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Intro
Contact:
🤖 : (718) 578-6613
😍 : bruh@si-nyc.com
Disclaimer: We’ll ask questions that only you have the answers to. All meetings are kept strictly confidential.
On a more serious note…
That snappy language in the membership spotlight was to get the smart SI Chamber members into the back room. You’ve entered the password and you’re here now.
Welcome to the speakeasy.
First off,
we know, all too well, that it is completely inappropriate to use humor and snappy language in certain industries. Serious industries are professions such as physicians and hospitals. They need to use milder tones in their language that inspire trust, safety, great patient care, and expertise. It is necessary to expect a certain behavior in these certain professions.
We do, do that very well. We solve problems.
EXAMPLE
While we normally agree with using people and their faces in ads, the stock photography used here won’t reverberate with people. Fake is fake in anyone’s books. I doubt that these people are patients or work in this hospital.
These types of ads are exactly why people distain advertising. We’d suggest having great photos of real doctors and real nurses tell us something about: “WHY THEY LOVE WHAT THEY DO.”
The headlines below the stock photography images also say nothing of the value that Northwell actually brings to patients.
The actual layout of these ads are pretty good for a hospital. It FEELS safe, reliable, clean, confident and organized. Here’s what they did:
Here’s how we would offer to improve this campaign:
You might be asking: Why?
RATIONALE: flowers are the first thing that people think to take to their loved ones in the hospital…. besides stuffing their pockets with a few of their beloved’s favorite snacks. Flowers are beautiful and pleasing to the eye. You get a shot of dopamine (a “pleasure” hormone) released from the brain just looking at them, as neuro-scientific studies show.
We wouldn’t pitch this to Northwell as is, but they are on our short hit list of client prospects.
We solve problems.
Likewise, law firms, insurance companies, financial & accounting firms, and banks serve their customers best by being fair, intelligent, concise, and informative. This also leaves entertainment-like language on the back burner. We’ve worked for law firms like Winthrop Stimson, Fried Frank, and Cravath, Swaine, and Moore, arguably the finest in the industry.
We do, do that well too. We solve problems.
Ideally, there is a time and place for everything and we couldn’t agree more.
Looking over at restaurants, cafes, fashion brands, electronic products, amusements and the tech industries can be more risqué, using humor more freely and can be so bold as to shock and awe their audiences. That’s where our clients tell us we kill it. Like, we really kill it.
We love digging deep to uncover the stories that make our clients stand out from the competition. We call it motivational psychology. Maybe no one told our clients that it was “Okay to stand out—to be head over heels, above the rest.”
Perhaps their fear is: No one is disliked for doing a sound and logical ad. The problem with this approach is that it is very basic and borders being boring.
How about something unexpected?
This is NOT boring or basic:
Many people photographed this sign, put it up on Facebook or Instagram, and sent it to their friends. It makes for a memorable Word-of-Mouth (WOM) campaign which increases revenue. It is remarkable and different. It also had nothing to do with coffee, sandwiches, wraps or fresh juices. It had to do with perception.
This 20% increase for this particular cafe is likely to happen nine times out of ten according to our feedback and experiences with working with over 4,000 Brooklyn and Manhattan businesses in 25 years.
The power in having our particular team do an ad campaign is when and if we are not perfectly pitched or perfectly on point, we can make very fast adjustments to course correct to a more optimal ad market solution.
Maybe try it yourself. See what happens.
The best part about creating a WOM campaign is that it works to both increase traffic and increase revenue with little recurring ad costs. The sandwich board lured foot traffic by changing their perception of the place, not by listing culinary products and coffee drinks.
WOM is the little things in life that connect people to others, to places or to things. So that’s one of our secret weapons. It’s how we solve problems.
Creating a WOM is creating a remarkable experience which gets people talking more, thinking less and moves customers toward you rather than you trying to market to them. This creative and strategic approach is far more powerful and effective for both quick fixes and long-term financial gains.
When it is done well, it keeps customers coming back to see what the business might do or say next. It’s not only more effective, but it also increases business at an accelerated rate.
But, HOW? But, WHY?
(… do these methods work?)
We promised you some secrets, so here we go.
OUR TOP SECRETS and some not so secret.
The art (photography or illustration) should always be of high quality. Quality images show you respect your audience and your client/customers to give them something nice, clean and beautiful to look at.
😍 : more NYC photos from Julien McRoberts
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Phenomenology
We’re jumping off the rails here to go further than most people care to go. You’re in for a little treat.
Consider a full-body experience when advertising or marketing. It’s a lot easier than you think.
We all have five senses. Well, actually we all have a sixth sense, which doesn’t get exercised very often because its empirical discovery is recent and relatively new (MEG). So, for now, we’ll stick with the 5 senses for argument’s sake.
A) Definitely, don’t just list your products and services. That’s a boring waste of space.
B) If you sound like everybody else— it’s not effective and is absolutely no fun at all.
C) You can’t bore people into buying from you no matter how hard you try. And, we’ve tried. And, it doesn’t work.
Try something more inspirational. Try being phenomenal.
Phe·nom·e·nol·o·gy is an approach that concentrates on the study of consciousness and utilizes the objects of direct experience. Yes, it can be used for extremely effective MARKETING and sales. Only a handful of digital ad agencies or marketers do this well at all. They’re all too concerned with hitting numbers and miss the meaning and context of advertising.
This is because the typical marketer’s mindset is to just do as a client asks. The marketer or public relations specialist either obeys the client or gets fired. It’s a waste of talent to treat them as just another vendor. Many should be treated that way, though just as many shouldn’t. There’s an easy way to test this before hiring or firing them.
A DILEMMA 01
Clients have all the gold and
1) Tell a creative team or marketer what to create (a lame and critical error) and,
2) Because the clients have all the gold they are often logical—money-minded—which runs counter to great marketing, advertising, or branding.
3) Many marketers do as they are told to get all the gold and having eaten from their Clients’ pockets so long, they have completely forgotten or ignored their power to be creative and create great campaigns and become Automatons. 🤖 Those poor devils.
4) We love our clients because they have all the gold. They love us because we are honest.
A DILEMMA 02
Logic and logicians are ineffective as brand marketers. 1. Their philosophical mindset is too mechanic. They are fear-driven and take the sad and sorry approach and seize up when it comes time to be even slightly creative. 2. Their campaigns lack originality, humor, honesty, fearlessness, disruption, culture, and stimulation. We can bat on and on… most of all it lacks phenomenology which is the ability to create a sensory experience from the written word and compelling image.
Phenomenology engages consciousness and utilizes the objects of direct experience as a medium.
A SOLUTION 01
Your customers are people. They are the ones who are delivering all the gold to the business. Business owners sometimes forget this fact and they treat clients as mere numbers.
Customers live and breathe, like animals, as we all do. We all have to eat and breathe. Some of us are angels who have descended from the heavens above (fantasy) and some of us have ascended up from the apes (reality). Some of us take business way too seriously to care less for what the customer really wants from us. We help our clients see the true value of their brand and what makes them different.
People are organic. We are semi-conscious, habitual creatures and more often than not, too emotional. When we are treated with respect, as equals, as living breathing human beings, we tend to FEEL like we can develop a greater sense of being toward ourselves and others. When someone else makes us feel that way, we can show love to them.
We can develop trust, develop a sense of a relationship with others, and tend to like and love those types of businesses that think like us and share our values. This ‘like and love’ feature can easily be transferred to companies and brands as well. This is how all the gold finds its way into our clients’ businesses.
We do this really, really well.
Phenomenology
Consider the sense of smell. Olfactory is a $5. scientific word for the sense of smell. It is the most powerful of the senses for ad-brand-marketing due to the fact that its superpower lasts the longest in our memory. It does this better and more predictably than all the other senses.
To get a whiff of this, consider the fact that the US Fragrance Market continues to climb slowly every year and are at $44B in sales for 2019.
Another way to test this is to think for a second or two about the scent of a rose.
Do you have it in mind?
Okay. Let’s try the scent of lemon.
Got it?
If you could do this easily, you are an angel that descended from the heavens. If you couldn’t do it, don’t worry, you’re a human ascended from the apes. Both are still human and we still respect you both. #WeJest
Does your business have a scent? Does it just smell? Do you sell a product? Do you sell a service? Consider adding a scent to the office or the product line, inside the package, box or bag. This works for service-based businesses too. When a client/customer opens the door or package, they should get a scent. It’s the scent of your brand. They’ll remember this for years to come. It usually takes a few times to get an Olfactory campaign started.
Use it consistently, for years to come. You will be remembered for it. They will come back.
Do you doubt it?
Fine, 🙂 notice the next time you pass a McDonald’s and/or open a Coco-Cola if you have any doubt about the power of our nostrils, how it connects images in the mind, almost magically. Do you hear a song, or a jingle when I mentioned these brands? That’s a total recall experience and has been long utilized in megastores and shopping malls to get shoppers to shop more, spend more and buy more. It’s not too expensive to do.
If you find a smell you like or love, use this to increase the memory, not for you, but for your customers’ sake. There are millions of smells out there and far less than a million businesses utilizing the Olfactory sense to market their profession. So, that’s one little way you can win.
How else do we accelerate business?
Consider the sense of sight. Neuroscience shows that our eyes take in 40,000,000 bits of data per second. Our brains only use 40 bits of data per second to protect our consciousness from data overload. The rest of the data gets buried directly into the subconscious and stored for retrieval. This means that the data is not lost, but one million times more information comes in than what will ever get used. The subconscious brain is an optimizer of information. It works toward energetic efficiently.
This subconscious feature of the human being protects our consciousness from using too much mental bandwidth, caloric burnout and operates through us in the form of habits and habitual behavior (like routine, gambling, addiction, weight gain, obsessive spending, stealing, but also exercise, health food eating and loving others). Our brains are a supercomputing device and the eyes are the windows.
Visual branding is an extensive field and our small but multi-disciplinary SI-nyc Team has 5 visual specialists in design, photography, videography, visual branding and creating visual scenes (moving pictures and images) from words alone. We’ve even extended our team to include accounting and legal services but, it’s too soon to discuss this yet.
So the take away in this section:
DON’T THINK of a YELLOW CAT with BLUE EYES.
What did you think of instead?
( Oh no, you didn’t, did you? )
A yellow cat with blue eyes immediately jumped into your head. It’s a total recall. It’s also very predictable from an ad, brand and design perspective. We design ads with a predictable outcome in mind. Our clients’ receive full benefits.
Okay. To add another smart visual tool to your ad-brand-advertising toolbox, you can be much more noticeable by using color to attract customers. Appealing to their subconscious or emotional visual centers in the brain, in our humble opinion, is the only way. This happens by using complementary colors.
Even black/white or red/gray can be considered complementary colors, so just don’t go for the basic combinations: yellow/purple, red/green, blue/orange as primary/secondary color schemes.
So what? Everybody knows about those.
Do they?
You’re probably wondering what the SECRET trick is that we know that others don’t?
Here it is: When you have one THING that you want the Client/Customer to REMEMBER as a result of reading the ad or design: use the secondary color to lead them to the primary color. An Example. You have a 300-word ad, you want the reader to call. Use a secondary color for the body text and for the “call to action,” use the primary color to focus on the telephone number, website or address.
Primary colors are called primary for a reason. They are primary. Secondary colors are also called that for a reason. They are secondary. Primary is more important than secondary colors. Use them accordingly. We subconsciously understand this. It’s a natural and predictable response.
There are a hundred more techniques we’ve learned over the years to increase business. We’ve mentioned just a few here. They’re our secrets and now you have them too.
Phenomenology is so powerful primarily because it utilizes a full sensory experience: the sense of smell, sight, sound, touch, and taste. We’ve only covered two here.
You are likely to find Phenomenology experiences and techniques used in airports, malls, national fast-food chains and hotels than you would find them in small to mid-sized businesses. These techniques have been long used by international luxury fashion brands, fashion shows and the costs are clearly out of arms-reach to small and mid-sized businesses.
We do this well and are making this affordable to our fellow members at the SI Chamber. Yay!
Phenomenal Experiences are about YOU but even more about clients/customers. They are the ones that deliver all the gold.
More on this if we meet.
How else do we accelerate business?
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Business Acceleration
CUSTOMER-centricity
What do you have to say? What makes you better? Unique? What makes your company a brand that customers want to do business with? What are the sensory experiences that match the brand and fit tighter than a black glove on OJ Simpson?
What our clients will tell you that makes us really special is that we THINK like your client/customer. We think deeply about how to create the most openable email, the most compelling digital and traditional ads, stellar video and photography, graphic and web design, Instagram and Facebook posts through eye-popping images and compelling copywriting, and where else it gets placed in the public for MAXIMUM FACEBUSTING IMPACT.
That, and the smartest Ad campaigns we do—that tickle people pink on the inside. It’s Phenomenal!
And because we THINK, we work hard with our clients so we don’t have to ever go back to the drawing board with the video or photography or start from scratch on the brand or design strategy. It’s pretty right, right from day one. And we CAN NOT do this well without our clients’ logical guidance. We bring the magic.
Rationale: It’s not about the best price. It never was.
[PROOF: There’s no logical reason that the PVC plastic handbags from Louis Vuitton should cost $1,800-2,200 per bag. Yeah, and they’re not even leather (check it). Why is it that every woman either wants one or already has one, or two, or three. Just ask her. There’s one hanging in her closet right next to a few of her old skeletons].
Price wars, discounts, sales, etc., are for businesses who lack deep consumer insight and connectivity. ‘What is it motivates your customer?‘ is a common question you’ll hear from us.
This is CUSTOMER-centricity.
How else do we accelerate business?
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The Formula for Living Clients that we use:
As odd as this may sound, we use a strict system based in mathematic and scientific data for logical reasoning before catapulting into explosive and impactful creative imagery and copywriting. Yep, that’s how we roll.
“Calling…”
🤒 : Breuk IVersen
🤖 : (718) 578-6613
😍 : bruh@si-nyc.com
How else do we accelerate business?
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BRANDING vs. COMMODITY
Sam (Chief Operating Officer) of The Angiuli Group, LLC thanked us for sharing this document with him and the owners of Flagship Brewery. We saw him months after the fact and wasn’t expecting anything at all. They must’ve found it valuable and very useful. We already suspected the reasons why they would.
This is the very first thing we give our clients to read: PDF is here
It’s a complimentary $1,000.00 value for the SI Chamber members and one reason why we wanted to keep this page private.
In the right hands, it is a superior marketing weapon.
Click here or click the image for the PDF
How else do we accelerate business?
Like, in 2000, when we started 11211 Magazine in Williamsburg | Brooklyn and interviewed everyone local from the hot dog guy, the bagel man (inventor of Rainbow Bagel), Larry Pace, a homeless man, visited Hassidic temples, hung out with the Bloods in the Wburg Red Zone, shared stories of ghost goats with the Italians and some illegal bunkers in their neighborhood, sat in the places on Graham Ave. (where Donnie Brasco infiltrated the family), had morning cappuccinos and afternoon espressos with Mr. Fortunato, and investigated (but never published) some old bootlegging tunnels in basements on Lorimer Ave., while pushing for artist First Amendment Rights and the 2005 rezoning the Williamsburg 11211 ZIP CODE.
First, we couldn’t get people from Manhattan to visit us in Brooklyn, now we can’t get them out of there. 🙂
Williamsburg and Brooklyn have never been the same since. The local residents who owned property back then are sitting pretty on Easy Street. So, our job was done there in 2006.
Or more recently, the time we used a smart SI approach to edit COFFEE videos for The Von Agency‘s special blog called Vonsense! Or to re-introduce SI’s own Wealth and Legacy Group to engage its very select market. They are among the classiest people we’ve met here yet.
Or way back in the initial days of branding and brainstorming ad campaigns with Kate and Andy in their UES kitchen to launch her Kate Spade handbags (back in 1992). Or our photographer who worked closely with Jeff Bezos for five years (and, boy oh boy, can she tell you some stories you won’t read in his bio anywhere).
There are many things we are GREAT at so what do we suck at? We’re opinionated. After so many years of seeing what works and what doesn’t work, we have some opinions about that. Don’t crucify us.
Stellar Video, Photography, Branding, Re-branding, Graphic and Web Design and killer Ads that do better than you expect them to.
Now, today, Amazon is one of the reasons a new digital agency like ours even exists. There is a big revolution happening and you don’t want to miss out on this.
5,000 more words on The Information Revolution, if you want to deep fry your brains some more.
2019 SHOPPING
Let’s face it, traditional shopping was fun back in the olden days. Today we have an amazing Amazon mobile experience which is how most people shop today. They use something at Amazon called persuasive technology. It’s why you shop at Amazon and why you love your mobile phones so much. We’ve been fortunate enough to bring this technology back to the analog world that we call reality. It is seldom used in video or traditional Advertising.
Amazon is not slowing down either. In fact, they are still growing and beating Apple and Google for the first time ever in 2018. In between 2018 and 2019, they’ve grown by a whopping 52%. 😮
See more on:
If you don’t think that Amazon has everything to do with the Retail Apocalypse, then please explain why 20% of all Manhattan Retail Stores are empty right now.
How else do we accelerate business?
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BONUS
What is a little SI-life without a BONUS?
You probably already knew this already and yet we are amazed at how many Staten Islanders DO NOT know this about their most noble island.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, the…”
SiLive… love ’em or hate ’em:
Directly and through various subsidiaries, the [Staten Island Advance aka Advance Publications, Inc. In SI] group owns Discovery Channel, Condé Nast, the popular digital news websites: Wired, Lycos, Angelfire, Tripod and is the majority shareholder in Reddit.
They are the flagship of an empire. And it’s located right here in SI.
Condé Nast
Current USA publications and digital assets owned by Advance Publications, Inc.
- Allure
- Architectural Digest
- Bon Appétit
- Condé Nast Traveler
- GQ
- The New Yorker
- Vanity Fair
- Vogue
- Wired
Digital
Online
- Cookie
- Details
- Elegant Bride
- Golf for Women
- Golf Digest
- Gourmet
- House & Garden
- Jane
- Lucky
- Mademoiselle
- Men’s Vogue
- Modern Bride
- Portfolio Magazine
- Self
- Style.com
- Teen Vogue
- Vitals Men
- Vitals Women
- Vogue Living
- WomenSports
- YM
Can we get a little… Holy WOW!?!
The Staten Island Advance was one of the main reasons that truly inspired our 3 women and two men SI-nyc Team to launch here. We want SI to be better than Brooklyn. We think it can. We’ll need a little help and support from you. In return, we’ll give you help and support in exchange.
How else do we accelerate business?
Okay, now back to that snappy language you really crave. 🙂 Here goes:
So try us or fry us. You’ll see how the “WOW, SI-nyc really got it” makes us different, makes marketing much more sweet, profitable and accelerated. Let’s chat. And let’s dig in to find your remarkable story. Let’s start some T-R-O-U-B-L-E (or not).
If you’re nice, we’ll roll you in a rickshaw, laughing all the way to the bank. 😊 Naw. We’re totally kidding about the rickshaw. The hills in Staten Island are truly impossible. Maybe we can ride you to the bank in a golf cart instead.
We’ll always say YES to having you laugh all the way to the bank. That’s just what we do for a living.
A Business Acceleration Meeting:
It’s complimentary. If you want a 30 mile an hour conversation, serve us tea. If you want a 60 mile per hr convo, just serve coffee. For the 120 miles per hour convos, drop a triple espresso shot into a dark roast coffee and strap your sweet tush in for a ride.
E-mail to set up a meeting. We don’t bite. We’ll bring coffee or if it’s later in the day, can wine do? 👍🏼
Have a very nice day.
Truly,
Call up:
🤒 : Breuk IVersen (bay Ridge, Brooklyn boy)
🤖 : (718) 578-6613
😍 : bruh@si-nyc.com
Agency Reel
🥳
Disclaimer: We’ll ask questions that only you have the answers to. All meetings are kept strictly confidential.
Staten Island, NY #si-nyc 