Grady Britton

photo credit: Tyler Riewer

A fabulous party for a fabulous guy — last night’s celebration for Frank Grady’s retirement was awesome. Thanks to all of our guests who came and paid tribute to The King. For those who couldn’t make it we’ve got a Frank Fest photo gallery on our Facebook page.

On a sincere note, we would like to say thank you, Frank, for the years of friendship, guidance, wisdom and brilliance. We’re better people for knowing you and proud to be the company that bears your name.

Hearts to you, from your Griffins, past and present!

Today Dayn Wilberding and Becky Engel attended the PIE PDX Demo Day (#piedemo), where eight companies shared their business pitches with an audience of about 300 (according to our guesstimates and the PR folks at PIE). What a fantastic opportunity to see the Portland startup community alive and kicking! From the vibe in the room, it feels like our region’s venture community is awakening, ready to fuel the immense creative thinking and entrepreneurism in Portland. We couldn’t be more glad about this.

A couple cloud-based companies presented, including Cloudability, which helps companies monitor and manage their cloud spending; and Revisu, which facilitates digital review cycles via the cloud for creative work. Grady Britton has actually been a mentor to Revisu in parallel to their PIE experience, and today we were introduced as Revisu’s first agency customer. We’re proud to be a part of this company’s early product development — especially because we see huge potential in how we can plug Revisu into Basecamp to more easily facilitate approvals and revisions on our work (internally and with clients).

Becky’s drooling over next week’s launch of Spotsi, an app that curates travel stories, reviews and recommendations from experts and the socialsphere about a specific destination. Imagine visiting New York or London in the future and getting an insider’s guide to the city, curated by people who have similar interests to you. For example: check out their curated guide for Portland’s salt stores. Ah Portland.

Two other presenting companies are hoping to capitalize on a couple audience niches very popular in the city: athletes and pet owners. Athletepath is supported by W+K and has developed a digital platform to provide race results, sign-ups, and social interactions around a racing event. No more standing in the rain waiting for times to be posted on paper – nice.  Stayhound is the AirBnB of pet sitters — through their service you can find people in your social circle who are trusted candidates to take care of your kitteh or dog while you’re away.

Mopix is hoping to capitalize on the demise of DVDs by creating a new app store for film and videos. If we understood it correctly, they are targeting both content creators and distributors to package up video, photos, directors’ cuts and any other multimedia that is associated with a piece of content and merchandize these apps to consumers. It was somewhat complicated model to grasp in the brief preso, but they definitely are poised to influence how we consume entertainment content.

If you’re one of those people who need something new to learn every day, you’re going to want to check out DailyPath. They’re riding the wave of personal development with their product that will build a community of people around you who have similar goals and objectives.

Arguably the most successful company presenting today was VendScreen. This is the most traditional product pitched today (they even had hardware!), but perhaps the most timely and smart. Here’s their deal: All those vending machines located around the country are going to have to start sharing nutritional information in the next year. VendScreen installs small displays on vending machines so this info can be displayed digitally. They can also share allergy info about products in the machine, ads for vendors, product details and other info on the screen. AND they allow payment via your PHONE. The product also allows operators to receive inventory and service alerts via the Android interface, thus reducing unnecessary service calls. Tight product, smart business plan, clear and timely audience need, highly relevant. No wonder they’ve already secured $12M in funding, and have already booked orders with two of the 100ish vending companies. We’re impressed.

Congrats to PIE GM Rick Turoczy and the other PIE folks on such a successful day. GB is so excited about what you’re doing, and can’t wait to support the efforts of your next class of startups.

UPDATE: if you’re interested in seeing the presentations from PIE Demo Day, check out their YouTube channel. Highly recommend. Enjoy!

ANOTHER UPDATE: today the founder of VendScreen published a fun/ inspiring story about how their impressive $12M round came to be. Love the friendly competition and motivation from their fellow PIE members. Butterfly effect indeed.

Happy New Year Twuffer! Since we launched our Twuffer application three years ago, we’ve been so excited by the response the application has seen. Here’s a little preview into what’s happening with our free tweet scheduler.

Thanks to the Twuffer community who continually gives us feedback on how to make this better. Your contributions have been invaluable.

Congrats to our clients Travel Portland and Howard S. Wright! The work that GB did for both of these brands was recognized last week at the PAF’s Rosey Awards, the granddaddy of all Portland creative awards shows.

The first big moment of the night was Travel Portland’s ASAE booth called “Portland Live” winning a Rosey for Best Consumer Environment/Exhibit. To support Travel Portland at their annual ASAE event for meeting planners, GB developed “Portland Live” to show event attendees in St. Louis the awesomeness of Portland by giving them a LIVE tour of the city. GB projected live-broadcast feeds of various activities in Portland on large displays in their booth. Visitors to the booth could see eight venues around Portland, where we stationed cameramen who broadcast using iPads as cameras and a brand new iPad app for Ustream, the online broadcast platform.

Portland Live!: Behind the Scenes from Brett Eichenberger on Vimeo.

The other highlight from the show was Howard S. Wright’s pocket guide being honored with a Merit Award in the Print Collateral category. This charismatic booklet was created to help the company’s employees learn about the acquisition of their company by Balfour Beatty Construction.

We enjoyed the show, but more than that, we continue to appreciate the great clients who give us the opportunity to do great work. Thanks to you and to the teams who made this magic happen.

A couple months ago there was a story floating around about how Morton’s Steakhouse delivered a steak to a passenger (Peter Shankman) landing at Newark Airport. They did so after seeing a tweet from Mr. Shankman, jokingly requesting one. The social and viral buzz that followed was nothing short of impressive, not to mention the goodwill that resulted for Morton’s.

It got us crunching some hypothetical numbers: what was the cost to Morton’s for proactively responding to that single tweet, and what was the soft ROI that resulted from their social engagement efforts?

It’s no way scientific, but here’s our infographic to illustrate what we came up with:

Just goes to show how effective online engagement can be. Consistently and authentically engaging with customers one-to-one online… rewarding loyal fans…real-time communication…that’s how you treat customers. We love it.

And the 2011 GB Grant winner is… Community Warehouse!

This year, Grady Britton will donate $25,000 of in-kind creative and marketing services to an organization that truly exemplifies Portland’s huge heart and giving spirit. Community Warehouse takes donations of furniture and household goods and gives them new life in the hands and homes of low-income families looking to make a fresh start. We look forward to working with these incredibly talented people to increase brand awareness, bolster creative and forever change the way Portlanders think about used couches. Game on!

We’re uncorking the champagne and raising a toast. Because for the 5th year in a row, Grady Britton has been ranked by Oregon Business magazine as one of the 100 Best Companies to Work for in Oregon in the small business category. This year we placed 31st. The best businesses attract the best people, reward them for their work, and nurture them to their full potential. According to the survey employees filled out, that’s exactly what makes Grady Britton such a great place to work. The company is committed to creating the kind of work-life balance, benefits, training and compensation programs for its employees – along with some very fun activities thrown in – that can compete with many larger companies in our industry. Above all, it’s committed to making sure that employees are recognized for their efforts and know how much they are appreciated.

Hey gang, it’s the next installment of December Content U here at GB, courtesy of MarketingProfsU.  This installment comes from a session we heard yesterday that had our Delicious tag button burnin’.

John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing shared his list of must-have online resources for driving website conversions.  Herewith, his list of essential tools:

For content subject matter inspiration, try:

• Delicious
• Google Reader
• Stumble Upon
• Google Keywords
• SmartBriefs from any industry topic of relevance

RSS Aggregators/Readers:

• Google News
• Feedburner
• Delicious
• Yahoo Pipes

To better understand and nurture your web traffic consider:

• Unbounce:  a simple landing page building tool/service (of course you could call GB too)
• Flowtown: provides a social graph of your web visitors after you collect an email address.
• SendPepper: auto-follow-up message generator, via email, print or electronic direct mail.

For online slidecasts:

• Slide Rocket

John also gave a tip we felt was share-worthy, since we get asked this question frequently.  If you want to customize and self-filter an RSS feed on your site, try this: tag any online mentions you find worthy of your RSS feed, tag it w/ a Delicious tag, and then use that Delicious tag to feed in the hand-picked results you want to feature in your RSS feed.