Sade Acosta, A Death Defied, Twice

Sade was only 19-years old and pursuing her dream of being a singer, when she fell to the ground after a party and was unable to talk or even recognize her brothers and sisters. This was not due to any intoxicants, but rather an explosion of blood from a tiny arterial/venal malformation that threatened to destroy her brain. She tells the story of how she survived the two cerebral hemorrhages that almost ended her career, and her life, before she reached 20.




Her neurosurgeon, Charles Liu, M.D., explains how he removed the clot and saved her life. After her brain anatomy, which had been distorted by the hemorrhage, returned to normal, he then proceeded to monitor her progress with MRIs every two months to isolate the cause and prevent a recurrence. After her second hemorrhage, Dr. Liu found a minute AVM (arterio-venous malformation) and with the help of neuronavigation imaging, tracked it down and eliminated it.
This is just one of thirteen videos that Pasadena Advertising Marketing and Design produced for the USC Keck School Of Medicine: true stories of normal, healthy people whose everyday lives were suddenly shattered by catastrophic medical emergencies no one could predict or prepare for.  The patients themselves tell their stories of survival with the help of their doctors: the neurologists, neuroradiologists and neurosurgeons of the Keck School of Medicine at USC.
This is the kind of information my wife and I wished we'd had when our daughter’s life was nearly ended by a brain hemorrhage in Scotland in 2007. We spent hours pouring over the Internet scouring all the information we could find on aneurysms and the treatment, coil embolization. Most of what we found was so arcane and technical that we could not truly grasp what was happening. We created these videos for people like us – people who need immediate answers, to urgent questions, in idioms they can easily understand.
With these videos at their fingertips, patients, friends and families dealing with life threatening neurological threats will finally have a place to turn for practical answers that they can understand.

These videos were conceived and produced by Tony Nino and Suzanne Marks at Pasadena Advertising Marketing Design.
The director and DP was James OKeeffe and the editor was Peter Bayer.

Mobile Commerce: HUGE or tiny. Yes!

Two MediaPost articles caught my eye this morning. One on M-Commerce derided the minuscule $6 billion in sales that retailers can expect this year from mobile sales, and projected a paltry $31 billion by 2016. The other on SmartPhone data use, trumpeted that smartphones had almost doubled their data access over the last 12 months from 230 MB to 435 MB - and that's not counting tablets and e-readers.

On the face of it, those numbers don't seem to add up. While data use rises exponentially, mobile sales creep up arithmetically. You have to wonder if those two writers even speak to each other… until you notice that they are one in the same, Mark Walsh.

However, when you read further down in Mark's M-Commerce story, two paragraphs jump out at you:

Despite rising smartphone adoption and the burst to roll out new mobile payments, mobile "shopping" often isn't about buying. When consumers use their phones, it's usually to get product information or compare prices -- rather than actually completing a transaction. Shopping never ranks high on any list of Web activities.
Furthermore, retailers are not spending much to optimize their sites for mobile. They are also confused about the best way to approach the medium -- the mobile Web versus apps conundrum. While most retailers have not pursued apps, the potential for location-based services and other tools enabled by more sophisticated devices cannot be ignored.

So, it's not the technology or the adoption rate that is curtailing mobile commerce, but rather Retailers' inability to keep up with the technology. In fact, Marks writes, the "innovation is likely to drive paralysis" as retailers struggle to find vendors and partners who understand this rapidly changing landscape.

Part of the conundrum is that mobile commerce isn't as much about electronic purchasing as it is about in-store shopping. In lieu of those bygone days of knowledgeable human assistance, people use their phones to compare products and prices. Most retailers are singularly unprepared for the convergence of e-commerce and in-store interaction. And many consider their in-store and e-commerce (mainly web) departments as competition.

Ironically, in this economy, when retailers have the least time and money to spend straightening that out, those who spend the most, most wisely, will spring ahead of the others.

IMHO
Tony Nino
Pasadena Advertising Marketing Design

WINNNINGGGGG!

No, really. We won!

Pasadena Advertising Marketing and Design, working with Green Street Ads, has won a yearlong contract with the Orange County Transportation Authority (OCTA) to get people to give up riding alone in their cars. Our silent partner is of course the oil companies whose 4-bucks-plus for a gallon of gas is an excellent motivator to get solo drivers to strongly consider alternatives.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I admit I’ve been into alternative transportation for well over a decade. It all started off with riding my bike to work one day every week, then two days, then three, four and finally five. Now I get in between 60 and 100 miles every workweek depending on the weather and whether or not I have time to take a loop around the Rose Bowl. In addition to staying in shape and looking smashing in Spandex (as long as you keep your eyes closed). And I figure I’ve saved between $2,500 and $3,000 a year in gas. Those alone are not bad motivators.

For this contract, we are working together with fellow biker and long-time cigar buddy John Espinoza and his crew at Green Street Ads. We’ve worked together before on projects for Old Pasadena Management District and the Pasadena Department of Transportation. OCTA promises to be even more interesting. They have a great story – beginning with a wealth of alternatives to driving solo: Standard bus and rail services, a robust “Share the Ride” ridesharing database, a vanpool program, very efficient carpool matching services, employer transportation plans, and an extensive network of bike paths, lanes and routes. And they’re open to having fun.

Fun is good. Fun is a key ingredient to success in many media, but social media most of all.  With Facebook, Twitter, podcasts, blogs, and YouTube, the more fun, the more powerful the impact. If we make real fun an integral part of our events and promotions, that can play out in other media as well, and OCTA has set its sights on a broad media mix. We’ll be in traditional and electronic media ranging from print and broadcast to billboards and bus shelters, as well as in some pretty unconventional places. Drivers in Orange County are going to find our message in front of their eyes no matter who or where they are.

Our first meeting is July 1st.  Can’t wait.