“Peggy, just think about it deeply. Then forget it, and an idea will jump up in your face.” – Don Draper

There is no formula for creativity. In fact, those times when the job requires a particularly inspired idea are fairly terrifying, because who knows if it will come? You just hope that it does come, before your deadline, preferably, and that you have a pen or a MacBook Pro handy when it does.

Of course, we know there are things one can do to spirit the muse along. Jonah Lehrer seems to have narrowed the process down to a few steps. He doesn’t offer a magic elixir. It will still require some legwork on your part. But what he describes in his recently released book, Imagine: How Creativity Works (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, March 2012), is as close a proximation of an “idea formula” as I’ve come across.

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But first let’s talk about sandpaper. Sandpaper figures prominently into the story Lehrer tells. It begins in 1925 with Dick Drew, a sandpaper salesman working for the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company. On sales calls, Drew regularly saw auto body workers struggling with two-tone paint jobs. They would paint the car one color, then glue pieces of paper over that coat to form a stencil that allowed them to paint a shape – like a racing stripe – with a second color. But the glue was so strong that it would damage the first coat. Drew thought he had a solution. The sandpaper he sold was sheets of sturdy paper coated on one side with an adhesive and then an abrasive substance. If he just removed the abrasive, he’d be able to offer the auto workers ready-made adhesive sheets that would solve their painting problem and make their work easier.

But for a good while he failed. He couldn’t figure out a way to store and distribute the sheets of sticky paper. They’d stick together and become unmanageable. He obsessed about it, staying late at work testing out different formulas. He just did not have the solution. Then a second later, he did. Drew’s insight came out of nowhere: the adhesive could be applied to a thin strip of paper that would then be rolled up, allowing the auto body workers to tear off pieces as needed. He called it masking tape. Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company did very well with it.

Fast-forward about 50 years. Another engineer at the company – now called 3M – was attending a Tech Forum, an annual event designed to foster sharing of knowledge among employees. Arthur Fry, who worked in the company’s paper-products division, was attending a presentation by Spencer Silver, an adhesives engineer who had developed a glue that was so weak it could barely hold two pieces of paper together. Silver was hoping one of the engineers in attendance could imagine a use for it. None of them could, Fry included. Most dismissed it – a glue that isn’t very sticky – as a useless product.

Later that week, Fry was preparing for his weekly church choir duties, putting little strips of paper in his hymnal to mark the songs he’d be singing. As routinely happened, at some point between when he marked the pages and when he arrived at church for Sunday service, the little strips of paper fell out of the hymnal, causing him to have to search frantically for the right pages during the service. Fry daydreamed during that day’s sermon, as it was a particularly boring one. His mind floated to bookmarks, and it hit him. Would an application of Silver’s glue make for the perfect bookmark? One that would never fall out but could be easily removed without damaging pages?

After several months of trial and error, Fry had a prototype. He produced a small number of his perfect bookmarks and handed them out. People liked them enough, but they never asked him for another. They would simply transfer the first one from their current book to the next. It didn’t seem commercially viable to produce an inexpensive thing that people would never replace.

But soon enough Fry would have another idea. He was reading a report at work and had a question about a specific paragraph. Instead of writing directly on the page of the report, he wrote on a small square of his bookmark material and stuck it beside the appropriate paragraph. Fry sent the report to his boss, who caught on, cutting a square from his own bookmark and responding to Fry’s question in kind. A discovery had been made. Fry distributed squares of the material around the 3M offices and encouraged his colleagues to write on them. Before long, the walls at 3M were papered with what would later be named Post-It notes.

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Three steps to creative success!

At the heart of the 3M story is a formula for creative success that can be applied neatly to our industry. I should note that Lehrer’s book covers a variety of subjects – the 3M story is one chapter – and is worth reading in its entirety.

(I should further note that Lehrer doesn’t present his information as a formula or espouse a step-by-step process. I’ve constructed this gaudy “3 Steps to Creative Success!” thing because I’m a shameless huckster.)

Step 1: Immerse Yourself

This one is a no-brainer. You can’t have meaningful insight without being thoroughly educated on your subject matter. Drew likely would not have had his masking tape breakthrough had he not immersed himself so deeply in researching and thinking about the problem and the solution.

The lesson for advertising is the same. Know everything there is to know about the product or service you’re marketing. Dive into the research. Get to know your target consumer, what they want and the way they think.

Step 2: Collaborate

I agree in spirit with F. Scott Fitzgerald who said, “No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.” But F. Scott didn’t work in advertising. Anyone who has participated in a group concepting session knows the value of collaboration with colleagues. New concepts are born as people bounce ideas off one another, and each participant imbues the process with his or her own experience, knowledge and sensibility. And we know that if Silver’s weak glue hadn’t found its way to Fry’s paper, I wouldn’t be staring at a wall full of sticky notes right now.

Step 3: Take a Walk

After the research and study and conferring and focused concentration, the insight you hope for may still elude you if you don’t step away and, for crying out loud, relax. There’s a reason, Lehrer says, why Fry had his insight during a particularly boring church sermon, and it wasn’t divine intervention. Lehrer cites research conducted by Joydeep Bhattacharya, a Goldsmiths, University of London psychologist, who demonstrated a correlation between moments of insight and heightened alpha wave activity in the brain’s right hemisphere. And that kind of alpha wave activity only occurs when the mind is in a relaxed state.

Lehrer writes: “Are you stuck on a challenge that seems impossible? Lie down on a couch by a sunny window. Daydream. Play a game of pinball.”

Daydream. But not with abandon. Lehrer says the people who benefit from the creative advantages of daydreaming are those who daydream with a bit of focus. You have to maintain enough awareness to identify, and make a note (mental or otherwise) of the noteworthy ideas that drift in on the cerebral breezes.

For local and regional advertisers, political advertising presents a number of challenges. Political candidates are well funded, determined and aided by a number of FCC rules and policies. These rules provide political advertisers with guaranteed space and time on media outlets at the lowest rates possible, resulting in the potential preemption of regular commercial advertisers’ media schedules.

This year, the media landscape will be inundated with political advertising due to changes in legislation and the high number of elections occurring across the country. Analysts have estimated overall political advertising spending for 2012 will be at record levels, projecting figures as high as $4.9 billion with an estimated $3.2 billion of that placed on broadcast television. This estimate represents a 17 percent increase over the 2008 election year advertising spending.

There is no way to completely avoid political advertising and its negative impact on the efforts of regular commercial advertisers, but that doesn’t mean media buyers placing non-political advertising can just give up.

Do your homework

Media teams can plan intelligently, keep abreast of current market conditions and place media schedules as far in advance as possible. Added value, such as bonus weight, which has become a standard inclusion in television media buys, must be forgiven during political seasons and forgotten during political windows (the 45 days before primaries and the 60 days before a general election). Many stations simply refuse to run bonus weight during political windows. If stations allow bonus for regular commercial clients, stations would have to allow the same bonus for all political clients. Any unsold or remnant inventory that stations might have is generally reserved for replacing preempted spots.

Evaluate allocation of dayparts

Media planners can consider changes in television daypart mixes to avoid competing with political advertisers for space and time. Less emphasis on News dayparts, especially Late News would be a smart choice to avoid political competition and likely preemptions. A daypart like Primetime—a highly desirable daypart for commercial clients—is still a viable option. However, when planning for budgets, the cost per points given must take the glut of political advertising into consideration. In most markets, the CPPs will rise between 5 percent to 30 percent, depending on how inundated the market is with political dollars. Clients can expect to pay more for their advertising schedules during political windows.

Consider changing the media mix

Finally, considerations to changes in media mix during political windows can aid in running cleaner media schedules. As broadcast television is the most heavily impacted medium, clients may consider running more advertising on cable (foregoing news networks), radio (music formats in lieu of news/talk), online and print. The smartest thing commercial advertisers can do during this high spending political year is to be prepared. Broadcast television, especially News dayparts and Primetime, will be priced at a premium, political windows will produce a drop in available inventory and added value will not be an option or will be extremely limited.

By taking all of this into consideration and working in tandem with the media team, commercial clients will still be able to create strategic media plans and effective advertising campaigns, despite the onslaught of political advertising. The key is to plan realistically—maintain open, honest relationships with media partners and perform regular maintenance on media buys to ensure they maintain the integrity and level of impressions they are intended to deliver.

The New Aesthetic is a concept that has only recently been acknowledged in a real way. It’s a complicated idea that requires an understanding of art, culture and sociology to truly appreciate the impact of the New Aesthetic — as does aesthetics in general. I’m going to try and keep this short.

Aesthetics, aside from being a fun word to say at dinner parties after a couple glasses of wine, is a philosophical concept fundamentally concerned with defining our understanding of beauty. It typically asks questions like, “What is beauty? Why is something perceived as beautiful? And why does this appreciation of beauty change throughout history and across cultures?” It even dates back to guys in robes like Plato and Socrates.

Speaking of guys in robes, the ancient aesthetics, especially that of the Greeks, had an affinity for the human form and the depiction of poise, musculature and anatomically correct proportions (read: naked statues). Islamic aesthetics found inspiration in architecture, calligraphy and more abstract artistic representations. Later Christian aesthetics reflected increasingly religious overtones and eventually favored “enlightenment” during the Renaissance. In short, aesthetics changes with the times.

In the U.S., we can see how ideas about aesthetics changed with the decades. The aesthetic during the World Wars was one of strong men and women (think of the propaganda posters). The aesthetic during the Space Race was one of rounded edges and polished steel, reminiscent of rockets (think of the propaganda posters). The ‘60s aesthetic was characterized by swirling bright colors and exaggerated images (think of the propaganda posters). In short, an era’s aesthetic was a reflection of our culture and vice versa (and was, not surprisingly, reflected in propaganda posters).

Finally, we reach the New Aesthetic, which is one that has fundamentally changed our way of seeing the world. Instead of viewing the world through our own eyes, we’ve now taken to viewing the world through the unblinking eyes of the omnipresent computer. Closed Circuit TV cameras, little lenses on our phones and even that great eye-in-the-sky, the satellite, are all used to view our brave new world. Additionally, the New Aesthetic incorporates mobile games, the new Twitter language, clever WiFi network names to communicate with annoying neighbors and any number of other digital influences in our lives.

Here are a few examples:

For the first time, our aesthetic has shifted from a human-centered view of our reality (and, subsequently, our view of beauty) to a reality viewed through silicon.

The New Aesthetic — now being recognized in its recent coverage by Wired magazine and a SXSWi session in March of this year — will affect how people in the second decade of the 21^st century react to art, design and beauty.

I’ve done my best to explain the New Aesthetic but, much like the Matrix, you have to see it for yourself. Check out The New Aesthetic on Tumblr (UPDATE: This Tumblr has been closed and the owners are moving the site to www.new-aesthetic.com which is currently not yet live), or you can check out these links:

Other examples of the New Aesthetic:

Since it started in 1999, the Coachella Music Festival has become a world-class event, creating legions of fans and a brand that extends way beyond its desert confines. Not only have the music and production values always been top-notch, but Coachella is also an excellent example of how brands can use social media to generate awareness and drive sales. Year after year, Coachella’s innovative social media tactics have helped the festival sell out of tickets.

Consumers have changed more in the past 13 years than Coachella has. In fact, in 1999, only a third of Americans had a cell phone and none of the phones were smart phones. Cell phone reception was limited in the desert, and text messaging hadn’t hit the mainstream.

This year, AT&T alone trucked in four temporary cell sites to service its customers’ needs. At the end of the first weekend, fans had sent more than 62 million texts on AT&T’s network. In 1999, few fans would have emailed photos of the festival to friends or discussed Coachella in AOL’s infamous chat rooms. Today, fans can share images and video via Facebook, Twitter and Instagram with a click or swipe. Because these platforms have simplified the sharing process, fans are more willing to share their experiences. At concerts today, 32% of attendees are use their phones to update their status and 53% use their smart phone as their primary camera.

Using social media to drive sales

Two years ago, the festival allowed each band to give away tickets via Twitter and Facebook. The brand generated millions of free, targeted impressions and sold out in record time. Last year was the first time Coachella streamed the entire event on YouTube, which exposed the brand to millions of people who couldn’t attend. This year, Coachella was able to add another weekend to the festival, and both weekends sold out within hours.

Using fans to create content

Coachella is on all requisite social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, etc.), but it lets its artists and fans provide most of its social content. It has also been smart about creating a couple of buzz-worthy events each year to light up the social sphere—helping Coachella’s fans to help Coachella. This year’s Tupac hologram is a good example; the spectacle generated millions of mentions.

Using multichannel marketing to generate excitement

Take a look at Gotye’s performance of “Somebody That I Used to Know.” The night before Gotye performed it at Coachella, he sang it on SNL. That same week it was covered on Glee. Before he performed it Sunday night, several DJs remixed his song in Coachella’s dance tents. By the time he hit the stage, fans packed his tent and used their cell phones to record the sing-along event of the festival.

With all that media exposure, “Somebody That I Used to Know” shot to number one the next week, and Gotye sold more digital singles in a single week than any other solo artist before him and created a cultural moment that will be remembered by those who saw him perform it live and on YouTube.

So what can brands without access to the Tupac hologram and laser shows learn from this? With all that content being created and consumed instantaneously via mobile devices, it appears that consumers are as concerned with recording and sharing content as they are with the experiences themselves. They are using the technology to enhance their experience by connecting with friends and then reliving the experiences digitally. Brands that facilitate this sharing will be rewarded.

If you don’t have a wealth of digital assets, that’s okay—your fans will produce it. You just need to give them guidance and then let them do the heavy lifting. With a little help, they will produce more content (videos, images, etc.) than most brands can afford to. Continue providing the best products and service possible, and you will ensure that they want to keep talking about you. And every now and then, give them a little extra something to talk about, leveraging your sponsorships and traditional media partners when needed.

User experience designers (UX designers) from across the U.S. are convening in New Orleans to construct models to address two big problems facing the New Orleans music community: adapting its unique artistic mix to the digital economy and ensuring support for musicians who fall on hard times.

The UX for Good team is comprised of: Rob Chappell, VP, Interactive Director at Peter Mayer, Carolyn Chandler – Director of UX at Manifest Digital, Bill DeRouchey – UX Consultant, Brynn Evans – UX Designer for Google+, Ryan Freitas – Co-Founder of about.me, Lee-Sean Huang – Design Strategist at Purpose, John Kenny – Strategic Planning Director at Draftfcb, Jason Kunesh – UX Director for Obama for America, Jodi Leo – Director of UX at Bolt Peters, Tanarra Schneider – Associate UX Director at Manifest Digital, Mark Trammell – Design Researcher at Twitter, Brian Winters – Associate UX Director for Manifest Digital and Mark Wills – Interaction Designer at Hattery.

UX for Good was founded by Jeff Leitner, Founder of Insight Labs and Jason Ulaszek, UX Director at Manifest Digital.

“With each UX for Good event, we’re evolving directly based on what we learn from our participants, partners and most importantly, supporting non-profits. When we gather in May in New Orleans, we’ll continue that evolution, working with the best UX designers in the field today, a non-profit intimately familiar with the challenges musicians face and a city rich with heritage and pride. We’re bound to spark new ideas and solutions using our UX talent, and yet, that doesn’t shock me. I’ve always known UX designers to be bigger than a wireframe,” said Ulaszek.

Partnering with The Grammys and MusiCares, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative, the UX designers’ unique skills and perspective will be applied to the greater good – making sure music remains an abundant and treasured resource in our host city.

For more information visit: http://www.ux4good.com

From George: Insights on Innovation

Innovation is a word that gets tossed around frequently in the advertising industry. It’s one of those things that sounds great, but in reality, more people talk innovation than actually create innovative work.

We wanted to get a better understanding of what goes into creating a truly groundbreaking solution and learn about the problems innovators are currently focused on solving. At the recent PSFK conference, we listened to renowned writers, entrepreneurs, designers and technologists speak about their projects. We noticed that the majority of innovation involves big data, natural interface design and the initiative of individual designers.

Leveraging Big Data

A lot of statistics popped up at the conference about how much information is currently being created. One of the most memorable was that there was more information generated in 2011 than in the history of the world. The information comes from all kinds of connected devices, social networks and institutions. This glut of data provides a huge opportunity for those who can figure out how to aggregate, analyze and apply it in a useful way.

Robert Kirkpatrick, the Director of the United Nations’ Global Pulse initiative, discussed how his team is using all the information to get a real-time understanding of crisis situations in vulnerable communities around the world. By aggregating and analyzing the data from the communities, the UN is able to quickly detect a crisis and deliver the appropriate aid. By analyzing the data even further, they may even predict a crisis before it happens.

Brett Martin talked about his mobile application, Sonar. Sonar works by using your social data from Twitter, Foursquare and Facebook to discover the hidden connections you have with people close by. The application rates the 15-20 most relevant people around you and then plots them on a map for you.

Grant McCracken, anthropologist and author, pointed out, that back in 1962, a man named Wilfred Winkenbach found a creative way to use all of the free and seemingly useless data generated by the NFL. He created the first-ever fantasy football game while having drinks with some friends in a New York City hotel. Fantasy football has since grown into a $3.5 billion industry.

Natural Interface

The way we interact with technology is changing dramatically. We continue to move further from the desktop computer as the digital world blends more seamlessly into our everyday lives. The standard conventions of graphic user interface are starting to be supplemented. Products like Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Kinect and Google’s Project Glass are just the beginners in a new field in interface design called natural interface.

Microsoft’s Steve Clayton believes everything will have a digital interface in the future. The information we need could be communicated to us on any surface through a mixture of audio and gesture controls. He displayed a demo of the Magic Window, an interactive screen that can see what’s in front of it. He also showed a video of a wearable projector that can turn any surface into a digital display.

One of the most interesting projects he shared was a project called IllumiShare. IllumiShare allows remote people to share physical or digital objects on any surface. It looks pretty simple, but then you realize that two people are working together on something without a screen or a controller.

Self-initiated Projects

Designers typically spend most of their time working for clients. However, they sometimes run into problems that they feel compelled to solve on their own time. A few designers spoke about their projects and their motivation.

Jonathan Harris was troubled by a few trends he noticed emerging online: the dramatic decline in the amount of self-expression—a shift towards curation of content versus creation of content, and in general, a shortening of all content shared.

In response to these trends, Harris created Cowbird, an online community for storytellers who want to create and share richer, more engaging content. The site acts as a repository for what he calls teachable moments—those moments in life when we learn something that has a profound effect on who we are.

Tina Roth-Eisenberg got tired of her daughter wearing poorly designed temporary tattoos. She knew she could create better ones. She emailed a number of designer friends, created a website and launched Tattly, a site with beautifully designed temporary tattoos.

Abe Burmeister loved biking to work. Unfortunately, no one made pants that were designed to withstand the rigors of cycling yet looked good enough to wear to work. He decided to make his own pants and founded a clothing company, Outlier. He launched a website that had an image of his pants and a PayPal Buy Now Button. The first pair of pants he released sold so quickly he was forced to take down his site while he figured out how to fulfill all the orders.

Being around all the brilliant people at PSFK kind of made us think, for just a second, that innovation is easy. It’s not. It requires a huge amount of creativity, drive and luck to be able to create something that is both groundbreaking and popular. We look forward to seeing what kinds of interesting products are created using big data and natural interfaces. Who knows — we might even take a shot at solving some challenging problems on our own.

From Summer: Sharing Is Becoming a Natural Behavior

The recent one-day PSFK conference, “where disparate ideas can come together in new ways to fuel work that changes the world for the better, over-delivered on inspiration and proved to be the perfect intermission from the daily nine-to-five routine.

Though the conference’s speakers presented on a variety of topics, sharing emerged as a recurring theme linking their presentations. Whether it was sharing data to make the world a better place or sharing a teachable moment, it became apparent that sharing is becoming a natural behavior.

Three subthemes support this concept.

1.Curation.

Our digital lives encourage us to constantly produce data. We take this data, decipher it and make lists. We identify ourselves by these lists, and they become a representation of who we are. And, we have great flexibility with these lists—as we curate data and create online personas, we have the ability to create our self-identities in different ways. We have the opportunity to be something/someone that isn’t truly us.

2. Creation.

Jason Silva, in his presentation “The Creating and Sharing of Awe,” proposed that creation is a lonely experience. At first thought, it seemed a bit odd, but after further explanation, he made perfect sense. A) it only happens in our head and B) since no one can read our mind, it is solely up to us to take our inner thoughts and creative ideas and make them real and comprehensible.

Even if creation is viewed as a solitary process, human interaction is practically unavoidable. Any type of collaboration (or interaction), whether physical or digital, can spark creativity. This explains why much creation of happens with others. Through our experiences, interactions and collaborations with others, we can become inspired and cross boundaries that we otherwise wouldn’t have had the opportunity to cross.

3. Sharing data to make the world a better place.

By transforming digital services into an array of censor networks, we can provide help to people during — and possibly even before — a crisis or disaster. We have the ability to pull out real-time data faster to provide immediate solutions. As Robert Kirkpatrick from United Nations Global Pulse described, we live in a hyper-connected age with interconnected markets. Shock can ripple around the world. The true effects of global shock become evident years later through stats and data. When needs within a society change, so do its digital patterns.

As technology becomes seamlessly integrated into our daily lives, sharing is becoming a natural way of behavior. We have constant access to data. Any and everything we own is shared for mass consumption. We are constantly creating and curating data that can anticipate our needs. Technology makes it easy to share and we want to reap the benefits that go with it.

Hall’s Reports provides print media planners with valuable insights into the publications they are reviewing and considering for purchase. For example, advertising clutter can be assessed through current and historically trended Advertising/Editorial Ratio runs. Or, it can be used as an additional way of determining a book’s editorial relevance via numerous reports indicating the number of pages and percentage of total ads in a specific advertising category.

Among the other syndicated research the agency currently subscribes to are MRI, Ipsos Mendelsohn, comScore, The Media Audit and Nielsen AdViews.

Photos by Paulina Nguyen, Associate Interactive Designer

Many of the other artists working the bead dog sculptures were simply painting the forms, but not really using the sculpture itself to transform it into something different. So, we thought about how we could take the form of the sculpture, which is set, and use it to our advantage to create something uniquely New Orleans. What better way to use a big sculpture of spheres than to form it into a New Orleans snowball?

We completely changed the original sculpture by cutting off the feet of the bead dog and using buckets to create the styrofoam cups that snowballs come in. Then, we added a textured base to mimic crushed ice. Finally, we painted it a bold strawberry flavor color, with some other flavor colors as accents, and added a straw.

You can look for Snowball around our Camp Street office, and he may even make an appearance at some of your favorite snowball stands this summer.

We won gold ADDYs for Louisiana Department of Culture, Recreation & Tourism’s TV campaign, Sazarac’s Gran Gala mobile site, a Zatarain’s newspaper campaign and “As Seen on Okra” newspaper ad, and for our own 4^th of July poster. Additionally, we were proud to take home seven silver ADDYs for work done for Louisiana Department of Culture, Recreation & Tourism, Reily Foods’ French Market Coffee, New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corporation and the agency.

Some of the work will advance to the national competition. Those awards will be announced in Austin, Texas, in June.

“We are always looking for nice people, who are smart, to become part of our team. These new hires continue that policy,” said Mark A. Mayer, agency president.

Ashley Aarons has been hired as an Account Executive on the CenturyLink account. Ashley had been working for University Interscholastic League in Austin, Texas, one of the state’s governing bodies for academic, athletic and music events. Before that, Ashley worked at TracyLocke in Dallas. She earned bachelor’s degrees in advertising and public relations from the University of Texas.

Andrew Bovine has been hired as a Junior Account Executive on the CenturyLink account. Andrew, a native of Nashville, came from Thrive Marketing Group, where he helped managed lead generation, email and search campaigns. He earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration, with a concentration in marketing, from Spring Hill College.

Kelly Bricker has been hired as Accounts Payable Coordinator. Kelly, a native of New York City, has been working in the accounting field for 13 years. She spent the past two years working for an art distribution company in New Orleans as an accounts payable administrator. She majored in business with a minor in accounting at Central Arizona College.

Kasi Dickson has been hired as a Project Manager. Kasi comes from Chicago, where she worked for several advertising firms, most recently as a senior estimator/project manager at AbelsonTaylor, handling both digital and traditional media projects. She earned a bachelor’s degree in accounting with a concentration in marketing from Tulane University.

Lisa McKinley has been hired as a Graphic Designer. Lisa was most recently a graphic design intern at Zehno Cross Media Communications in New Orleans. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in graphic design from Loyola University.

Justin Villegas has been hired as a Senior Account Executive. Justin was most recently with tasc Performance in Metairie, where he served as director of marketing. Before that, he was a direct response associate for the National Federation of Independent Business. Justin, a native of Lawrenceville, Ga., earned a bachelor’s in English literature from the University of Virginia and a master’s degree in marketing and strategic management from Tulane University.

Beth Ann Williamson has been hired as a Junior Account Executive. Beth Ann, a native of Seminary, Miss., previously worked as an account services intern at SicolaMartin in Austin, Texas. She earned a bachelor’s degree in marketing from the University of Southern Mississippi and a master’s degree in advertising from the University of Texas.