2011 Best of Show

American Marketing Association Gold Peak Awards

Client: Level 3 Communications

Category: Online Marketing Campagin

Project: Website Acceleration, Converged Business Network, and Unified Communications Videos

As a provider of technology solutions for mid-size to large businesses, Level 3 Communications targets a wide market spanning many business verticals. We submitted our online marketing campaign – a series of videos – to the Colorado American Marketing Association (AMA), because we were successful in accomplishing a difficult task in our industry: simplifying complex technology and hitting relevant notes across a broad range of organizations and purchasing roles. Traditional technology marketing tactics, such as white papers, webinars, and case studies, while effective, typically need to be more highly targeted in order to achieve a successful return on investment. These tactics also are better suited for earlier in the sales cycle. We created our series of marketing videos to introduce Level 3 in a highly engaging way, yet with a broad enough appeal to use across our entire target audience. Our efforts took home the grand prize for Best Online Marketing Campaign.
We earned another Grand Prize for Corporate Identity Rebranding, including brand messaging and a consistent look and feel across our marketing vehicles. We’re particularly proud of this award because we put our internal agency up against a number of external agencies for the project when we embarked on a corporate identity refresh in early 2011.
Maria Trysla, vice president of marketing, accepted the awards on behalf of Level 3. You can check out our efforts – including the Prize winning Videos via the links below or at www.level3.com.
High Performing Websites <http://www.level3.com/en/resource-library/videos/high-performing-websites/>
Converged Business Network <http://www.level3.com/en/resource-library/videos/converged-business-network/>
Unified Communications <http://www.level3.com/Resource-Library/Videos/Unified-Communications.aspx>

Business Marketing Association Gold Key Awards

Client: Qwest/CenturyLink

Category: Digital Marketing: Mobile Marketing

Project: Innovative Touch Points

Qwest’s goal with this campaign was to engage our target audience to look beyond the “safe choices” and engage with the less obvious option. We embarked on extensive research to fully understand our prospective customers, and what makes them tick. We included IT experts, and internal and external Technology Decision Makers (TDMs). What we discovered was how important puzzles, games and strategic thinking are in the everyday lives of our targets. As a result, Qwest Business Markets Group (now CenturyLink BMG) launched a new national marketing campaign called Puzzle. These diabolical, rebus-type word puzzles took on common business problems and exploded into print and online in March 2010.  Each puzzle was built with a CenturyLink business product or service in mind, exposing the players to CenturyLink’s enterprise capabilities. The Puzzle campaign exploded online and into print in March 2010. The incredible success of the print and online campaign spurred the CenturyLink BMG marketing team and our agency, McKinney, to extend Puzzle into different mobile platforms. Like many professionals these days, our target spends a significant amount of time on their mobile devices – for both work and play. Given that a sizable portion of TDMs owned an iPhone or iPad, we leveraged new touch screen technology to engage with our target. With interactive ads on Wired and the IDG tech network pulling them into the online game - or better, bringing the online game to them, thousands of users clicked, played and engaged with CenturyLink Business in a new and exciting way. Thanks to both Cindy Humphrey and Joanne Kernie of the CenturyLink BMG group, who championed this idea from inception through production. And many thanks to our agency, McKinney, without whom this idea would never have come to life.

Colorado Healthcare Communicators Gold Leaf Awards

Client: Children’s Hospital

Category: New Media

Project: Children’s MD: A Smart Phone Symptom Checker

   Children’s Hospital Colorado received top honors at the 2011 Colorado Healthcare Communicators Gold Leaf Awards, winning the Grand Gold Leaf (a.k.a. “best in show”) for its ChildrensMD mobile app, a symptom checker for children.

   The hospital’s marketing and communications (MarComm) team developed the app, which helps parents assess a child’s illness and make a decision about seeking care. The app launched in March 2011 in hopes of fulfilling components of the hospital’s mission that includes the provision of “high-quality coordinated patient care” and “education”. To support this part of the mission, they included information on how caregivers could seek help at Children’s Colorado and offered the app free for download to any consumer.

   The web marketing manager, Jennifer Messina, directed the branding of an already-established symptom checker called Kidsdoc (coincidentally developed by the hospital’s own Barton Schmidt, M.D.), in order to highlight Children’s Colorado as a 24/7 resource for parents. ChildrensMD allows parents to get answers anytime, anywhere.

   The hospital added its “Balloon Boy” logo as the app’s icon and in the “hospital” section of the app, the team added photos of the hospital. New copy used a calm tone and simple explanations to help reduce parents’ stress and reinforce Children’s Colorado’s expertise.

   After the app launched, Denver’s Fox 31 interviewed Messina; immediately after the story ran, 904 new consumers downloaded the app. To date, 6,368 consumers have downloaded the app, with an average 209 downloads per week.

   ChildrensMD is available for free download on iTunes.

Public Relations Society of America Gold Pick Awards

Client: Denver Art Museum

Category: Promotion

Project: King Tut Exhibit

Rolling Out the Gold Carpet: King Tut’s Denver Debut

   Tutankhamun: The Golden King and the Great Pharaohs was a stunning exhibition of more than 100 works of art from the tomb of the pharaoh King Tut and other rulers of ancient Egypt. Brought to the Denver Art Museum (DAM) by exhibition organizers National Geographic and Arts and Exhibitions International, the exhibition was the first time objects belonging to the Boy King had ever been to Denver. The Mile High city was the 6th North American city on this exhibition’s tour.. As the only Rocky Mountain venue for this exhibition, DAM scheduled the show to open in summer 2010 for a six-month run.

   King Tut’s Colorado debut at the DAM was a golden opportunity for a strategic and integrated marketing, PR, and communications program. The communications team at the museum met its internal goals for King Tut by creating an integrated communications program that included paid marketing partnerships, promotional partnerships and ticket packages, tourism outreach, media relations and digital communications. This successful endeavor brought more tourists to the museum than ever before, as well as more first-time visitors than any other exhibition at the museum. The campaign brought more than 400,000 visitors to the DAM, increased museum membership by 20 percent and achieved tangible economic impacts for downtown Denver including nearly 6,000 VIP hotel packages—the most in Visit Denver’s history!