Creative Entries

Proud To Be Women Owned.

As we celebrate another Women’s History Month, we’re reminded of a stat we heard at the 3% Conference: In 2012, only 3% of creative directors in the United States were women. Anyone who has taken a tour of our offices will surely realize we’ve turned that number upside down. And, for many of our clients, being a women-owned business means we help them meet Tier 1 Diversity supplier standards. Yet our work in creating a diverse workplace certainly isn’t done.

Here are five of our favorite tips from the 3% Conference that we try to apply every day:

1. Celebrate diversity in all its forms, and be open to discussing it at work.
2. Allow flexibility. (At Fusion Hill we have Flex Fridays to celebrate hard work and accommodate busy schedules.)
3. Invest in personal development, whether that is presentation, diversity or leadership training. Prioritize giving your employees the tools they need to continue being successful.
4. Join organizations in the community that celebrate women and diversity.
5. Be a mentor to someone. Always be intentional about building each other up. Include men in these mentorship relationships, too, to avoid creating an echo chamber where women talk to women and no progress is made.

We are proud to do our part to boost the ratio of women in our industry, and we hope you’ll join us. Connect with us on Twitter, and tell us what you’re doing to make your workplace more diverse – and more accepting.

Name Storming: Trends, Audiences and Collaborative Creativity.

If you’ve ever named a child – or wondered why your parents picked your own name – you know just how important that choice can be. Naming a product or company is no different.

Over the years we’ve named everything from financial products to wellness programs. We’ve honed our approach with both creativity and strategy, beginning by analyzing naming trends and making sure we know the audience. We explore questions such as:

• How savvy is the audience? Will it relate to a name that is trendy or one that is traditional?
• Should the name be descriptive, suggestive, coined, tongue-in-cheek?
• How should the name complement or differentiate from existing company sub-brands?
• Should the name fall in line with what competitors are doing or be distinctive?

Of course, we also realize that sometimes a name doesn’t have to say everything. Intrigue and curiosity are often our most powerful tools.

With these questions answered, we then dive into our naming process. Gathering a mix of writers, designers, strategists and others, we explore words and categories that may work – letting our minds rove. Through several more rounds, we fine-tune suggested names. And in an age of hard-to-find URLs, we spend a lot of time exploring what’s actually possible to own.

Sometimes, the solutions come from those scheduled sessions. Other times it’s through scribbles on the napkins at restaurants. Or it’s an idea thought up during the morning shower or commute to work. As with anything we do that’s creative, we often find inspiration sparks at unexpected moments.

These days, naming is everything. In an age when trends are changing daily, it’s increasingly important to be intentionally relevant and impactful. Companies need names that can weather the storm of changing trends, resonate with their audience, and remain unique and creative. Our naming process includes the perfect balance of insight and imagination – and ultimately, the power that comes from allowing creativity to reach its full potential.

Getting Back to Basics: Knowing Your Consumer

Knowing your target audience is a common-sense cornerstone in marketing, but how often are brands really doing this well? In the creative world, marketers can sometimes end up developing collateral to speak to a client or company’s agenda. This makes sense – it’s what agencies are hired to do, after all. But in focusing only on the end goal, marketers can lose sight of the person for whom the materials are being created in the first place: the consumer.

As researchers, strategists, designers and writers, we are constantly reminded of the importance of going back to the basics and grounding our work in who our audience is and what they need by asking key questions, such as “What does our audience care about?” and “Where do the client’s goals and audience’s needs intersect?” Throughout projects, we continually return to these questions to ensure that our work and our message is hitting the mark. And we’re constantly reminded how important these steps are in guiding meaningful, impactful work.

In a recent project, for example, a health care client was interested in developing a digital tool to support consumers interacting with social service programs. At the outset of the research, they expected to find that these consumers had limited access to or familiarity with high-tech tools. By going directly to consumers, however, we discovered that the situation was quite the opposite. The participants we spoke to prioritized technology as a necessity in the modern world, even when finances were tight; they regularly used everything from mobile check deposit to Chrome Autofill. When we asked for their feedback, it became clear that not only did they understand the relatively simple functions of the tool the client had created, but also they wanted it to be even more advanced. To resonate with them, the tool would have to match the capabilities and complexity of the many other technologies they were accustomed to interacting with.

Building a foundation of real insights into your consumer is the key to developing a story that resonates. After all, there is a story at the heart of any communication. If that core message isn’t meaningful to the people who are being targeted, it won’t drive them to take action or lead to the outcomes desired.

These days, brand loyalty is often a thing of the past. Consumers are hungry for the best experience in every aspect of their lives and want to feel like brands “get them” in order to utilize a product or service. This new level of fluidity means that every act of outreach is a fresh opportunity for connection. The better we know our customers, the better we can speak to them in a meaningful way – and create real long-term engagement. After all, true storytelling comes from a person with a problem, not a business with an objective.

Our Work Here Is Not Done. But We’re Making a Dent.

We’ve come a long way from the days of Mad Men, but it’s no secret that the makeup of the advertising industry is still disproportionately male – particularly within positions of creative leadership.

Enter: The 3% Conference.

When the 3% Conference first launched in 2012, only 3% of creative directors in the United States were women. Since then, the conference has helped raise the number of female creative directors to 11% while giving agencies a clear road map of ways to champion female creative talent and leadership.

They made it a mission to teach men and women in agencies and on the client side how to address the issue in new ways and to offer something that has been sorely lacking for female creatives: a sense of community.

And this is where Fusion Hill enters.

We just returned from the 2016 3% Conference held at the Manhattan Center in the heart of New York City. The two-day event was filled with inspiring keynotes, professional development, themed tracks, networking and actionable takeaways.

This year’s theme was “What are you going to do about it?” and we are overflowing with inspiration.

So here’s what we are going to do.

Once a day through the end of the year, we will be tweeting micro-actions (small things you can do now!) to help drive the 3% number upward. Make sure you are following us here to find out how we all can change the ratio together.

@FusionHill

What’s Trending in Health Care?

A quick glimpse at health care today shows a drastically different landscape than five years ago. Doctors and hospitals are changing the way they communicate, providers are finding innovative ways to reach consumers and patients are playing a bigger role in their physical and behavioral care – and most all of this can be done at the click of a button.

From ER visits to weight loss to choosing a medical device to selecting health insurance, consumers’ health journeys are top of mind for marketers. And developing products and services that excite and content that engages starts long before creative teams choose imagery and writers craft headlines. It begins with the consumer – diving deep into the everyday world of that audience at home, at work and within the health care system.

As health care transitions to a more consumer-driven atmosphere, how do we connect the dots? Getting past barriers like prioritization to privacy regulations may seem daunting, but it’s one that can be accomplished by drawing on deep understandings of how consumers – from Millennials to women to seniors to Hispanics – approach health care.

Explore the health trends of today. We’ve compiled them in one comprehensive report – from insurance, device, hospital and well-being to technology, demographics, access and education. Get in front of the latest learnings and see how they may impact your future strategy.

Interested? Click here to request the full report.