.

So get in there and fan up. Who knows, soon you might be demanding a bowl of M&Ms with the brown ones removed.