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August 31, 2011
July 27, 2011
The Summer of Intern
Department Zero has definitely made good on their promise of an “internship that doesn’t suck.” I’ve had a great time learning from some great people, and I believe that my experience so far will have an astronomical impact in the future of my career.
Department Zero stands out from the crowd. Any company whose on-hold music is “Mahna Mahna” from The Muppet Show is a winner in my book, and the people that I met during my interviews are the kind of people that I want to emulate as a professional. My day to day routine as an intern has been consistently inconsistent, it’s fast paced and that’s the way (uh-huh, uh-huh) I like it. I never know what the next day will be about and that makes coming to work a real adventure.
The best part of my internship so far is that I’ve gained a sense of who I want to be after I graduate. I know that I want to be a dependable, helpful, hardworking asset to the team and Department Zero is showing me how to do that. I have two pieces of advice for anyone looking for an internship: Life is all about who’s hungry. Don’t be stagnant about what you want, but be hungry and go out to get it! And enjoy the little things, like a pool on the roof of your building.
Despite being offered a male modelling contract from a very prestigious modelling agency, Alex Edwards decided to spend his summer in Kansas City as an Account Services Intern. He works directly with our Talent, Account, and Operations teams and is graduating from K-State in December.
July 25, 2011
This just in... Social Music Update
It’s been only three months since we made our last post on social music and there is already two new sites taking the web by storm. Turntable.fm exploded into the social music scene, acquiring over 140,000 users after just one month as a semi-closed beta. The new site brings some really exciting features to the social music world.
Instead of stations, you have a choice of joining or creating rooms. Within a room there are five DJ spots that rotate playing one song at a time from Turntable’s extensive music library or a personal computer. Users vote whether a song is “Awesome” or “Lame” which either give DJs a point or skips the song. A live chat room is what really makes Turntable a social experience. The site is also run through a Facebook portal which makes sharing and joining a breeze.
All of these features add up to what might be one of the first platforms to successfully support an online event. It’s not hard to imagine a panel of celebrity DJ’s spinning their favorite music for the online masses. The rooms aren’t currently branded but they could easily be sponsored to promote events or help build a brand identity by sponsoring different genres.
The second new platform that has been stealing a lot of attention on Twitter and Facebook is Spotify. With so many options for a desktop DJ, what makes Spotify so intriguing? Spotify is a desktop application that has a very similar UI to iTunes so users will have no problem adjusting to it. What sets it apart from iTunes is it’s unlimited free music and Facebook connection which allows you to view all of your friends public playlsits and of course, share music. There is a free version but by paying $4.99 or $9.99 a month you are opened up to a whole lot of awesome features. Some premium features include mobile access and offline music. No filling up your harddrive, no waiting for downloads, easy music sharing among friends and endless amounts of music at your disposal. What’s not to love?
What are your favorite music sites these days? Will you consider trying out the new guys or are you content with your Pandora stations? Let us know what you think.
You can read our first post on Social Music here.
July 22, 2011
Festivals: Sponsored vs. Guerrilla Marketing
Festivals bring communities together allowing brands to target audiences or reach the masses. Music festivals, state fairs and sporting events all offer opportunities to impact thousands of consumers a day. There are two primary ways to capture attention at a festival - sponsorship and guerrilla marketing.
Sponsorships come in many levels, depending on the festival, from a full package including a large scale on-site presence, banners, web/TV/radio spots, stage announcements and more, down to a simple tent somewhere on the event grounds. Full package exposure gives a brand opportunities to build meaningful experiential environments, educate consumers, and grow emotional brand connections. It also includes built in pre-promotion before you step foot on-site. Prime, high traffic areas are reserved for brands that support the community and festival with large sponsorships.
Sponsorships can be costly, and so for some brands guerrilla marketing is a small-budget-friendly way to reach a large festival audience. Guerilla marketing does not grant the brand access into the actual event, and does not offer brand building opportunities. Guerilla simply allows sampling and other quick promotions to take place outside the festival in public areas. The consumers outside a festival are typically coming or going, and street teams are often the best way to approach guerrilla marketing.
In either case, festival marketing is ideal to reach a large mass of a target market, collect data, sample products, generate word of mouth and more!
Aaron Welch is a Talent Specialist at Department Zero, and is directly responsible for building teams of field staff across the country to represent clients like Integrys, Luzianne and Toyota.
July 20, 2011
Fall Internship Submission Deadline
It is internship submission time again! If you live in the Kansas City or Portland, OR areas and are a college junior or senior, you MUST read this.
2011 Summer interns Alex & Alexa, lounging at the rooftop pool in KC
You:
Have many options to help you to prepare to for the "real world" and a long list of things that would be more fun to do over the summer than work for free. Your advisers and parents really want you to be ready to enter the job force so you don't have to spend your first few years out of school referring to your parents as your "roommates."
We:
Need fun, young, creative people around us, have lots of cool projects and clients to work on, and do not have a corporate culture that will squash your soul or make you behave like a robot. We are an experiential marketing agency that creates awesome brand experiences for some of the biggest names out there.
How to score the best dang internship in the marketing world:
Send your resume to internships@deptzero.com and let us know why you want to be part of our fall, winter or spring intern crew. Tell us about your personal experiences with brands at major events, how you like to use social media, what you believe grassroots marketing means to consumers, or if you have other mad skillz we'd be stupid to overlook. Show us your personality and your passion, and we'll show you one heck of a time.
Deadlines:
Fall Internship (Aug 22-Nov 23) Submissions Due – 5pm, Friday August 5th
Winter Internship (Dec 1-Feb 25) Submissions Due - 5 pm, Friday, November 18th
Spring Internship (Mar 1-May 13) Submissions - 5pm Friday, January 30th
July 14, 2011
Great Googly Moogly
There has been a lot of chatter lately about Google+, their newest social network project, and the Google +1 button. Many of the features of both have been built to specifically address short comings of Facebook, and to integrate social behaviors into search results. After watching Google Buzz and Wave come and go so quickly, should anyone bother with this one? Without buying into the hype, I say yes. This might finally be where it all comes together for Google. Only time will tell, but this is MUCH more promising than their previous efforts.
Google+ has a lot of positives for users. The most immediate is that it makes it easy to put your friends, family, acquaintances and co-workers into nice neat little buckets called circles. As a user, this makes it less likely that you'll overshare, whereas it is very easy to forget to tweak your privacy settings on Facebook. Yay for you, boo for your mom. The mobile app feels seamless so far, which is a nice change from other social networks as well.
The Google +1 button is similar to the Facebook Like button, with one massive difference - +1 will affect how search engine rankings are managed and optimized on a grand scale.Google envisions +1 as the tool that ties together all user-endorsed content across the web. Whether you +1 something in search results or a photo that your friend took of his dog and uploaded to Google+, you’re contributing to your personal version of Google’s search algorithm, meaning that content may eventually be served to you differently based on your +1 behaviors. Whoa!
While special business profiles will not be available until later this year, it is easy to see that there will be huge possibilities to companies, advertisers, and online retailers. A study has found that Google's +1 button is now more common than Twitter's tweet button on the home pages of the 10,000 largest sites. In fact, the +1 button is now on 4.4% of those sites' front pages -- a 33% increase from a month ago.
This is just our first blush look at the new toys Google is providing, and there is a LOT more information to come to understand just how everything will work together. We will continue to experiment with the new platform, and report our experiences here, from the horrid to the remarkable.
Sara Soseman is the President of Department Zero, and ensures that brand experiences are consistently and successfully delivered from concept to execution for our partners, clients and consumers. She also has current profiles on at least 10 social networks at any given time.
Learn more about Department Zero by visiting our site.
July 13, 2011
DZ Muzak
“Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body.” – B. Marley Couldn’t have said it better myself!
Dev - Fireball
The Roots – How I Got Over
Freddy Jones Band – In a Day Dream
2Pac – Changes
Jason Aldean – My Kind of Party
The Naked and Famous – Young Blood
Kelly Rowland, feat. Eve – Like This
Billie Holiday – Summertime
Maroon 5, feat. Christina Aguilera – Moves like Jagger
Whiz Khalifa – Hero Freestyle
Thrice – In Exile
This month’s DZ Jam Master goes to … Brian Woltkamp with Jason Aldean’s My Kind of Party.Though this isn’t my favorite Aldean track (his current smash Dirt Road Anthem is a great summer jam), I’ve gotta appreciate someone else throwing me a bit of country love. Cheers, Woltkamp, for embracing your inner hick with me.
July 11, 2011
Mascots in the Marketplace
With the summer in full swing the long list of festivals, trade shows, and concerts fill up event calendars. As the Talent Department at Department Zero scours the country finding Brand Ambassadors that are a perfect fit for the client’s brand, there’s a special element that seems to create extra excitement at an event. Mascots/ Costume Characters literally help to bring the client’s brand to life.
We’ve found that covering up our most outgoing Brand Ambassadors in costumes doesn’t cover up their personality. In fact, they shine! With our database filled with hundreds of field staff across the country we are able to hand pick the talent that best fits the mascot's persona. Our clients count on us to create and implement experiential marketing programs and execute them flawlessly. Providing friendly and knowledgeable Brand Ambassadors and mascot talent to engage consumers is just another way we help our clients create brand awareness.
Kondra Gibson-Dingle is a Senior Talent Specialist at Department Zero, building and managing teams of field staff across the country to represent clients like Borden Dairy and Chevrolet.
Learn more about Department Zero by visiting our site.
July 08, 2011
The Perfect Tchotchke: for college students that is…
Looking to promote to a younger demographic? Then do I have the perfect idea for you. Behold the Pizza-Bottle Opener. The geniusness of this tchotchke is mind blowing. It combines the two most important things for a college student: a pizza slicer and a bottle opener. (Mom, if you’re reading this disregard that; I meant paper and pen were the most important things I had in school!)
If your target demographic is a collegiate crowd, then slap a logo on and start distributing. We all know how much pizza those kids eat and bottles of ‘soda’ they wolf down. This is one giveaway that won’t be tossed, but used time after time.
Brian Woltkamp is an Operations Specialist at Department Zero, and is directly responsible for operational quality control, logisitics, production, and fleet management for clients like Integrys Energy, Scion and Toyota.
Learn more about Department Zero by visiting our site.
July 05, 2011
To Celeb, or Not to Celeb?
After an article about SoBe’s new “Try Everything” tour caught my eye, it got me thinking about the presence of celebrities with experiential gigs. Yes? No? Maybe? (Check out the SoBe tour)
Food for thought when toying with the idea of bringing a celebrity on board for an experiential program...
- Does this particular public face endorse everything under the sun? Or will their connection seem
special to your brand?
- Celebrity image match the brand’s audience?
- Will the consumers have an easy time associating your brand with this person?
- Is there an opportunity for consumers to interact with the celebrity?
- Bottom line: does the cost of the appearance fee match the value of having that person on-site?
If you answered yes to most of the above questions ... give it a shot! With the added bonus of utilizing a celebrity's social media outlets, the publicity that it can bring to your event (if on target) could be phenomenal.
Homework to do before the show: determine what your brand needs to do to connect with the fans that came to your event to see their favorite celebrity. And, a quick message from your agency friends: if this illustrious star power overshadows your brand, move on to the next idea. The last thing you want is for consumers to leave without knowing who you were.
Annie Thompson is a Field Coordinator at Department Zero, and manages the day to day operations of experiential marketing efforts for clients like TGI Friday's Restaurants and Southwest Airlines.
Learn more about Department Zero by visiting our site.
