A Year in Review

As 2009 comes to an end, let's take a few moments to look at some of the accomplishments we've made over the past year...

1. Mastered Joomla! - Francomedia can just about do anything with this Content Management System (CMS), it was a big learning curve, but we dedicated hundreds of hours into learning it inside and out. The result now, is we can offer great web sites with endless functionality, endless SEO options and the customers can drive the content themselves. Well done Sandor and Nicholas.

2. Created Brands - Our design team has unveiled some great looking wordmarks and logos this year which I believe can be the start of some great brands. These designs have made it onto business cards, web sites, letterhead, billboards, the sides of vehicles, baby food packaging, pharmaceutical capsules, mobile web sites, point of sale materials, cleaning products, oil well sites, hats, presentation screens and onto coffee mugs. Well done Dave, Colin and Ryan.

3. Won Awards - The Francomedia team earned some street cred this year with 5 international awards. Spring arrived with a Platinum Hermes and Gold Hermes for the design of our own business card and the design of our own envelope with custom postage stamp. In the fall we learned that we won Platinum MarCom and Gold MarCom for the design of the Alternate Reality Game (ARG), Experience the Node and for the design of our own business cards. Then towards the end of the year we learned that we won the top honor, a Platinum Ava Award for the ARG we developed for our client, The Node. In December, it was announced that Francomedia is a finalist for the Marketing Award of Distinction and the Premiere's Award - handed out by the Alberta Chambers of Commerce. Well done team!

4. Continued to Grow - Despite the economic conditions, Francomedia was fortunate enough to grow over the past year, increasing sales and headcount. We have a great group of dedicated, talented and creative staff. I can attribute this past years' success to our team - no doubt their hard work and perseverance has solidified Francomedia's reputation in the market place as a reputable creative boutique. We were on the receiving end of many new customers who made the switch to our little shop of honors. We made many friends this year.

5. "Got Involved" - This year we did quite a bit of work for non-profit organizations, putting in many extra hours on projects for Volunteer Calgary, Servants Annonymous, The United Nations Association of Canada, The Santa Cause, Science Alberta and even became a platinum sponsor of a non-profit organization - the Calgary Council for Advanced Technology. In addition to that, we got involved with a for profit organization because we believed in what they were doing, we sponsored the "Access to Capital Conference", a platform to help businesses learn about and find alternate financing at time when businesses needed it most. We are proud of all these associations.

6. Got Famous - Well, we didn't, our business cards did. In addition to our business card designs picking up some international awards, they got featured in several blogs from around the world which resulted in us being interviewed for books, blogs and magazines. If you do a google image search of us and images of our business cards will fill your screen, well... almost. Every week or so we discover a new web site that is featuring our cards. We've had a lot of customers ask us about doing similar cards for them, but when they learn how much they are, they tend to drop the issue. Fame has a price and it's five bucks per.

7. Developed a Game - Every year as a holiday gift we like to do something creative. This year, we opted out on doing a physical printed card (sorry to our fine print suppliers) and decided to do something digital. A simple e-mail greeting wouldn't suffice, so we developed an arcade style video game and sent it to customers - it's called, "Mistletoe Command" and garnered much attention and adoration from our clients, friends and some new acquaintances. In addition to the game, we purchased 125 Colorado Spruce tree grow kits to promote the game as well as to award to winners of the game (the contest ends in 5 minutes).

I'm sure I've missed a few things, but those were a few of the highlights of the year, a few of many. So, with that said, I have just a few minutes before the clock strikes 12... from everyone at Francomedia to everyone... OK, both of you reading this, All the best in 2010 and have a prosperous New Year.

Another International Award!

The Francomedia mailbag arrived yesterday with some great news; an announcement from the Association of Marketing and Communications Professionals... we won a Platinum Ava Award!

The international Ava Awards recognizes outstanding work by creative professionals involved in the concept, writing, direction, shooting, and editing of video production, tv commercials, news, and programs, as well as new media.

In our case, we won in the new media category of "Web Development and Interactive Contests" for our work on the "Experience the Node, Alternate Reality Game (ARG)". The platinum award is the top honor.

The ARG that we developed along with our client, The Node Gaming Centre, has won top honors in the MarCom awards as well, so we can now say that it was a multiple award winning promotion!

Developing an ARG is an arduous task, it takes many hours of planning and many more in execution, in all nearly 500 hours were put into making the game a success internationally. The team working on this project, which included members of The Node as well as Francomedia, developed 4 videos that were placed on YouTube as part of the game, as well as 6 web sites, a forum, a database and used multiple social medias, forums and communication methods to both tell the story and execute the game (YouTube, Flicker, Facebook, Craigslist, UnFiction, IRC, blogs).

The ARG was developed to launch a new LAN Gaming Centre in Calgary last summer, the ARG created a buzz, garnered some traditional media attention and gave The Node a very cool story to tell as their brand grows and expands.

Just for the record, here are the hero's that worked on this project (alphabetically):

Sandor Fekete
Ryan Ferrier
Kevin Franco
Kaya Konopnicki
Dave Kromand
Tim MacRae
Colin Stange
John Thomas

So, to everyone who worked on this project, a great big thank you - it took a lot of creativity and a lot of hard work.

Francomedia Wins International Awards

Francomedia received notice today that it won 2 international marketing and communications awards - MarCom Awards. This, of course, was met with some excitement and a feeling of validation for all the hard work that the entire Francomedia team put into these projects.

Here's what we won:

Platinum Award, the top honor, for the development of the Alternate Reality Game (ARG) called, 'Experience the Node', an interactive game we created to launch a new LAN Gaming Centre in Calgary called, The Node. Players registered as agents and were given clues to solve 8 missions in total - clues were distributed or planted througout the internet in various places like Facebook, Youtube, Craigslist and in blogs - the mission: to find the location of The Node and win a invitation to the opening. This turned out to be a rather international hunt, players chatted on numerous bulletin boards, IRC chatrooms and through forums to help each other with each series of clues. It got increasingly hard until the last challenge which was a ge0-caching exercise to find the rogue agent in a parking lot in Calgary - he awaited the players arrival in a stretch limosine. Overall the ARG was a success and many of the players from around the world provided us with positive reviews. It was a hell of a lot of work, but well worth it.

A Gold Award was bestowed upon the design of our business cards - they have been featured all over the world in various blogs and design forums and will be part of an upcoming book on business card design. The Gold MarCom Award is a nice addition to the Platinum Hermes Award we won earlier this year for the same project.

The MarCom Awards are administered and judged by the Association of Marketing and Communication Professionals. AMCP is an international organization consisting of several thousand marketing, communication, advertising, public relations, media production and free-lance professionals.

As a rule, we typically don't enter client work into advertising design competitions, because the basis for the awards is so subjective and it takes away from the purpose of the work - to drive sales, not win awards. However, in the case of Experience the Node, the project was so complex and the work so compelling and high profile, we really did need to enter it, for validation and to further promote the success of the campaign.

We can't wait for the hardware to arrive - we will definitely need a large trophy case now!