We’re pleased to announce that three recent creative projects have received awards from the 2024 International Hermes Creative Awards Competition.
Shady Grove Medical Center has recently introduced the construction of a new tower building, with a focus on providing patient-centric care and innovation. The advertising campaign by CMBell showcases the hospital's cutting-edge technologies and medical advancements through captivating visuals and compelling narratives, representing the hospital's transformative journey.
How do you know if you’re getting the best possible results from your social media?
You should be getting leads (or sales, if your product can be purchased online), and your audience and engagement should be growing.
If you’re ready to level up your video content game, the next step is figuring out what kinds of videos will fit your goals.
Here are just a few of the video options to consider:
Looking to hire a new communication team leader?
Hiring for a communication position—and wishing you could dig a bit deeper than the standard interview questions? You know, the ones that ask about strengths and weakness, career plans, and why they are interested in this particular position.
Shady Grove Medical Center has recently introduced the construction of a new tower building, with a focus on providing patient-centric care and innovation. The advertising campaign by CMBell showcases the hospital's cutting-edge technologies and medical advancements through captivating visuals and compelling narratives, representing the hospital's transformative journey.
DEVELOPING ENGAGING CONTENT is one of the biggest challenges of digital communication. With so much content vying for our attention, there are tried and true ways to capture and hold a viewer's interest.
Visuals are an essential element for any post, and because the brain is attuned to motion, using video almost always increases engagement.
Communication has never been more important to businesses and organizations. A company’s website is probably the most important marketing and sales tool available. It’s important to update stagnant designs after five years or more.
CMBell recently redesigned the visual brand for Stella’s Homestead, and in this entry, we’ll take you behind the scenes on some of the work that led up to this.
Getting heard is getting harder, and having a strong digital presence has never been more important.
Whether you want to build culture, increase online presence, or win customers, video outperforms all other media in getting viewed and remembered and should be part of your current marketing strategy.
Creating a new website can easily slip into the “not today” category, and for good reasons.
It’s easy to get caught up in a flurry of worries like: What if I can’t find the right vendor? How can I be sure that I’ll get a website that helps grow our business? What if there are cost overruns? What if there are delays? What if I haven’t managed an outside web vendor before? Or where do I even begin?
If you’re one who gets excited about design trends, Pantone recently announced “Ultimate Gray” and “Illuminating” as the 2021 Colors of the Year.
CMBell and four of our clients have received awards from the 2020 International MarCom Awards Competition. The MarCom Awards honor excellence in marketing and communication and represent one of the largest creative competitions in the world—with 6,000 entries submitted from creative teams in dozens of countries.
Words and images are powerful tools for building a company’s culture. And yet they are too often underused in business.
While mission and values are at the center of an organization’s culture-building language, a mantra can flesh those out. If, for example, excellence is one of your values, a mantra can focus attention on how excellence occurs.
Creative work by CMBell and their clients have garnered four Aster Awards: One gold award for a marketing video in Physician profile, one silver in executive message – internal communication video, two bronze awards in marketing videos for regional healthcare systems.
The Aster Awards competition is dedicated to recognizing the most talented healthcare marketing professionals for outstanding excellence in advertising, marketing and communications.
Communications has never been more important to businesses and organizations, and as we look at trends and needs among our clients, we’re convinced that our new mission statement precisely describes the space we’ll occupy: Creating signature communications that drive purpose and grow business.
As an outgrowth of that, we’ve updated our visual brand, and in this entry, we’ll take you behind the scenes on some of the work that led up to this.
Getting heard is getting harder. But creating good content continues to be a winning strategy for building strong brands.
Whether you want to build culture, increase employee engagement, or win customers, video outperforms all other media in getting viewed and remembered and should be part of your 2017 brand content strategy.
But don't get caught thinking only of traditional, high-cost video productions. Videos now come in all kinds of styles and price points—some less than you've paid for a traditional print ad. Here are eight popular types to consider:
Pros: Evokes a feeling about your brand through the artful use of visuals and music without narration. This style is less about persuasion and more about connecting you emotionally to the brand. These work well as the hero video for your website's home page.
Pros: Brings your message to life with custom illustrations in almost any style—from casual and fun to sophisticated and stunning. Helps you avoid that moment when you realize that your competitor is using the same stock images that you are.
Pros: Great tool to add humor and fun to a topic that might be complex or less than exciting. Can be produced quickly without the need for images or footage. These are ideal for explaining a process or an idea.
Pros: This unscripted style can make a leader's message more personal or bring to life a customer testimonial. Affordable to produce.
Pros: Lends the credibility of real people doing real life. And who doesn't love a story?
Pros: This is a fast, affordable way to bring simple messages to life using motion graphics and music. Great tool for adding impact to websites, digital ads, and e-letters. In its simplest form, this can make you look smart even if you don't have the time or the budget to get great photos. And it can be embellished with photos or illustrations.
Pros: Nothing reveals the heart of your organization like a story. These can be built with interviews, narration, b-roll, still images, illustrations, and on-screen text using fresh production techniques and arresting music, but the key is often a good interview. This versatile style is the must-have piece in any company's video portfolio and works well for web, special events, fundraising galas, e-letter marketing, and digital marketing.
Pros: Put your old-school PowerPoint presentation on steroids by reinterpreting it as a video rich with visuals, music, and narration. Good for selling an idea, strategy or vision to employees, customers, and shareholders.
Wondering how video can help your brand get noticed? Let's talk.
In some circles, great design is still considered a luxury. But more often than not, this idea is a fatal flaw for a brand.
Today’s consumer has sophisticated visual tastes created by the most creative communicators in the world. Their reference point for this is not just your competitors—it’s every message they get from any industry.
This is why great design is actually a brand differentiator. Great design provides instant visual cues about your brand that affiliate it with other brands familiar to the viewer—allowing them to decide in as little as a second if they want to further engage with you. The more oversaturated people are with information, the more they rely on these cues as short cuts for adjudicating a product or service. It’s simply an efficient way of navigating information.
Here are some common mistakes brands make when they don’t embrace this important truth:
It’s better to go with less in other areas than to settle for also-ran design.
Naming your new product, service or business is about so much more than whether you like the name. Each word in the name carries with it meanings—some of which are pervasive and others which are nuanced.
Here are 10 guidelines we use when working with clients looking for a name:
In most cases, names that make it immediately clear what the business is will help your prospective customers engage sooner. If I’m looking for a florist and words like “flowers” or “florist” are in the name, I immediately see that this is the kind of business I’m searching for. There are exceptions, of course, but we know that when the brain spots a word it recognizes, the process of searching is made easier.
The name should be distinctive and memorable.
The name should import or evoke the desired brand attributes. If your business is competing in and industry known for fun, for example, then the name needs to evoke that.
Take into consideration what its acronym spells (in any language).
The name should be easy to pronounce, as sometimes it will be only heard and not seen (think audio-only ads).
The name should both sound good and look good visually on an ad, billboard, website or in a logo.
Check domain name availability and buy it quickly once you have consulted your legal counsel. And here’s a word of caution. Some domain sites actually buy-up names you search for as part of their business strategy, so you can look up their availability one day and later come back to find it is no longer available—except if you want to pay the higher price they’ve now attached to it.
If it’s a made-up word—like OptiTru or XyPhil—you’ll need the budget to teach the public what it means. Made-up names don’t signal any reference point in the reader’s brain. This can be good, if you want to create the brand from ground up—but bad if you don’t have a lot of money to spend.
If there will be multiple locations, make the name flexible to accommodate those.
If it’s a sub-brand, think through the implications of its relationship—visually and otherwise—to the master brand.
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