Salva O'Renick to host First Fridays event

The 1810 Gallery at Salva O'Renick is hosting an environmentally friendly event for the May Crossroads Arts District First Friday tour. The event is May 3, from 6 to 9 p.m. at the 1810 Gallery, located at 1810 Cherry. 

The event features art, interactive experiences and information around environmentally-friendly topics and is sponsored by Salva O'Renick, Ingenology, Cromwell Solar and Bridging the Gap. 

"We're excited to showcase a unique collection of art, while also featuring the great work Cromwell did on our solar energy project," says Mark O'Renick, the CEO of Salva O'Renick and ...

Highlights from Salva O'Renick + Ingenology hosting NASA Space Apps Challenge

Salva O'Renick and Ingenology, the agency's digital subsidiary, hosted the NASA International Space Apps Challenge on April 19-21. The event brought together some of Kansas City's brighest designers, programmers, content developers and strategists to help work on projects that promote and advance NASA's missions. 

Two of the solutions that we created, Sol Weather and Stellar Stuff, have been forwarded to NASA for international award consideration. The event also garnered plenty of local media coverage. 

Throughout the weekend, we promoted the event and the challenges we created through social media channels. Here's a look at some ...

Space Apps Challenge in the news

Salva O'Renick and Ingenology, its digital subsidiary, hosted the NASA International Space Apps Challenge on April 19-21. For three days, people from Salva O'Renick and Ingenology, along with RareWire, Sprint, Cerner, VML and Waddell and Reed, worked together to develop solutions to challenges posed by NASA. The event received local coverage from The Kansas City Star and KSHB  41, as well as national press from The Verge, one of the largest tech blogs in the world.

The International Space Apps Challenge brings together designers, programmers, content developers, strategists and space enthusiasts to form teams and build and release ...

Giving back during the holiday season

Salva O'Renick employees and Ingenology partners recently gave their time and blood to help an area child in need during the holiday season.

The Community Blood Center of Greater Kansas City collected blood from around 20 employees and their family members as part of Salva O'Renick's effort.  

The center has been holding blood drives around the area to help a 6-year-old Leukemia patient who begins chemotherapy treatment after Christmas at Children's Mercy Hospital. 

"It's great that we get to contribute, even a little, in this holiday season. And having it right on site makes it ...

Salva O'Renick volunteers at Ronald McDonald house

As part of Salva O'Renick’s continuing effort to give back to the Kansas City community, the families of six of our employees and Ingenology partners volunteered their time and cooking skills Wednesday evening as part of Ronald McDonald House’s Cooks for Kids program.

Our volunteers spent time organizing and preparing a meal for around 30 people. Then Wednesday, they served an enchilada dinner to guest families at the Ronald McDonald House’s Cherry Street House in Kansas City.

“It was great to come together as an agency in a spirit of service,” Creative Director Michael Paoletti said ...

Strengthening Our Financial Services Experience

Financial services marketing is at the heart of what we do at Salva O'Renick. And clients in the financial services industry work with us specifically because of our understanding of how to align marketing and sales to create integrated brand experiences.

To do that takes expertise across a broad range of issues and segments serving financial services consumers.

In the past nine months, Salva O'Renick has welcomed three new marketing professionals with significant financial services experience to our team. Tracy Smith joined Salva O'Renick this summer, Karl Ploeger this spring and Phil Kennedy in fall 2011, all ...

The Financial Focused Agency

Financial services marketers face critical challenges in today’s rapidly changing environment. Building trust, reducing complexity, communicating true differentiation and delivering a consistent brand experience across customer interactions. Not to mention the shifting landscape of regulation, keeping pace with technology-driven change, and responding to shifting customer needs.

So too have the demands changed for marketing services providers, and a key reason why a firm focused on financial services can give marketers a critical advantage.  Mark Shrout, Managing Director at Salva O’Renick, says the perspective his firm has gained through experience is key to solving the problems clients face. “We ...

Happy Birthday, Here’s a Coupon

Today is my birthday.   I’ve never been one to make a big deal out of birthdays – being just another day in our planet’s annual journey around the sun.  My friends have expressed their well wishes on Facebook, which is nice.   A few companies have even gotten into the game of wishing me happy birthday. That part I could do without.

In my email box first thing this morning, I had birthday wishes from a couple of companies.  The first is an online bank with a penchant for orange (which also happens to be one of my favorite colors ...

The Measure of Success

An interesting exchange this week at a local fast food restaurant pointed out the critical need to link marketing and sales in delivering a valued customer experience.

The exchange went down like this.  My daughter and I pulled into a drive through to get breakfast on the way to school.  Luckily, as we were pressed for time,  there was no in front of us.  There was also no on behind us.  We ordered and pulled forward to the window as directed.  There, I happily traded a pleasant ‘good morning’, paid with a bigger bill than the total and received the ...

Web Designers Need to Code or Not?

disclaimer: this post is long, at times geeky and mostly written to designers from a designer’s perspective, but I think there’s a little worth for anyone who’s willing.

So if you’re not immersed in or nerdy about following the web design community you may have missed out on the string of discussions and debates that were sparked by one little tweet by Elliot Jay Stocks that called out ‘web designers’ who don’t code. The community responded directly to the tweet, other respected minds in the community wrote their own posts here, here and here and ...

Red Heads, The Entertainment Industry and You

If you’re like me, you got wrapped up in the Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, Letterman, Kimmel, et al fiasco. You likely laughed, you likely shook your head wondering how NBC could decide to give Jay Leno another show and you’ve likely since forgotten about it. If you didn’t follow the drama, here’s a link to Conan’s farewell speech. In it he admonishes and pleads with viewers, especially his young fans, to avoid cynicism. To me  this was the one take away worth its weight from the month long entertaining broadcast battle (aside from the ...

Balancing Innovation and Risk in IT

How You Talk to People Says A Lot

My father cultivated a regard for reputation and first impressions in me from a young age that I’m thankful for. He taught me that how you dress, how you shake someone’s hand and how you talk to people when first meeting them impacts their impression of you and there’s no changing first impressions.

I now find myself in a place where I’m relearning lessons from my youth as if they were new to me. And this past week learned a lesson about the power of how you speak to people in a less than likely situation ...

A Little Gift From Me to You

Awhile back I created a twitter icon for myself. I wanted it to be a glossy button with my initials in it. I’m far from the first person to do such an icon (Adobe, Mac so on and so forth). Nonetheless I made it for myself by zooming in and checking out how other icons were put together.

Since then I’ve reused the base of my twitter icon for a few other purposes – here’s one of them. I decided I’d share this file with you. The layers of the logo are separated out so you can ...

Different Sides of Your Persona – Consider Your Audience

At the beginning of ‘09 I was directed to this post by CEO of Zappos on how twitter can make you a better person. This post solidified my personal position on transparency (almost every online username I have, for better or worse, is my government name – sorry mom).

In the subsequent time I’ve become even more active in multiple channels, twitter, facebook, google reader and recently blip. However I was starting to feel I was stretched socially thin. I wanted to maximize my time as I’m sure my employer would also appreciate (thanks for everything by the way ...

Please Update Your Subscription To Our Blog

Hello Salva O’Renick Blog Readers,

To make a long story very short, we are making updates to our blog and RSS feeds and we need you to resubscribe. Please note that it may be necessary to unsubscribe to the old feed to prevent receiving duplicate posts in the future.

If you weren’t a subscriber in the past, there is no time like the present – Just click the orange “Subscribe” button on the Blog page.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience, and if you have any questions please feel free to contact Nick at nchristus@uncommonsense.com.

Thanks,
The ...

The Beauty of Starting Over

Letting go is hard.

I don’t think anyone would disagree with that.

But letting go is especially hard when it’s something you’re very connected to. Just as I’m sure it’s tough letting a child go off to college or move out*, when you have to say goodbye to a totally sweet idea it feels like a little part of you leaves with it.

I mean – here’s this idea that you worked on. This idea you molded and mended and spent time with. This idea you passionately made a case for. And it just… wasn ...

What Page Are We On?

The debate over health care reform is dominating the airwaves.  It’s a tough issue that seems to have no clear-cut answer.  At its core, health care reform is a classic case of organizational alignment as our government tries to find the proper role to play.  As such, the solution would seem to lie in leveraging the process of alignment that organizations in the private sector utilize to drive success.

Alignment is defined as the state of cooperation among persons or groups with a common cause or viewpoint.  For a minute let’s assume that everyone shares the common cause ...

Above the Fold – For Web Design

So I stumbled upon this article about designing above the fold for web design. It’s over two years old, but I felt that the content was compelling (foreshadowing) and wanted to share.

It highlights several examples of highly active links and site activity happening far beyond the traditional “fold” of a website.

The article also makes note of the fact that at best, any pixel height used is going to be a best practices guess due to varying browser toolbars, add on’s, bookmarks etc. I’m not suggesting we ignore the idea of there being information that is ...

A Focus for the Rest of Your Life

I wish more people would do what my coworker Dave Gilbertson is doing.  Dave has taken it upon himself to organize a blood drive.

Most of us get busy with our daily lives and forget about the critical need for blood donations.  It’s a need that grows every year – driven by ongoing advancements in medical treatments that help us live longer lives (while at the same time increasing transfusions as part of the patient care).  Giving blood is not something we normally think about, but I’m glad Dave is.

To say Dave’s actions to organize the blood ...

What wows customers

For some time now, our agency has focused on the critical integration of marketing and sales and helping clients create the ideal selling environment.  We’ve developed a methodology that focuses on what we call the ‘most critical interaction’ – which is the point at which the marketing and sales functions intersect.  For both retail and B2B companies alike, this is typically defined as the point at which customers move from brand preference to purchase intent.  In simple terms, marketing works to create brand preference – sales enters into the picture to advance purchase intent and then close the deal.

For many ...

Get Away

It’s summer time, and like many folks it’s time to head out for a few days of family vacation.  Yet in a pressure-packed world, where every day is a struggle to prove value (especially in a tough economy) taking a vacation seems downright irresponsible.  And if we care about our families, working hard to help provide for them is an important thing right?  In reality, though, getting away from the rat race once in a while is the best thing you can do for your business and your family.

An article by ad-agency focused Grant Consulting, quotes a ...

Hey GM, What’s In It For Us?

As GM went into bankruptcy, they launched gmreinvention.com.  So what are they talking about?  Themselves. Look, potential car buyers are going to ask, “What does this mean for us?”  Savvy taxpayers are going to ask, “How are all those tax dollars we gave you going to benefit us?”  Hey, it’s not that we don’t care about you, GM.  It’s just that we’re human.  And we’re going to want to know, what’s in it for us?

Blame me, it’s okay.

We all know that our economy has been going through some tough times. This morning on CNBC, Pennsylvania Congressman Paul Kanjorski described the underlying problem as ‘our tendency to rush to excess.’ Examples of this run the gamut.  From the king of excessive greed Bernie Madhoff to folks on main street getting carried away with their credit cards.  The correction in the markets and a little restraint is certainly a good thing for the long-term health of our economy.

Interestingly enough, a Harris Interactive poll taken in March and April, found that 66% of US Internet users believe advertising agencies ...

Who uses social media?

Who doesn’t?

I’ve been reading a lot lately about the demographics of social media users, with the highlight being that it’s not just for the teeny-boppers or 20-something socialites.  It appears that what many of us have known all along is now being brought to light by the media.

All of this was vividly brought to life for me within the last week as I realized that both my mother and my grandmother have facebook profiles.  And they use them!  They post status updates, comment on links that I share, and write on each others walls.  All ...

facebook: Connect & Share

I recently attended the Kansas City Chapter of the American Marketing Association’s Annual Meeting featuring speaker Brad Keown of facebook.  Brad discussed the newfound strategies behind social networking and its integration into every demographic. During the seminar, Keown also answered questions regarding facebook’s phenomenal branding success, their place in popular culture, their role in viral marketing and their development of unique segmentation opportunities.

Having been involved with social networking since its inception in the early 2000s, I went into this seminar with a strong understanding of the topic and the marketplace.  And I still managed to leave with ...

Missouri Town and The Kid in Me

In the day to day grind it’s easy to lose sight of all the great things going on in one’s life. I have all the basic necessities to sustain life. I have food, shelter and money to pay my bills. I am also blessed with great friends, family and a career I love. Sometimes though – it takes something magical to remind you how good life is and how truly blessed you are.

An awe inspiring sunset, the birth of a child or in my case running around Missouri Town with a few coworkers filming a video that features ...

Never Underestimate the Power of a Good Marketing Story

I came across this blog post from Seth Godin a few weeks back in which he ponders what came first – the product or the marketing? It made me proud to be in the line of work that I am in. Marketing is not about simply informing an audience about a product, marketing is about creating an experience which triggers an emotional response. This emotional response makes you want further interaction with the product, perhaps even creating the desire to make it a permanent part of your life.

But what I think is really cool about what Seth had to say ...

Time. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

It’s that time of year again. Time for businesses to attempt to win over our hearts with complimentary cookies and the melodic sounds of holiday cheer piping through the loudspeakers. The problem is, they are forgetting what most of us need more than ever right now—time.

It’s a simple gift really, but something that so few companies really embrace. I was talking with a coworker who shared his recent experience with a well-known and respected hotel. After staying at the hotel, he received not one, but three requests to fill out a survey about his experience—none ...