See anything unusual in this photo?

Burke House, where our offices are located, has a restless spirit. He roams our offices at night, searching for something he can never find. He wanders up and down the stairs, never staying long in one location. He leaves little evidence of his presence – a stack of papers moved here, a picture adjusted there. But the careful observer, upon returning to the office in the morning, will see that an unseen hand has paid a call.

I’m talking, of course, about Art Bloom.

But Art is not alone in his midnight rambles. In recounting his late night visits to The Bloom Agency’s offices, Art has often spoken of mysterious noises, closing doors, and the occasional cold chill, as if a bony finger had tapped him on the shoulder.

In other words, ladies and gentlemen, our offices are haunted.

We want to extend congratulations to Southern Community Bank for taking home its 9th consecutive award for the bank’s annual report! Southern Community Financial Corporation’s 2010 annual report was honored with a Bronze Vision Award in an international competition sponsored by the League of American Communications Professionals (LACP). The Bloom Agency is proud to have worked with Southern Community Bank to develop all nine of the recognized annual reports.

The Vision Awards acknowledges outstanding annual reports from around the world produced for the most recent fiscal year. Competition was particularly steep this year with more than 5,000 entries from 24 countries and only one out of five receiving recognition. Judges rated the bank’s annual report “superb” with high marks for narrative content, message clarity and information accessibility.

Recently Art sent me a link to an article from Fast Company called The Future of Advertising. I’m sure a lot of people in our business would be depressed reading it, but he and I both had the same reaction – “Yeah, so?”

You see, the article puts forth the idea (well, the reality) that the classic agency model* is disintegrating, brought down by the new phenomenon of digital marketing. “The explosion of platforms like search, geotargeting, the iPad, and mobile apps means fragmented media budgets and fragmented consumer attention,” the article explains, as well as the end of “the fat 15% commissions [agencies] used to score off of a client’s media spend, a spend ballooned mostly by television commercials.”

At Bloom, that’s not a problem because we have never taken that “fat 15% commission.” And having never taken it, we don’t miss it, and are well prepared to see it go the way of the horse and buggy (or the rotary phone, for those of you who prefer a more timely reference).

We always say (and we mean it) that we don’t do what we do just to win awards. On the other hand, when we do win awards we don’t want to keep it a secret. Which is our way of saying, “Hey, check this out - we just won two Telly awards!”

At some point in the last decade or so, an odd thing happened in the world of advertising and marketing: companies decided it was okay to portray their customers as stupid, deceitful, mean, spiteful and a lot of other negative things. And even odder, the customers don’t seem to mind.

As an example (and there are many), a beef jerky company is currently running a campaign in which a group of friends (the beef jerky customers) do something to Bigfoot that causes him to hurt himself. They are, in essence, being cruel by tricking and humiliating a kind of “dumb animal.” Bigfoot then retaliates against the customers, harming them in return. This would indicate that the customers are also pretty stupid, as this behavior occurs again and again. In other words, there’s no way the customers – the people who are buying and eating this beef jerky – come out of these commercials looking good. Yet this campaign has been running for a few years now, indicating it has been successful in selling more beef jerky.