Here Comes The Neighborhood!

Open the doors and seize the day. That’s what they’re doing in Old Pasadena every Thursday for the months of September and October. Over 50 Old Pas merchants will offer special discounts and promotions to Pasadena residents as well as those who work in Pasadena during Old Pasadena’s Locals Only Thursdays.

From the home page of the website to signs throughout the district, locals are directed to savings

Due to the success of last year’s event, Locals Only Thursdays is being extended to two months this year beginning September 1.  We fully expect to draw thousands of Pasadena residents, business people and employees to Old Pasadena to enjoy a wide range of in-store giveaways and promotions.

Restaurants; stores; coffee, tea and dessert shops; spas and beauty salons throughout Old Pasadena are offering special giveaways and exclusive savings including Banana Republic, Forever 21, The Body Shop, Verizon Wireless, Eileen Fisher, The Sofa Company, The Luggage Room Pizzeria, Stats Floral Display, Vertical Wine Bistro, Lula Mae, Distant Lands and Sushi Roku, among others. They are offering thousands of dollars in savings and many are offering free gifts to customers.

As head of the Old Pasadena Management District Marketing Committee, I get to congratulate Kershona Mayo for her excellent work in organizing this event, and Janet Swartz for her online marketing. I love how good they make me look. Wow times 2. But in truth, we really do have a lot of great stuff to work with.

Old Pasadena has always been a great place to live, work and shop, and now, it’s even better.   For more information including a download of all the exclusive special offers, giveaways and promotions please visit www.oldpasadena.org/localsonly.

Pasadena Heritage Honors Us

Tony Nino, Rhea Roberts, Steve Mulheim, Hanna Wood, Suzanne Marks, Marilyn Buchannan

After 40 years of friendly enmity, the Pasadena Heritage Society held a gala evening at the Green Hotel in Pasadena to honor the hundreds of builders, architects, developers, civic organizations, city leaders and volunteers who stood in the way of the wrecking ball, and saved Old Pasadena. They called us The Guardians of Old Pasadena, the people who managed to turn a desolate slum into one of the most popular downtown areas in Southern California in less than thirty years. As past chairs of the Old Pasadena Management District, Suzanne and I were proud to be a part of it.
Rebuilding was not an easy task, and things often got testy. In fact, all of us being honored had often disagreed with Pasadena Heritage, sometimes strenuously, over how much development was too much, and how much control property owners had over their properties. However, as one of the honorees, my friend and mentor, Jim Plotkin pointed out, “We never fought each other. No matter how much we might have disagreed, we always fought on the same side for the same vision: a vital, restored, reinvigorated Old Pasadena.”
It was a fight we nearly lost even before we ever began. As Donald Shoup and Douglas Kolozsvari wrote in “The High Cost of Free Parking,” Old Pasadena had turned into a classic skid row, “known mainly for its pawn shops, porn theaters, and tattoo parlors.”

From online archives of Old Pasadena

The City’s solution was draconian, tear it down and start anew… according to 1970’s standards.

From “The High Cost of Free Parking,” Donald Shoup and Douglas Kolozsvari

The Arroyo Group and some helpful friends at the City Council joined Pasadena Heritage to fight long and hard to bring that destructive effort to a stop, and they succeeded. But even after they’d won, and wrecking balls were safely stowed away, someone had to step up and physically build the vision they’d had. That’s when the property and building owners, developers and builders stepped up to restore the crumbling facades that had fallen into such sad disrepair. Their contribution was represented by Jim Plotkin, but also included Gene and Marilyn Buchanan, Francine Tolkin, John Wilson, Danny Mellinkoff and many others. Once the restoration of the faded architecture began to return to it’s former glory, there came the daunting task to make Old Pasadena profitable again.
A number of Old Pasadena business development organizations were formed to coordinate this Herculean effort, including today’s Old Pasadena Management District (OPMD). At first we met in the refurbished Chamber of Commerce building at Arroyo and Colorado, because there was no place for Old Pasadena advocates to meet.  Of course, at the time, there wasn't really an Old Pasadena. But there was Bruce Ackerman, President of the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce. He not only let us meet there, he acted as referee when this contentious band he had invited in every month would ... disagree. Heatedly. Repeatedly. Somehow, he took our passion and turned it into action.
Within ten years, reconstruction was accompanied by revitalization. Events were organized to introduce new visitors to this brand new Old Pasadena. A movie theater was built to reinvigorate nightlife. A slumlord got kicked out of his building, and the last island of decay within our 22 blocks, was rebuilt. And in an epiphany of counter intuition, a parking plan was devised to bring more customers into the district, raise money for the district and encourage employees to park off of the main business streets to make room for shoppers. The secret? Parking meters. In combination with 90-minute free parking in parking structures, more visitors stopped, shopped, ate and played than ever before. The solution was so successful, it fills the pages of “The High Cost of Free Parking,” by Donald Shoup and Douglas Kolozsvari.
Five years ago, OPMD took over management of the parking structures from the City. We cleaned them up, made them safer, kept the prices low and offered 90-minutes free parking. In our first full year, we took the annual earnings from $5000 a year to $500,000 – yes, 100 times better. Last year, at the height of the worst recession in 60 years, we made $1.7 million. Our lots were so successful, some in the City tried to take them back. Instead, we are slated to take over two more structures. In Steve Mulheim's two minutes at the dinner, he didn't have time to mention that.
Today, as the economy rocks and reels, the same Old Pasadena that was born in adversity, continues to thrive. But now, OPMD can support our developers, building owners, merchants, and restaurants with a level of marketing that vastly exceeds our miniscule budget. Our events have grown so popular that sponsors stand in line to support them. Our web site gives all of our stakeholders their own unique page or provides links to their own sites. Our social media programs have proven so popular that now even referral sites like Yelp have joined our pool of sponsors whenever we hold an event.

OPMD Website supports our merchants and directs our visitors.

We thank Pasadena Heritage Society Executive Director Sue Mossman for a very special evening. And in turn, we thank them, and each and every one of our predecessors for helping to take these 22 blocks from the brink of obliteration to where it is today. Thank you for honoring us. Thank you for being a part of us. We look forward to working together for our future.

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.

Phil Sands – Yo! You wanna go diggin' in MY brain?

To call Phil Sands a character would elevate the definition of that word to dizzying heights. He's a force of nature. But when he was hit with an excruciating and debilitating headache, he bowed to his wife's wishes and got some serious imaging studies done, a CT scan, MRI and finally an angiogram. The doctors discovered an eight mm basilar tip aneurysm that not only caused his headache, but was in imminent danger of a crippling or deadly rupture. Suddenly, the worst headache of his life was the least of his problems.



But Phil was Brooklyn born and bred, and too hard headed to take anything or anyone at face value. He did his homework, and searched all over his adopted home town of Los Angeles to find the right place and the right people to make this problem go away for good. He checked out numerous hospitals. He grilled the doctors. He grilled the neurosurgeons, neuroradiologists, and their staffs. Only after he was completely satisfied that he had found the right place, did he decide to proceed.
Arun P. Amar M.D., from the USC Keck School of Medicine, explains how he and his Neurosurgical/neuroradiological team - Arun Amar, M.D., William Mack, M.D., and Medical Director, Donald Larsen, M.D., treated him using stenting and coil embolization. For all his bravado, Phil recognizes how close he was to disaster, and how much he owes to his wife, his family and friends and the doctor's and staff who became some of his biggest fans.
This is just one of thirteen videos: 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.

Stella Kuymjian, A Stolen Life, Restored

Stella Kuyumjian was a teenager when her brain short circuited sending her into waves of debilitating, paralyzing seizures. They call it "status epilepticus," a state of persistant seizure that can last up to an hour. It is always life threatening, but for Stella, it was the only life she knew for eleven years.



After 11 years of massive seizures, and countless rounds of frustrating, failed treatments, Stella was finally taken to USC Keck School of Medicine's Neurosurgical Unit. At USC, she was diagnosed by neurologist Christianne Heck, M.D., and her team of epileptologists as a candidate for surgical solution, a temporal lobectomy to correct her intractable grand mal seizures.
However her particular form of epilepsy would not yield easily. Her neurosurgeon, Charles Liu, M.D., was unable to pinpoint the site of the temporal scarring. In fact the epidermal electrodes were unable to even identify which side of the brain was causing the seizures. Before Dr. Liu could proceed, he first had to pin point the location using cranial sub dural electrodes, placed on the surface of the brain itself and construct a composite neuro navigation map of her temporal lobe.
Now after 11 years of persistent, life threatening grand mal seizures, Stella is seizure free. Finally she can begin to tell her story of this living nightmare. Doctors Keck and Liu, USC Keck School of Medicine, explain the dizzying array of complications surrounding her condition and the exacting procedures necessary to find her cure.
This is just one of thirteen videos: 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.