Grady Britton

photo credit: Tyler Riewer

A fabulous party for a fabulous guy — last night’s celebration for Frank Grady’s retirement was awesome. Thanks to all of our guests who came and paid tribute to The King. For those who couldn’t make it we’ve got a Frank Fest photo gallery on our Facebook page.

On a sincere note, we would like to say thank you, Frank, for the years of friendship, guidance, wisdom and brilliance. We’re better people for knowing you and proud to be the company that bears your name.

Hearts to you, from your Griffins, past and present!

Meet our newest GB Intern Frances Kershaw! Channeling Proust and Bernard Pivot, herewith is everything you need to know about this fabulous new Griffin who’s interning with our PR and account services gang.

Describe your personality in 144 characters.

Quirky, open-minded, inquisitive, persistent, hard-working, motivated, self-directed, optimistic, kind, cooperative, reserved, but silly, increasingly more adventurous.

What did you study in school, and how does it relate to what you’re doing now?

I studied Chinese literature and language at Reed College – the writing and research skills I acquired from my studies are incredibly important for the work I do at GB. More importantly, coming from an environment that nurtures the pursuit of knowledge, I feel that curiosity is one of the most useful qualities I can apply to my work.

What is the #1 most played song on your iPod?

For the last couple of weeks, Gotye’s “Somebody that I used to know” and Kimbra’s mashup of “Two Weeks” and “Head Over Heels” have dominated my playlist. LMFAO’s “Sexy and I know it” is my go-to workout song.

What sound do you love?

My neighborhood church bells

If you could throw any kind of party, what would it be like and what would it be for?

YEASTer! Bring your homemade beer, cider, and loaves! A giant celebration of food and drink in which yeast is the star ingredient. We’re actually hosting this in a few months.

Which celebrity do you get mistaken for?

I’ve been compared to a celebrity only once. 10th grade, new student orientation at the International School of Brussels, Paris Gourtsoyannis tried to pick me up by telling me that I had an uncanny resemblance to Michelle Branch. We became good friends, but I never let him forget it.

What is one thing you learned in the last week?

Researching key word placement and frequency online – how to incorporate them into pitches/press releases and how this translates to tangible results for a client.

When you have 30 minutes of free time what do you do?

Catch up on episodes of New Girl.

What’s your favorite website to visit and why?

It varies. I’m a NY Times junkie, but markbittman.com has occupied much of my time lately. Equal parts food revolution and cooking tips.

What’s your most distinctive “Portland-like” personality trait?

I’m a food and beer snob. PBR is not the beer of Portland, people.

What do you hope to learn here?

In general, I hope to gain a stronger understanding of the relationships between all the players that make up an integrated agency – the work that they do and how each component is pieced into a larger project. Specifically, I am drawn to account strategy and planning. The people here at Grady Britton have been so encouraging and receptive to my goals, and I feel very fortunate to be a part of this community.

Today Dayn Wilberding and Becky Engel attended the PIE PDX Demo Day (#piedemo), where eight companies shared their business pitches with an audience of about 300 (according to our guesstimates and the PR folks at PIE). What a fantastic opportunity to see the Portland startup community alive and kicking! From the vibe in the room, it feels like our region’s venture community is awakening, ready to fuel the immense creative thinking and entrepreneurism in Portland. We couldn’t be more glad about this.

A couple cloud-based companies presented, including Cloudability, which helps companies monitor and manage their cloud spending; and Revisu, which facilitates digital review cycles via the cloud for creative work. Grady Britton has actually been a mentor to Revisu in parallel to their PIE experience, and today we were introduced as Revisu’s first agency customer. We’re proud to be a part of this company’s early product development — especially because we see huge potential in how we can plug Revisu into Basecamp to more easily facilitate approvals and revisions on our work (internally and with clients).

Becky’s drooling over next week’s launch of Spotsi, an app that curates travel stories, reviews and recommendations from experts and the socialsphere about a specific destination. Imagine visiting New York or London in the future and getting an insider’s guide to the city, curated by people who have similar interests to you. For example: check out their curated guide for Portland’s salt stores. Ah Portland.

Two other presenting companies are hoping to capitalize on a couple audience niches very popular in the city: athletes and pet owners. Athletepath is supported by W+K and has developed a digital platform to provide race results, sign-ups, and social interactions around a racing event. No more standing in the rain waiting for times to be posted on paper – nice.  Stayhound is the AirBnB of pet sitters — through their service you can find people in your social circle who are trusted candidates to take care of your kitteh or dog while you’re away.

Mopix is hoping to capitalize on the demise of DVDs by creating a new app store for film and videos. If we understood it correctly, they are targeting both content creators and distributors to package up video, photos, directors’ cuts and any other multimedia that is associated with a piece of content and merchandize these apps to consumers. It was somewhat complicated model to grasp in the brief preso, but they definitely are poised to influence how we consume entertainment content.

If you’re one of those people who need something new to learn every day, you’re going to want to check out DailyPath. They’re riding the wave of personal development with their product that will build a community of people around you who have similar goals and objectives.

Arguably the most successful company presenting today was VendScreen. This is the most traditional product pitched today (they even had hardware!), but perhaps the most timely and smart. Here’s their deal: All those vending machines located around the country are going to have to start sharing nutritional information in the next year. VendScreen installs small displays on vending machines so this info can be displayed digitally. They can also share allergy info about products in the machine, ads for vendors, product details and other info on the screen. AND they allow payment via your PHONE. The product also allows operators to receive inventory and service alerts via the Android interface, thus reducing unnecessary service calls. Tight product, smart business plan, clear and timely audience need, highly relevant. No wonder they’ve already secured $12M in funding, and have already booked orders with two of the 100ish vending companies. We’re impressed.

Congrats to PIE GM Rick Turoczy and the other PIE folks on such a successful day. GB is so excited about what you’re doing, and can’t wait to support the efforts of your next class of startups.

UPDATE: if you’re interested in seeing the presentations from PIE Demo Day, check out their YouTube channel. Highly recommend. Enjoy!

Today’s post was contributed by GB’s Tyler Riewer and Dayn Wilberding. Enjoy!

Surely, you’ve heard about Louis C.K.’s recent experiment. Last month, the comedian self-produced a comedy album and sold it exclusively on his website for $5 — skipping the distribution, DRM, ads and everything else that goes into the marketing and sale of a video. It was kind of a test. Louis explained it this way: “The experiment was: If I put out a brand new standup special at a drastically low price and make it as easy as possible to buy, download and enjoy, free of any restrictions, will everyone just go and steal it? Will they pay for it? And how much money can be made by an individual in this manner?”

The experiment caught everyone’s attention — thanks in large part to Louis C.K.’s complete transparency. He even shared the screen shot on the left of his PayPal account upon reaching $1,000,000.

The whole thing has been very fun to follow, and there are some great lessons to be learned here.

To us though, the interesting thing about all of this is what it says about online piracy (and to a more poignantly, SOPA). Pirates determined to get and distribute content for free always will, regardless of fancy encryption or security measures. There is always a way around every system.

The best defense against piracy is to make your content so valuable, unique, affordable and easy to consume that it’s actually more difficult to get it from a pirate source than it is to just acquire it legally. (Case in point: Radiohead’s release last year or Bjork’s iPad app.) Who’s going to hunt around pirate sites or sift through SPAM peer-to-peer sharing files* for the brand new Iron and Wine track when it’s only $.99 and available at a swipe?

Sadly, if passed SOPA will have a profound impact, but not on the pirates. It stands to erode the free and open internet by giving control of the DNS system to government agencies. Shoot and ask questions later. SiliconFlorist and Oregon Senator Ron Wyden have more on SOPA and its chilling effect.

*In fact, many argue that digging through all that pirated content actually enables discovery by new audiences, and eventually results in more profit for the content creator. Some companies have even released specially branded versions of their content to pirate networks, since they knew they will get the content anyhow. Imagine a version of the game HALO 2 where all of the characters have eye patches! Why not own the pirate space with a special “pirate” version?

With the new year fast approaching, we wanted to create our own list of goals — things that we can aspire to do as an agency. These are our ten resolutions for 2012:

1. Hire and develop creative honeybadgers
   These people lead. They do not give up, do not let boundaries bother them or give them an out in creating an awesome, relevant, inspired creative product or visionary path. Creative honeybadgers takes what they wants.
2. Make timesheets a daily annoyance instead of a weekly one
   Tracking time is important to what we do. And while it might seem like a hassle, it’s a lot easier (and more accurate) when we bite off little bits at a time instead of waiting until the end of the week to recount our activities in 15 minute increments.
3. Use Gotham in moderation
   Yes, it’s stoic and rugged and handsome. It’s far above Papyrus, louder than Arial, and much more dangerous than Futura. But it’s also on the verge of a Helvetica-style overdose. There are other fonts out there. Let’s not over do it.
4. Stop getting lost in the Internet
   We all know that the Internet has black-hole potential (how did you find this blog post?). We need to browse smarter. Go offline for inspiration. Catch up on Facebook all at once instead of refreshing every ten minutes. The web should be a vehicle, not a ride
5. Think mobile first
   Mobile experience is user experience. Every piece of content we build should work in a mobile environment and be conscious of how people will interact with it. We should be starting here and working outward.
6. Flush big ideas out of the weeds, circle back and go for the low hanging fruit outside the box
   Let’s just promise to never say any of these things again.
7. Give purpose to QR codes
   It’s incredible technology. It is. But so is sky-writing. Let’s just reserve QR codes for situations where they really, truly, actually serve a purpose.
8. Replace the creamer that you stole from the fridge
   Not trying to point fingers here (ahem… Dayn), but our workplace would be considerably happier if kitchen thieves would accept some responsibility and replace the items that they “borrow” from the fridge. This resolution also applies to note pads, pens and staplers.
9. Save yourself an email
   If it’s something that can be said in a few words, walk down the hall and say it in person. Let’s take more action. Let’s email less and make the emails we do send more meaningful. We could use the break from our screens anyway.
10. Invite the agency website to sit in on meetings
    The agency website is the face of Us when None of Us are actually present in the outside world. It should, in fact, be better than any One of Us. Inviting it to sit in on our meetings, offices, and reception desks will make it more real, more active, more relevant in our everyday. Which is the way it needs to be.

Happy New Year Twuffer! Since we launched our Twuffer application three years ago, we’ve been so excited by the response the application has seen. Here’s a little preview into what’s happening with our free tweet scheduler.

Thanks to the Twuffer community who continually gives us feedback on how to make this better. Your contributions have been invaluable.

If you’re feeling a little bit befuddled by Google+ right now, we don’t blame you. It’s one more social channel to deal with, it’s meeting mixed reviews, and while there are some great features (hangouts, circles, etc), people don’t seem to be embracing them.

Here’s the thing… while we don’t know how/if users will continue to use to Google+, we do know that there’s value to unique content and that Google has the ability to reward valuable content in search. That’s the one piece that’s immediately worth it for everyone. Because every time someone interacts with you on the Google+ platform (which can be as simple as clicking a +1 button), it gradually improves where you show up in search results.

In a post we wrote back in August (Five Things You Need to Know About Google+ Right Now), we said, “If there’s something for marketers to be giddy about here… brand pages are it.” We still believe that too.

Beyond the search benefits, there’s a lot of potential here. Even though you might feel limited in what you can do with your brand page right now, there will absolutely come a day when it will be integrated into Analytics, consumer behavior, AdWords, Google Docs, location-based targeting(!), and more.

Right now, it’s all about search. In the future, it will be about unlimited integration into everything you do online. Those are the things we’re most excited about.

Our Google+ advice: establish your brand page now, incorporate the +1 button into your website, create valuable content, and start dreaming bigger.

Shout-out to our client Kryptiq, who was just honored with a spot on the Portland Business Journal’s Most Admired Tech Companies in the region. This is the sixth year the company was included on this prestigious list.

We’re so glad to be working with you and proud of your ongoing efforts to improve how healthcare information is meaningfully shared.

This award comes on the heels of the launch of Kryptiq’s new website, which we unveiled last week with a fresh design, clear and concise messaging and simple product presentation.

Even better than our thoughts on the site, was word from one of Kryptiq’s customers that said, “The new site is the cleanest and most clearly articulated site that I have seen in healthcare.” That’s a compliment you don’t get everyday!

Congrats to our clients Travel Portland and Howard S. Wright! The work that GB did for both of these brands was recognized last week at the PAF’s Rosey Awards, the granddaddy of all Portland creative awards shows.

The first big moment of the night was Travel Portland’s ASAE booth called “Portland Live” winning a Rosey for Best Consumer Environment/Exhibit. To support Travel Portland at their annual ASAE event for meeting planners, GB developed “Portland Live” to show event attendees in St. Louis the awesomeness of Portland by giving them a LIVE tour of the city. GB projected live-broadcast feeds of various activities in Portland on large displays in their booth. Visitors to the booth could see eight venues around Portland, where we stationed cameramen who broadcast using iPads as cameras and a brand new iPad app for Ustream, the online broadcast platform.

Portland Live!: Behind the Scenes from Brett Eichenberger on Vimeo.

The other highlight from the show was Howard S. Wright’s pocket guide being honored with a Merit Award in the Print Collateral category. This charismatic booklet was created to help the company’s employees learn about the acquisition of their company by Balfour Beatty Construction.

We enjoyed the show, but more than that, we continue to appreciate the great clients who give us the opportunity to do great work. Thanks to you and to the teams who made this magic happen.