After 8 months of planning and 600 cups of coffee, Billups Design is excited to announce that we are opening a second office in Philadelphia, that wonderful city of brotherly love! The need to put the agnecy closer to the east coast market became more and more clear in 2011 as we continued to grow our client base for our new online advertising suite, TheLiveAds, as well as our other integrated digital marketing solutions.

"As an agency that delivers creative, technology and software services to a variety of verticals, we needed to expand our reach into new markets, taking into consideration the economic upswings occurring in different regions of the country," said Charles Stevenson, Senior Partner. "The Philadelphia / New York market is one of those regions. This move gives us a solid footprint there and allows us to create even more responsive, long-term engagements."

Since October, Billups Design has been assembling the right team to manage operations and new business development there, and now we're moving in the boxes, desks and computers! The Philadelphia office will be headed by Greg Lee, our newly minted VP for Business Development / East Coast. Greg has many years of experience in the agency world, leading as an Account Manager, Project Manager and New Business Development executive.

Now Billups Design can support a variety of clients on the east coast as well as the Midwest. We are confident this will make us even more valuable to our clients and partners in 2012.

We're looking forward to meeting all of our new neighbors in Philadelphia, and helping to grow some of the finest companies in the U.S.! If you're a marketing professional anywhere on the east coast and would like to meet our team, please call Greg directly at 610-858-4553. 

The Washington Post Media Group just launched a new campaign for their new Master Class online courses program. Billups Design was brought on to lead in creative messaging, design and execution of all ads in the campaign. After exploration, creative insights and identification of the strongest customer connections, multiple variations of ads were produced for each specific course in their offering, and retargeted at prospects who had recently booked travel to destinations similar to its curriculum. This approach is at the heart of our Smart-Retargeting campaigns that match product and message to consumer at the right time and place in order to move them along their consideration process. For these campaigns, a person who is traveling to Beijing is being served the Washington Post Master Class on China, "Intelligence and insights from the inside." When the viewer sees this ad, while surfing online prior to their flight for example, their potential interest in the course is at its peak and the probability of conversion is higher. The focused revelance of these smart-retargeted ads to The Washington Post Media's prospects has resulted in strong peformance in the campaign's early stages. Thanks to everyone on the BD team, and everyone at The Washington Post Media Group who helped make this a successful campaign!

Adobe BrowserLab marketing manager, Rich Lee, has invited our own Ted Billups to become a member of their CAB (customer advisory board) for another exciting new product coming soon.  Ted will be joining weekly meetings (on Thursdays) where the group will be exposed to different aspects of the app and asked for their reactions and ideas.  The CAB has early access to builds (every couple of weeks) and there is a prerelease forum where the CAB has direct dialog about features (planned and public), which can directly influence what Adobe is building next.

Congratulations, Ted!

**** UPDATE ****

The software was released to Adobe Labs today (8/1/11). It's called Adobe Edge. The new app is designed to "help you efficiently create animated content with web standards like HTML/HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS". We created a demo html5 ad using Adobe Edge last week - let us know what you think!

Here is a link to the Adobe Edge Preview on Labs so you can make your own animated html.

As part of the overall 2011-2012 Billups Design / theWit partnership to strategically and creatively transform the iconic Chicago hotel's digital marketing efforts, we have successfully launched another innovative property web site. The cibo matto site features big beautiful photography of award-winning Chef Evan Percoco’s masterpiece dishes, its one-of-a-kind atmosphere and the dedicated staff in action. It also featues social media tie-in, diner reviews and automated online reservations. cibo matto is one of Chicago’s premiere fine dining destinations located right on historic State St. , and is part of the theWit Hotel’s (a Hilton Doubletree Hotel) family of dining establishments. We want to thank the great marketing team at theWit for making this project such a success. Also, thanks go out to David Ditzler Photography and Chef Evan Percoco for his hospitatlity and hard work on the food shoots. Here at Billups Design, shout outs to CS, CW, MP, SM and CS for another job well done.

Billups Design is happy to be working with Catch & The Oyster Bar in Toronto's Park Hyatt on the newly redesigned and relaunched web site for September 2011. The restaurant(s) are currently undergoing a top to bottom rennovation that is going to reinvent and revitalize the restaurant for a local and travelling clientelle that appreciates great dining experiences in the Toronto area. The new site will emphasize conversion and effective funneling through quick and easy reservations, Gift Card account balances, interactive map location and resplendent photography.

Seven months ago, Billups Design launched Road Plates, a mobile game for the iPhone. The game received good marks from gamers and reviewers alike. Downloads of Road Plates over those seven months averaged roughly 10 daily. So we reconvened the development and design team to look at the game's current configuration and discover meaningful ways to improve it and increase downloads. This is a typical exercise here as it applies to maximizing traffic and conversion for our client web sites or as it applies to our Dynamic Digital Advertising clients' campaigns.

The first insight, and perhpas most important, was the idea that changing the name of the game could increase its exposure in the iTunes app store and search results placement for new shoppers. We thus decided to change the name of the app from Road Plates to Road Games.

Next we resolved to enhance the game experience itself in several ways. The most important might have been to create additional 'side-games' for the main game. As plate hunting on the highway (the game's main premise) can have pauses in action, players could now play spontaneous tile-puzzle games, or even a 'Road Games' version of Frogger.

We then went back into the game's narrative and looked for ways to increase the engagement with players by writing an amusing overarching storyline that capitalizes on the culture of the road and the humor of family vacations.

Finally, we went back into the game's graphics and upgraded every element, designing everyting to display razor-sharp in the iPhone 4 hi-res screens. The result was a clarity and crispness to the game's overall appearance that wasn't there before.

After the version 2.0 launch on iTunes app store three weeks ago, downloads are up 6-fold, averaging over 60 downloads daily. Most downloads occur here in the United States, but we are pleased to see that Road Games is being downloaded in countries all over the world from Austrailia to Saudi Arabia. (How they play it where no U.S. license plates exist on the highway, we don't know.)

Taking a road trip soon with your family or friends? Download Road Games and tell us what you think! We're planning version 3.0 all the time and your ideas could make it in!

We're excited to announce that Billups Design has been retained by theWit Hotel (a member of the Doubletree by Hilton Hotels family) to provide innovative strategic and creative services in its 2011 initiative to re-energize its online marketing. BD will be teaming up with theWit's marketing team to complete a phase 1 rennovation of the State and Lake Restaurant and Cibo Matto Restaurant web sites. Digital campaigns to market the hotel restaurants in the Chicago and travel marketplace, and changes to theWit's Hotel's main online presence are all part of phase 2. We're looking forward to working with team at theWit and Hilton Hotels.

We're delighted to tell everyone that Kronos Quartet's new web site is live. [www.kronosquartet.org] Sample lots of their music, interact with past concerts and speical projects, view upcoming performance schedules, order tickets and much more. Kronos Quartet is one of the most celebrated and influential groups of our time, performing thousands of concerts worldwide, releasing more than 45 recordings of extraordinary breadth and creativity, collaborating with many of the world's most eclectic composers and performers, and commissioning more than 700 works and arrangements for string quartet. Kronos' work has also garnered numerous awards, including a Grammy for Best Chamber Music Performance (2004) and "Musicians of the Year" (2003) from Musical America.

Thank you to everyone on the team at Kronos and here at Billups Design for making this new web presence a powerful reality! RN, BH, CS, CW, CS, TB, SM, CJ, TopSpin and anyone else we forgot to mention!