Alright, San Francisco. One minute, you’re freezing our faces off. The next, you’re dumping buckets on our heads. If you’re trying to get us to do our angry pouty face, it’s working. At least there’s something out there to keep us happy: Mortar’s new outdoor work for Golden Gate University. It’s the next phase of the Shine campaign we launched back in 2009.
Hrmm, you think to yourself. With a tagline like “Shine,” I thought the headlines would be all rainbows and sunny skies. Not quite. The kind of shining GGU students do actually takes a freaking ton of hard work, dedication, and a relentless desire to succeed.
GGU is for the ambitious finance major who works two jobs and runs to classes in between. The tenacious law student who was the first in his family to go to college – let alone grad school. The hyper-busy mom who’s committed to finishing her degree. To “shine” is to make the self-inspired, completely optional decision to rise above the 40-hour week, using the remaining 128 hours to bust your gritty behind and thrust the idea of “succeeding” into a new dimension.
The message is bold, and so are the headlines. GGU students shine so bright, they make the sun look bad. Especially in craptastic weather.
When we first discovered Eat24 – an online service that allows us to order food without having to deal with human beings – we wept tears of joy. When we found them sitting in our conference room, a certain copywriter who shall remain nameless burst into the meeting and said, “You guys are Eat24? I f#*!ing love you guys!” …and the business was ours. A few months later, new work is beginning to break. Work like this right here. Enjoy.
In which our hero grabs some well-deserved me-time. Mmmm. Hero. Wonder where you could
order one of those for takeout and/or delivery?
Sloths are not lazy. They’re just conserving energy. We’d tell you to write that one down, but the
pen and paper are way…over…there.
We’re not saying you should order Eat24 for every meal, but if you did, you could make every shelf
in your refrigerator The Beer Shelf. The more you know.
Let the eagle soar! (Especially if you’ve got a trained eagle who brings you delicious food.
If not, Eat24 can help.)
We love it when clients share our sense of humor. So when Marketo asked us to make fun of marketers and all the worn-out, senseless jargon we they use, we didn’t blink half an eyelash before saying yes.
Though it might seem like a bunch of shiny pictures and word fluff, marketing is a tough job. (Stop laughing.) Marketo’s customers find themselves caught in a constant tug-of-war, between sales teams harassing them to find better leads, and higher-ups demanding to know where all the marketing dollars are going. It’s enough to make you crazy.
The whole thing would be a helluva lot easier if marketers could see what goes on behind the invisible marketing curtain – like which leads are more promising, and which marketing efforts are working best. That’s exactly what Marketo helps marketers do, using smart tracking software and sophisticated analytics. They wanted to tell their customers they’re here to extend a helping hand, hopefully catching them before they go off the ledge (or at least before they make that awful splat! sound on the ground).
Behold: A series of direct mail postcards, leading to a landing page where users can submit their own headlines. Remember, writing can be a highly effective means of relieving stress.
Hi, I’m Allyson. Or, Ally. Around Mortar, I’m known as Stinchfield, the new resident PR and social media guru. I met Mortar folks years ago on LinkedIn. We recently found each other again there.
I am happy to be here. I’m excited to help Mortar’s diverse set of clients create PR and social media conversations that harness the power of a Mortar360 branding workshop.
There are a few things that have stood out for me during my first official days at Mortar:
Everyone is having fun and talking out loud, in a good-getting-great-stuff-done kind of way.
The resident monkey is nowhere to be found.
Mortar’s clients are diverse. Already, I’ve written a blog about a company lifting farmers out of poverty in Burma (Proximity Designs), sat in a room with a leading SaaS company forever changing the way marketing and sales teams score leads (Marketo), and talked in-depth with some execs about how to better serve Americans in debt (Financial Freedom Network).
We get to work with smart professors from all walks of life at Golden Gate University (GGU), one of Mortar’s many long-term clients. The media call upon them regularly these days (great job former Mortar PR gurus!).
The branding conversation with clients is much more direct than the PR ones I’ve been privy to over the last decade. There’s more focus on getting real rich insights upfront from all stakeholders (customers, partners, critics, competitors, people online and on the street, the media, etc.), and less on creating B.S. out of thin air.
It’s a truthful 360-leadership conversation where everyone contributes. I’ve watched Mortar share information that clients may not want to hear, but need to. For instance, “Your messaging makes no sense to anyone but you and we fell asleep reading all of those atrocious acronyms.”
The Mortar Foundation is doing good work in the world. Work I care about too. Like helping less fortunate people who need voices to shout out to them every once in awhile, “Hey, we’ve got your back!”
I look forward to my journey as Mortar’s resident, provisional PR and social media guru. Drop me a line anytime. I’d love to hear from you.
Stinchfield
P.S. Using the power of social media and PR, I’ve learned how to speed up help for AFCECO orphans and once for a miraculous little boy named Oliver. I look forward to contributing my skills to The Mortar Foundation and client causes, too.
Avinger is a medical device company devoted to developing innovative treatments for Peripheral Artery Disease (PAD) – a very common, very nasty disease where your arteries clog up and cut off circulation to your limbs, heart and brain. Most patients leave it untreated too long, which has a lot to do with why PAD is the leading cause of amputation in patients over 50, and is responsible for hundreds of thousands of amputations every year. Yes, we said “amputations.” As in – you leave the hospital with fewer limbs than you had when you entered. Avinger believed there was a better way to fight PAD, so they created one. Let us show you what they’re up to:
Need a tissue? We understand completely.
We’re proud to be a part of Avinger’s amazing work, and pleased to see their shiny new website make its debut. We hope you never need their products – but it sure is nice to know Avinger is there if you do.
Speaking of dancing – other clients? The gauntlet has been thrown down. Right about the time the site launched, look what showed up at Mortar Global HQ.
