Part of being a successful business is never forgetting that you are a member of the community where you operate and also always remembering to be a good neighbor. One of the ways OrangeRoc gives back to the Honolulu community is by working on pro-bono accounts for the arts and children’s organizations. Another way we strive to be a good neighbor is by giving to those in need. This year OrangeRoc has made a donation on behalf of its employees and all of our clients to The 4th Annual Thanksgiving Dinner at Aala Park. This yearly event is organized by the Calvary Chapel Honolulu and is an opportunity to help those in need enjoy a wonderful Thanksgiving meal. Aala park is only a few blocks from our office and so we thought it fitting to help those in the downtown area who are struggling just to survive. This is just another way we at OrangeRoc give back to a community that has given us so much good fortune.

Happy Thanksgiving to all our friends, our families and our clients and vendors. We are thankful for all of you and hope your holiday is a special one.

Gobble, Gobble!!

(Here is what a Hawaii turkey looks like!!)

Editor Note: [ Yesterday all of us at OrangeRoc celebrated Thanksgiving a little early at Melinda's house which coincidentally was having a new carpet installed at the same time. Good food and fun was had by all. We left stuffed and satisfied by the enormous feast that Melinda had created for us and not one crumb of food was dropped onto the new carpet. Murphy's Law was averted once again. What follows is Melinda's blog entry for today and it has been left unedited for your enjoyment. As you will see it is quite lengthy and if you know Melinda you probably realize that her writing tends to be short, direct and to the point...Unless it is a topic she feels very passionately about. Two of those topics are her OrangeRoc team and food...therefore you'll notice the longer entry. There is also a recipe for an amazing Sweet Potato Souffle' ––– Enjoy!!]

Nothing is too good for a great team…

Maybe it is traditional for families to get together and enjoy a feast for Thanksgiving but at OrangeRoc it’s my way of letting everyone know I sincerely appreciate each individual and recognize the dedication we all bring to the creative drawing table of our life’s each day.

So here’s how it goes…shop for the finest ingredients you know the everyday things in your household cabinet. Like saffron, fresh dill, organic garlic cloves, hand-picked sweet potatoes, organic green beans, butter ball lettuce, vine-ripen tomatoes, fresh rosemary, lemon, brown sugar, sugar, pecans, walnuts, one dozen eggs, chicken broth, cornbread crumbs, fresh ground pepper, celery sea salt, banana, apples, grapes, oranges, corn flakes, virgin olive oil, fresh mushrooms, sage, and a free-range turkey. Oops, also bottled water.

A couple of tips:
You will need 8 hours to cut, peel, chop, wash, wrap and prep all the food.
You will need 5-8 hours to cook all the dishes
You will need 20-40 minutes to prepare for all of the toppings on the baked dishes
You will need about 45 minutes to set the table
Please include to 20 minutes to rearrange the refrigerator and oven as dishes are complete
Never forget to have the spirit of giving and love in your heart and the feast will be fantastic.
Never let your guest clean the dishes that’s rude. Let them savor the moment of someone serving them genuine gratitude.

Special thanks for Andy’s bottles of fine tasting in wine and Kristen’s apple pie and ice cream brought for us all to enjoy.

Clean-up
Pots and pans allow 45 minutes
Fine China hand-washed, dried and put back in it’s special holders allow 1 hour and 30 minutes
Wine glasses hand-washed and dried 10 minutes
Save the yummy left over’s for a few good meals the next day.

Yep, the recipes are all in my heart and head. I do not crack open a book after all I been making Thanksgiving dinners for friends, co-workers and foreign exchange students for 22 years.

If you would like to join us next year please give us a shout and I will include a place for you at our table.

Sweet Potatoes Soufflé
Potatoes baked for approximately 3 hours on 375 degrees
Rub olive on the outside of each potatoes and poke with fork several times
Wrap each potatoes in foil
Only buy sweet potatoes not yams
Once they are very soft remove from oven
Let sit for 10 minutes
Unwrap and slice one side and roll off the skin
Place all sweet potatoes in baking dish
Add Butter (to your personal taste)
Add a pinch of nutmeg
Let the dish cool and then cover

Topping
Melt a lot of butter in pan
Add brown sugar
Add sugar
Add chopped pecans
After everything is melted add corn flakes
Cook on low heat for 4 minutes (do not let the corn flakes get mushy)

Add topping even across dish and bake for 10-15 minutes on 250 degree
Serve and enjoy.

CHOICES, CHOICES….

If you or your company is shopping around for an agency to help with your marketing, advertising, design, website, branding, packaging or promotions – finding the firm that fits your needs, your culture and your budget can be an easy task if you know what to look for.

At OrangeRoc, we are a great fit for companies that need a comprehensive solution that encompasses a mix of marketing touch-points. But… we want everyone to know that we are not an advertising agency and we are not a design firm. We prefer to call what we do, “Creative Range,” as in we offer our clients an unlimited range of creative solutions to get their messages out. 

What follows is some great advice for choosing your next marketing partner:

Your consultant needs to be an exceptional listener. You need to be able to trust him with one of your company’s most valuable assets (Your Brand).

Some of the key aspects you should look for in a marketing firm are:

The hunger to completely understand your business. A holistic understanding that is, including your business direction, culture, process, goals (short and long term), target market, industry and your competition. This understanding must be sound, well before any ideas are generated. A skilled consultant will help you share the information with him by asking you and the key members your team a series of structured questions. This is where all the information and inspiration is contained.

Timeless approach to identity design. Powerful brands will stand the test of time. Consider that when you choose your marketing and design team because they need to believe what they will create will be around long after you have left this earth and that it will be standing strong. This makes understanding your long term goals critical, otherwise it is next to impossible to create anything meaningful that will last.

Powerful design skills and ability in many mediums. It is invaluable to find a design and marketing firm that has the ability to implement the new brand through your entire collateral material, whether it is print, live or online. A firm with equally talented staff in all areas of design can offer you commanding branding at every client touch point. A touch point is any element of your business that your client touches, whether it is a business card, a sign, your website or even your voicemail.

By doing so you can eliminate the weak links created when using multiple independent firms. The weak links will occur when the creative direction has to be translated again by a new creative team and is misunderstood. It can often be purposely modified with new “creative direction” because of a “was not done here” mentality. This intentional misdirection weakens your message and dilutes your brand’s story.

In summary, you need a firm with a hunger to understand your business and a desire to create you a timeless brand with the ability and team to implement it powerfully throughout your company… And you need a firm with a lot of crayons in its box. Sounds Simple Right?

It is when you choose OrangeRoc … We’ve got a lot of crayons!

Put your type-identifying-skills to the test by playing the font game at fontgame.ilovetypography.com. A word of warning; once you start playing you might not be able to stop yourself trying to identify font faces all around you… have fun!

Today OrangeRoc celebrates the birthday of our accountant, HR queen, office manager and do-it-all saint, Terri. The picture you see here is not of her but it is a fair representation of her work load on any given day. We would be lost without you and we truly value all of the talents you bring to our little OrangeRoc family.

Alohas and HAPPY BIRTHDAY wishes from the team!!

In 2008 big banks failed, big insurance failed, big auto is on the verge of failure, big coffee (Starbucks) is downsizing and big internet (google and yahoo) are downsizing. What’s taking their place? Small.

At OrangeRoc we are small and nimble, with all the resources of a big marketing, advertising and design firm, but without the baloney and corporate hullabaloo that you find in larger firms. And although we are small, we think very big.

The next time you need some big ideas, just think small…think OrangeRoc.

What follows is a blog entry written by a great business speaker and author Seth Godin. It’s all about where business is headed in the early part of the 21st century. And that place is called “small.”
Enjoy the essay below by Seth Godin —-

Small is the new big
Big used to matter. Big meant economies of scale. (You never hear about “economies of tiny” do you?) People, usually guys, often ex-Marines, wanted to be CEO of a big company. The Fortune 500 is where people went to make… a fortune.

There was a good reason for this. Value was added in ways that big organizations were good at. Value was added with efficient manufacturing, widespread distribution and very large R&D staffs. Value came from hundreds of operators standing by and from nine-figure TV ad budgets. Value came from a huge sales force.
Of course, it’s not just big organizations that added value. Big planes were better than small ones, because they were faster and more efficient. Big buildings were better than small ones because they facilitated communications and used downtown land quite efficiently. Bigger computers could handle more simultaneous users, as well.

Get Big Fast was the motto for startups, because big companies can go public and get more access to capital and use that capital to get even bigger. Big accounting firms were the place to go to get audited if you were a big company, because a big accounting firm could be trusted. Big law firms were the place to find the right lawyer, because big law firms were a one-stop shop.

And then small happened.
Enron (big) got audited by Andersen (big) and failed (big.) The World Trade Center was a target. TV advertising is collapsing so fast you can hear it. American Airlines (big) is getting creamed by Jet Blue (think small). BoingBoing (four people) has a readership growing a hundred times faster than the New Yorker (hundreds of people).

Big computers are silly. They use lots of power and are not nearly as efficient as properly networked Dell boxes (at least that’s the way it works at Yahoo and Google). Big boom boxes are replaced by tiny ipod shuffles. (Yeah, I know big-screen tvs are the big thing. Can’t be right all the time).
I’m writing this on a laptop at a skateboard park… that added wifi for parents. Because they wanted to. It took them a few minutes and $50. No big meetings, corporate policies or feasibility studies. They just did it.
Today, little companies often make more money than big companies. Little churches grow faster than worldwide ones. Little jets are way faster (door to door) than big ones.

Today, Craigslist (18 employees) is the fourth most visited site according to some measures. They are partly owned by eBay (more than 4,000 employees) which hopes to stay in the same league, traffic-wise. They’re certainly not growing nearly as fast.

Small means the founder makes a far greater percentage of the customer interactions. Small means the founder is close to the decisions that matter and can make them, quickly.
Small is the new big because small gives you the flexibility to change the business model when your competition changes theirs.

Small means you can tell the truth on your blog.
Small means that you can answer email from your customers.
Small means that you will outsource the boring, low-impact stuff like manufacturing and shipping and billing and packing to others, while you keep the power because you invent the remarkable and tell stories to people who want to hear them.
A small law firm or accounting firm or ad agency is succeeding because they’re good, not because they’re big. So smart small companies are happy to hire them.
A small restaurant has an owner who greets you by name.
A small venture fund doesn’t have to fund big bad ideas in order to get capital doing work. They can make small investments in tiny companies with good (big) ideas.
A small church has a minister with the time to visit you in the hospital when you’re sick.
Is it better to be the head of Craigslist or the head of UPS?

Small is the new big only when the person running the small thinks big.

Don’t wait. Get small. Think big.

The world is full of ideas. Everyone has ideas, but only some of those ideas are truly great ideas. At OrangeRoc great ideas are what we have to sell. The result of the ideas or the tangible printed piece, website or video is simply the execution of the ideas. It’s easier to place a monetary figure on time spent designing a website or print ad but it is much harder to place a value on the big idea that came before the actual execution began. Sometimes a great deal of time is spent nurturing an idea and perfecting it before the results of that idea are actually seen.

An ad may take 10 hours to lay out and revise a couple of times and the cost of those hours can be easily quantified. The concept or the idea behind that ad could have taken 5 minutes to create or it could have taken 5 weeks, but a great idea that is used by a company to sell a lot of products or services is quite valuable and that value is much harder to quantify. Cost vs. value or worth has always been a slippery slope in the creative industry.

There is the famous story of an art student who was paid 35 dollars to create the Nike swoosh logo. She was paid 35 measly dollars for a logo that has grossed billions. Is that fair? What is the true value of that logo? It was reported that many years later the art student was compensated additionally with Nike stock worth an undetermined amount.

There is also another story attributed to a few artists including Monet but no one can be sure who it actually was. The story goes that Monet was approached by an art buyer interested in purchasing one of his paintings and when asked how much the painting cost, Monet threw out a figure that shocked the man. He balked at Monet, “How do you come up with such a high price for your swirls of paint?” Monet simply replied, “Sir, I do not place a value on my work based upon the amount of paint on the canvas or the amount of time required to place the paint on the canvas, but rather I place a value on my work based upon a lifetime of experience.”

Finally, I have included an excerpt from a really awesome blogger named Hank Williams. His blog titled “Why does everything suck?” is very insightful and well written and covers all sorts of technology related topics. The post I am quoting here is titled “What is an idea worth?”

His post begins here:
I am a member of the NextNY mailing list which is a group of New York folks that talk about tech business and entrepreneurship. A recent conversation and actually a persistent theme in that group is that in a startup, an idea is worth 1% and execution is worth 99% or some other highly disproportionate ratio.

I take issue with the concept.

Here’s the problem with the formulation. It belies a misunderstanding of what an actionable “idea” really is. A good idea is almost never some light bulb moment that occurs where you realize some insight that no one else has seen. In truth there are few of those. Very, very few people are that smart or that lucky. Great actionable ideas are really a collection of much smaller ideas, weaved together in such a way as to create something useful unique and compelling. There are few actionable “aha” moments.

In other words, to me, coming up with great actionable ideas requires lots of perspiration, iteration, and ideation. However, once you have an actionable idea that has been achieved through this process it is worth *way* more than 1%. I would say getting to this point is worth easily 50% and perhaps well more than 50% of the value of your enterprise. Actionable and truly compelling business ideas are incredibly valuable. And most people that say otherwise probably don’t have them. For example if you open up a shoe store on Amazon, there is likely no “idea” there. But if you have developed a set of insights which allows you to develop a cost effective and safe hovercraft, that is certainly a valuable idea.

The problem is that people confuse the idea creation process with the execution process. They are different. I think one can, at times, blend the idea creation process with the *development* process, but there are important distinctions. When development is just execution of some defined idea, that is not idea creation. That is part of execution.

On the other hand, when the development process is part of the ideation process, you have set the stage for an environment where real creativity is possible. But in order for this to work, the development process must be more interactive and less goal-oriented. Great ideas come from having a bit of a “lab-like” environment in the early stages of your process. This is because exploration is almost always required to achieve a great compelling concept. Few of us has the ability to see with clarity a really useful idea from the beginning of the process, which is why iteration and stepwise refinement is so important.

And so the point of all of this is that I feel few people really respect the process of creating big ideas. Compelling idea creation is hard and it is incredibly valuable.
END—
So the upshot to all of this is that big ideas are the most valuable thing in the marketing, advertising and design world, but it is always the most difficult part of the process for us as an agency to place a value on and even harder for clients to realize that what they are paying for is not a $35 logo, but instead “a lifetime of experience.”

We are inviting all our readers to participate in one of the projects we are working on for our client, The Honolulu Star-Bulletin. Please click on the this link www.surveymonkey.com/starbulletinsurvey and spend a few minutes letting the Star-Bulletin know how you really feel about them. They want to know the good, the bad and the ugly, so don’t be shy. Everyone who replies to the survey will be entered into a drawing for a chance to win some fabulous prizes.

While looking at  the Bacchetta web site, I noticed some new paint jobs. The Orange one looks faster to me (of course it does). How about you.

I have a confession to make. I ride a recumbent bicycle, and I am proud of it.There are many reasons behind my choice to ride a recumbent or “bent” for short,speed, efficiency, my desire to be different, but the main reason these things are a blast to ride.

I think my choice of Bents, tells a lot about about why I am at OrangeRoc.  We don’t accept an answer or a solution just because every one is doing it. No we look for a different answer, a faster, more efficient, more impact-full solution. If that solution requires us to shift our paradigm, we do. If it requires us to re-think our position, we do it gladly. It is this approach that drew me it to this business in the first place, and I have a blast.

     

At OrangeRoc we like to pass along good things when we find them. Today we’d like to let you know about a neat website/blog/information company simply called, “GOOD.” Their motto is “For people who give a damn.” They have blogs, videos, events, magazine, and mini-info papers at Starbucks. They are all about making the world a better place by informing people about topics that matter. Their most recent “good sheet” is about what US Presidents have done in their first 100 days in office. Other sheets have been about CO2 emissions, healthcare, immigration, education, the economy, and politics. The best part about these good sheets is that the information is all presented in an easy to digest format with killer graphic design. We dig that. check out their good sheet blog at www.good.is/goodsheet and all their other cool stuff at www.good.is.  It’s all good.