The Not-So-Terrible Twos for SOVRN Creative

Our friends over at SOVRN Creative celebrated their second anniversary recently, and shared a few highlights from the past two years, including:

  • Joe has learned more about trash and recycling, water conservation, wastewater management, and nursing than he ever thought he would. Unless you want to incur his wrath, don’t throw away anything that can be recycled. And unless you’ve got a spare hour, don’t mention anything about wastewater or Steven Seagal.
  • For our work in 2009, we earned a Silver Addy and a Gold Rockie for Rapture in Six Cantos, Silver Rockies for both the Parallels video and the Wastewater 2020 video, an Impact Excellence Award for Curb It, and a bunch of Citations for Excellence. Pretty cool, especially since we submitted 5 pieces and received 10 awards!
  • For our annual board meeting, we took a fishing trip. It got pretty dicey at moments, especially since Joe out-caught Philip, the accomplished fisherman. It made it worse that Joe was borrowing Philip’s equipment and hadn’t been fishing for over 20 years. Brian managed to catch quite a few silver Natty Lights.

Whether you want to call it a birthday, an anniversary, or just a milestone — congratulations are in order to Brian, Joe and Philip for all the success they’ve had so far, and what we’re sure will be much more still to come.

They’re in good company too, joining the likes of Mitchell + Palmer and Red Sky Public Relations, who also celebrated their second years in business this spring.

Setting Aside Humble and Understated…

…for the moment at least.

Because this is the point at which I get to say that the Idaho Ad Agencies blog is now the award-winning Idaho Ad Agencies blog.

Bear with me – the boasting will be over soon.

The Idaho Ad Agencies blog recently received an Excellence award at Capital City Communicator’s inaugural IMPACT Awards.  It was one of 31 winners in 15 categories at the event, which also included awards to our friends at Rizen Creative, Red Sky Public Relations, FusionSet, Murphy Media Services, SOVRN Creative and many more.

So with that little bit of bragging out of the way, we offer a hearty congratulations to all of this year’s winners.

We now return you to your regularly-scheduled programming already in progress.

Party Hats and All

Over the weekend, the Idaho Ad Agencies blog turned four-years-old.  What started out as a ‘just because I can’ project has grown into so much more.

Thank you to everyone who reads, comments, and contributes to the site in one way or another.  You’ve helped make it what it is today.

In Memory: John Givens

The Idaho advertising community lost one of it’s founders with the passing on John Givens on Monday, February 1st, 2010.

Not familiar with the name?  Unfortunately, neither was I until last week.

John Givens was a third-generation Boisean, a graduate of Boise High School and after service in the United States Naval Air Corp during World War II, a student at the Boise Junior College and the University of Idaho, among others.

John began his career in advertising in 1947, and in 1952 he founded Givens-Davies Advertising, Inc. with Kenneth R. Davies.  He helped grow the agency to become one of the largest and most powerful in Idaho, and a major player in the Pacific Northwest.  Note: Givens-Davies would later go on to become Davies-Rourke, and in its current form is known as DaviesMoore.

Later, he went on to form John Givens Advertising, Inc., and in 1988 was awarded the Silver Medal from the Boise Advertising Federation.  John retired from advertising in 1987.

Among his many accomplishments, John was instrumental in coordinating public relations and fundraising efforts for the Morrison Center for the Performing Arts, and creating the Idaho Governor’s Cup golf tournament scholarship fundraiser.

John is survived by five children, two grandchildren, three great-grandchildren and two step-grandchildren.

A memorial service was held on Saturday, February 6th.

While I never had the chance to meet John Givens, I would like to offer a belated ‘thank you’ to him on behalf of the entire advertising and marketing community in Idaho for everything that he did over the years, and those that he helped guide and inspire.

A complete obituary is available here, if you’d like to read more.

Predictions and Trends

Its that time of year again.

The time when everyone and their dog, cat and goldfish makes their predictions about what the biggest trends will be in the coming year.  And, like every year, its a shot in the dark.  Sometimes those predictions are right, sometimes they’re horribly wrong.

That being said, this year I say we crowdsource the whole prediction thing.  I’d like to know what you, dear readers, think will be the big trends in 2010, and any predictions you’d like to make.

Comment away.