Since its establishment in 1976, Virginia Tire & Auto, a full-service, family-owned auto repair shop, has continued to expand throughout Northern Virginia. With more than 35 years of experience under the hood, Virginia Tire & Auto was in need of a branding tune-up.

A major goal was changing the brand’s perception in the marketplace to more accurately reflect their services—being all-inclusive and not just limited to tires—as their name suggests.

Virginia Tire & Auto sought HZDG’s (HZ) expertise in developing a high-impact, integrated marketing solution that would boost awareness, increase customer engagement, and establish the brand’s presence in the auto shop arena.

With a proven track record of outstanding customer service and a commitment to offering the best possible value, Virginia Tire & Auto was the ideal candidate for developing a strong, authentic brand with a fun, inviting personality.

The new brand features a friendly handshake symbol with the catchy, informative tagline, “All Your Car Needs,” emphasizing the company’s full range of services.

Illustrations inspired by service lights on a dashboard along with color photography, bold fonts, and bright colors reinforce the brand’s image while also portraying a professional look that stands out in the marketplace.

By using the versatile, all-encompassing tagline as the backbone of the brand’s voice, HZ moved seamlessly across mediums to form an integrated approach that would reach consumers at multiple touch points—including writing and designing print and interactive marketing and advertising materials, as well as revamping the store’s interior.

What do you get when you have a whole bunch of creatives working together? A whole bunch of crazy ideas. And, of course, lots of fun. But many of those “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” ideas never make it beyond that stage. That’s why, at HZ, we created a culture team dedicated to making things happen. We call it the Sync Tank. So far, it’s been a riot—and nobody has gotten hurt.

Work hard. Play hard.

Many agencies say they work hard and play hard. But all too often, this is relegated to a couple of happy hours or a completely excessive company holiday party. And while we still have those, we’ve added quite a lot of other events and occasions to our repertoire.

But let’s talk about how it all began. Like most things at HZ, it started with Karen. More specifically, her meeting Jenn Lim, the CEO of Delivering Happiness (of Zappos fame). We helped them with their brand. In turn, we took part in their Delivering Happiness at Work initiative. One of the things that came out of those workshops was the formation of the culture team.

What’s in a name?

Sync (work well together) + Think Tank = Sync Tank. (Hey, it works for us!)

So, who are we? Obviously, we all work at HZ. Other than that, we’re very different. But we all agree that where you work should be fun. It’s the place where you spend most of your day, so why not make it awesome!?

So, what do we do? A whole lot. We’ve kept up old HZ traditions, like our legendary Halloween contest,

paintball battles of epic proportions,

and the no-less-competitive bowling league.

We’ve also created new traditions, from a beer club,

to a poker night, to the Cereal de Mayo cereal buffet.

But it’s not all about fun and games. We’ve also tackled some work issues, from filling out time sheets to kitchen etiquette. Most were a raving success, some not so much, some are still works in progress.

Granted, we’re not the first to create a culture team. But we’ve made it our own. And it’s made a difference at HZ—one of the many reasons why people look forward to coming to work every day.

So, got any fun ideas? Send them our way.

The Art Directors Club of Metropolitan Washington (ADCMW) is a non-profit organization that aims to inform, inspire, and educate the nations’ creative community. To showcase the area’s top professionals, the club holds the Annual Show—a yearly competition to give recognition to the best print and interactive work. The Gold and Silver awards will be announced during the Gala Awards Ceremony on Saturday, June 8th at the Nclud space in Washington, DC.

Congrats to all participants—see you at the Gala!

Website: Culinary Research & Education Academy (CREA)

Social Media: Love is in the Air Social Campaign / Rockefeller Center

Social Media: Christmas at Rockefeller Center Social Campaign / Rockefeller Center

Self-Promotion: 1. HZDG Chocolate Gift   2. HZDG Culture Book / HZDG

Logo: Notch 8 Logo / The JBG Companies

Logo: Fort Totten Square Logo / The JBG Companies

This is just one example of how being proactive in providing a fun, interactive experience with tenants increases positive sentiment for an apartment complex online. Whether it’s via social media or a review site, seeing good reviews from happy customers can really be effective in validating the value of a business to any potential customer – especially in local search results!

Since some businesses aren’t always able to hold an event to naturally encourage feedback from their customers, we’ve compiled a list of tips to keep in mind to increase online reviews:

1 – Ask.

If you don’t ask, you will not receive. You should never miss an opportunity to ask for a review, so think about ways to point your customers to a review site, whether it’s online or offline. Google+Local, Yelp and Foursquare are the most popular, but there are other review sites that are just as effective like Best Of The Web and Hot Frog.

Inserting calls-to-action on your site where it isn’t out of context, or displaying social icons leading to your business’s listing on a review site are other ways of encouraging reviews organically.

2 – Incentivize.

While offering a reward to everyone who submits a review is usually a bad idea, one effective method of encouraging reviews would be to hold a monthly drawing for a prize to customers that leave a review, and subtly promote it via online and offline methods. Incentivizing your employees is also an effective way to make sure everyone is on the same page in getting reviews.

The only caveat to incentives is to be sure to space these promotions out strategically, so your business listing has a lower risk of being penalized by sites with strict policies on soliciting reviews, like Google+Local and Yelp. Seeing an influx of reviews within a small time span “flags” them as being solicited and may result in your reviews and listing being taken down.

3 – Leverage All Channels of Communication.

Using various methods of online and offline promotion increases the chances of someone submitting a review on your business listing.

Aside from utilizing social media and e-mail marketing (post-sale), you could hand out review cards letting reviewers know about your business listing or mention how to submit a review online in a newsletter. Creating a countertop POS (point-of-sale) display that includes a QR code directing your customers to one of your business listings for a review is effective as well.

Just be sure to avoid using your business’ computer to submit reviews, as most review sites are intuitive enough to see multiple reviews coming from the same IP address, which could negatively affect your listing.

4 – Respond to Reviews.

The key to soliciting reviews online is to accept the good and the bad that comes with it, and that includes negative reviews.

While most businesses only want positive reviews, a majority of reviews geared towards one bias can also dissuade visitors and be a “trigger” for removal for some of the stricter sites mentioned above.

There are many strategies for dealing with bad reviews, but no matter what tactic you use, always keep responses as consistent as possible, and don’t forget to thank a user for reviewing your business!

The Bozzuto Group, a privately held, integrated real estate services organization, is celebrating their 25th year in the business.

As a client of HZDG (HZ) for over seven years, Bozzuto is a trusted partner with whom HZ has the pleasure of designing and creating unique brand experiences for numerous communities.

HZ recently launched bozzuto25.com, a fully responsive website that illustrates the first 25 years at Bozzuto. An engaging, interactive timeline was built to showcase the organization’s major accomplishments over the years that helped shape the brand into what it is today. In addition, the website provides company news, community involvement, and opportunities for users to engage with Bozzuto.

HZ is proud to work with The Bozzuto Group, an organization that continues to grow and make a positive impact on the community.

First of all, we need to clarify some myths that have been floating around in the search marketing world, like those saying that search engine optimization (SEO) is better than PPC or vice versa, or that SEO and PPC are as different as day and night, and thus, couldn’t possibly co-exist in the same marketing plan for the purpose of fulfilling a similar goal.

I will admit SEO and PPC have their differences; however, they have just as many similarities. Also, what differences they do possess, do not make one better than the other – they actually make the two a perfect search couple. Sold yet? That’s ok, keep reading.

Let’s Start by Airing Out Their Dirty Laundry.

Most would agree PPC can be a pretty nifty marketing expense, especially if the industry you or your client is in is very competitive. I mean, you pay per click, and some of the keywords in a competitive industry, like email marketing, can cost up to $51 per click—and that’s just an average, not a max. SEO, on the other hand, is pretty much a free strategy, excluding minor costs for certain directory listings, and maybe the occasional link.

(Ok, maybe SEO isn’t free—you need to invest labor hours, through either staff or consultants. But if done right, the results stick, and you don’t have to keep paying for them.)

Additionally, many hold a reservation with PPC because they think, why waste money on a click for a paid ad ranking for keyword X when I already have an organic result ranking on page 1 of Google for keyword X? Hmmm, good question.

Let me ask you this: Is your organic result for keyword X, result 1 on page 1, or is it result 2, or maybe even result 7? If you don’t hold the top organic result, how can you be certain a searcher won’t find another result he/she likes better while trekking 10 miles through potential competitor territory, and be invited in by one of them for a cold beer and a warm meal before making it to your door?

That brings me to my next point. While SEO offers no guarantee your website or content will ever top page 1 of Google (and the likelihood is most dismal for local startups trying to rank for broad keywords, and businesses that have competitors with high authority sites, like Amazon and Entrepreneur), PPC ensures that you will rank, and usually in the top 3 paid results, that is, if you have a good quality score and play the bidding game right, but I will save that topic for another post.

Ranking naturally in organic takes time, and involves the diligent process of consistently creating highly-targeted, quality content, forging meaningful relationships with influential online figures, and building relevant backlinks to your site.

However, with PPC, you can rank in Google almost instantaneously for a keyword, and all you have to do is create a campaign in Google Adwords, pick and group your keywords, write an ad, set a budget and CPC (cost-per-click) bid, and voila, there your result is on Google.

Unlike SEO, PPC doesn’t really ever change. Sure, Google makes some minor policy tweaks and creates new features, but there are no algorithmic rules in the forms of Panda and Penguin, which are constantly changing, making the search engine visibility playing field a fickle game of Russian Roulette. By that, I mean, a white-hat link building tactic today can be deemed black-hat tomorrow.

These variables in SEO make optimizing content and testing keywords a delicate balancing act of strategy and considerations. If you have a “just enough to be dangerous” knowledge of SEO, one small maneuver could increase your ranking and click-through-rate (CTR), or send you flying down 10 flights of search results pages (SERPS).

PPC, on the other hand, not only provides quick feedback because of the ability for paid ads to instantly rank, but with paid search, you can optimize keywords and ad/landing page copy without fearing a penalty. How, you ask? Just write A and B versions of an ad or a landing page, and Google will automatically split the traffic it sends to each, allowing you to efficiently gage what really resonates with searchers.

If you are in a competitive industry, SEO doesn’t really excel at letting websites rank for their competitors’ keywords. Actually, the only way to do this well would be to create a lot of content around your competitors’ branded keyword phrases, and unless all this content is meant as a slander (which I wildly do NOT recommend), it is not worth it, because it only promotes your competition.

PPC, however, while it doesn’t allow for advertisers to use their competitors’ trademarks in their ad copy, it does permit advertisers to bid on, and rank for, all of their competitors’ branded terms.

Why PPC and SEO Are Like A Non-Tragic Romeo and Juliet

Now, before I go into the lovy-dovy scenarios about why SEO and PPC are a match meant to be, let me not discount the potential of stand-alone organic search strategies. In fact, SEO is an extremely vital component of a long-term marketing effort meant for achieving search endurance, that when executed wisely, can be very rewarding in its ability to confirm a company’s or website’s trustworthiness and industry expertise.

Additionally, unlike PPC, SEO can’t just be cut-off. SEO is an investment, that overtime, delivers loyalty. That means that after you have put in many a sleepless night to get all of your pages to rank on the first SERP, you can then just sit back and monitor to ensure that some stealthy competitor doesn’t try to sneak in your seat; it’s no longer a game of constant directory submissions, begging bloggers for links, etc. Although, staying on top of content creation is still a must.

With that said, though, another vital component of search endurance is first knowing and accepting that SEO alone cannot give you the best return on investment (ROI), and second, learning best how to implement a PPC strategy to supplement your SEO efforts—pick up the slack of organic search pitfalls.

I mentioned that PPC can be, or seem to be, a very costly solution for businesses with a small budget, but get this. One of PPC’s best bragging rights is that it rocks at lead generation and customer acquisition. This means if you are having trouble getting an ecommerce site or a page with a lead form on it to rank on the first SERP, a paid ad showing above all organic results, could be the way to go until that organic result starts rocking the SERPs.

Moreover, a Google sponsored study conducted by Enquiro, found that a searcher’s purchase intent increases by 8% when both a paid and organic ad show on the same page. Also, the video below illustrates that companies that use paid online advertising with SEO see an increase in in-store sales and a 15 to 1 return on ad dollars.

</im

Getting success hungry are you? The SEO-PPC combo sure does smell like a yummy way to increase sales and revenue, doesn’t it?

Combining SEO and PPC is a synergistic, not a cannibalistic, tactic. The Adwords Agency blog reported that when used together, PPC and SEO generate a CTR 66% more than that of SEO alone. In fact, a Bright Oak article notes that companies who use both PPC and SEO, and then dump PPC, will usually see a decline in organic traffic. Scowley, the author of the post, writes:

The presence of paid placement in search results as a complement to normal organic rankings is a major trust indicator. If two SERP text snippets both point the searcher to the same site, the ‘strength in numbers’ quality signal increases click-through, regardless of whether one of those is paid.

Making a duo of PPC and SEO gives businesses the opportunity to optimize their content, and in turn, their visibility. While it is difficult to test different versions of a landing page in SEO to figure out which visitors like, or convert, better on, PPC makes it easy to test not only landing pages, but meta tags, as well as keyword phrases.

Like I mentioned, a platform, like Google Adwords, will automatically split the impressions of an ad, or traffic to a landing page. Why not, then, test an ad with two headline or description variances in paid search, and then replace your current meta title and meta description for an organic page with the winning headline and body text from your paid search test?

And why not conduct a similar paid search test to find a landing page with winning content that you can replace a poor-converting organic page with? Additionally, since PPC ads are pretty much guaranteed to rank for keywords, why not test to see whether long-tailed or short-tailed, branded or product, etc. keywords will give you the highest CTR and ROI?

A final reason why SEO and PPC make a fine pair is because together, they dominate more search real estate, especially when it comes to competitors’ turf. What is better than owning every result on page 1 of Google for your branded keywords? Owning land at the top of the hill on the first page of results for your competitors’ branded keywords, too!

With strategic SEO, you can own all organic results for your branded keywords, but the only way to have visibility when searchers are looking for your competitors is to bid on their keywords in paid search. The cool thing is that not only does that give you visibility on your competitors’ turf, it can give you visibility at the top of their turf, meaning searchers initially with the intent to find your competitor, may actually see your result first, and choose to visit you instead.

Ready to Ask PPC to Marry Your SEO?

If you answered yes, then great! If you are still unsure, then maybe some of my search marketing industry peers will kindly share their optimistic insights and experiences with you in the comments below. We’re always open to your thoughts.

First of all, we need to clarify some myths that have been floating around in the search marketing world, like those saying that search engine optimization (SEO) is better than PPC or vice versa, or that SEO and PPC are as different as day and night, and thus, couldn’t possibly co-exist in the same marketing plan for the purpose of fulfilling a similar goal.

I will admit SEO and PPC have their differences; however, they have just as many similarities. Also, what differences they do possess, do not make one better than the other – they actually make the two a perfect search couple. Sold yet? That’s ok, keep reading.

Let’s Start by Airing Out Their Dirty Laundry

Most would agree PPC can be a pretty nifty marketing expense, especially if the industry you or your client is in is very competitive. I mean, you pay per click, and some of the keywords in a competitive industry, like email marketing, can cost up to $51 per click—and that’s just an average, not a max. SEO, on the other hand, is pretty much a free strategy, excluding minor costs for certain directory listings, and maybe the occasional link.

(Ok, maybe SEO isn’t free—you need to invest labor hours, through either staff or consultants. But if done right, the results stick, and you don’t have to keep paying for them.)

Additionally, many hold a reservation with PPC because they think, why waste money on a click for a paid ad ranking for keyword X when I already have an organic result ranking on page 1 of Google for keyword X? Hmmm, good question.

Let me ask you this: Is your organic result for keyword X, result 1 on page 1, or is it result 2, or maybe even result 7? If you don’t hold the top organic result, how can you be certain a searcher won’t find another result he/she likes better while trekking 10 miles through potential competitor territory, and be invited in by one of them for a cold beer and a warm meal before making it to your door?

That brings me to my next point. While SEO offers no guarantee your website or content will ever top page 1 of Google (and the likelihood is most dismal for local startups trying to rank for broad keywords, and businesses that have competitors with high authority sites, like Amazon and Entrepreneur), PPC ensures that you will rank, and usually in the top 3 paid results, that is, if you have a good quality score and play the bidding game right, but I will save that topic for another post.

Ranking naturally in organic takes time, and involves the diligent process of consistently creating highly-targeted, quality content, forging meaningful relationships with influential online figures, and building relevant backlinks to your site.

However, with PPC, you can rank in Google almost instantaneously for a keyword, and all you have to do is create a campaign in Google Adwords, pick and group your keywords, write an ad, set a budget and CPC (cost-per-click) bid, and voila, there your result is on Google.

Unlike SEO, PPC doesn’t really ever change. Sure, Google makes some minor policy tweaks and creates new features, but there are no algorithmic rules in the forms of Panda and Penguin, which are constantly changing, making the search engine visibility playing field a fickle game of Russian Roulette. By that, I mean, a white-hat link building tactic today can be deemed black-hat tomorrow.

These variables in SEO make optimizing content and testing keywords a delicate balancing act of strategy and considerations. If you have a “just enough to be dangerous” knowledge of SEO, one small maneuver could increase your ranking and click-through-rate (CTR), or send you flying down 10 flights of search results pages (SERPS).

PPC, on the other hand, not only provides quick feedback because of the ability for paid ads to instantly rank, but with paid search, you can optimize keywords and ad/landing page copy without fearing a penalty. How, you ask? Just write A and B versions of an ad or a landing page, and Google will automatically split the traffic it sends to each, allowing you to efficiently gage what really resonates with searchers.

If you are in a competitive industry, SEO doesn’t really excel at letting websites rank for their competitors’ keywords. Actually, the only way to do this well would be to create a lot of content around your competitors’ branded keyword phrases, and unless all this content is meant as a slander (which I wildly NOT recommend), it is not worth it, because it only promotes your competition.

PPC, however, while it doesn’t allow for advertisers to use their competitors’ trademarks in their ad copy, it does permit advertisers to bid on, and rank for, all of their competitors’ branded terms.

Why PPC and SEO Are Lik a Non-Tragic Romeo and Juliet

Now, before I go into the lovy-dovy scenarios about why SEO and PPC are a match meant to be, let me not discount the potential of stand-alone organic search strategies. In fact, SEO is an extremely vital component of a long-term marketing effort meant for achieving search endurance, that when executed wisely, can be very rewarding in its ability to confirm a company’s or website’s trustworthiness and industry expertise.

Additionally, unlike PPC, SEO can’t just be cut-off. SEO is an investment, that overtime, delivers loyalty. That means that after you have put in many a sleepless night to get all of your pages to rank on the first SERP, you can then just sit back and monitor to ensure that some stealthy competitor doesn’t try to sneak in your seat; it’s no longer a game of constant directory submissions, begging bloggers for links, etc. Although, staying on top of content creation is still a must.

With that said, though, another vital component of search endurance is first knowing and accepting that SEO alone cannot give you the best return on investment (ROI), and second, learning best how to implement a PPC strategy to supplement your SEO efforts—pick up the slack of organic search pitfalls.

I mentioned that PPC can be, or seem to be, a very costly solution for businesses with a small budget, but get this. One of PPC’s best bragging rights is that it rocks at lead generation and customer acquisition. This means if you are having trouble getting an ecommerce site or a page with a lead form on it to rank on the first SERP, a paid ad showing above all organic results, could be the way to go until that organic result starts rocking the SERPs.

Moreover, a Google sponsored study conducted by Enquiro, found that a searcher’s purchase intent increases by 8% when both a paid and organic ad show on the same page. Also, the video below illustrates that companies that use paid online advertising with SEO see an increase in in-store sales and a 15 to 1 return on ad dollars.

Getting success hungry are you? The SEO-PPC combo sure does smell like a yummy way to increase sales and revenue, doesn’t it?

Combining SEO and PPC is a synergistic, not a cannibalistic, tactic. The Adwords Agency blog reported that when used together, PPC and SEO generate a CTR 66% more than that of SEO alone. In fact, a Bright Oak article notes that companies who use both PPC and SEO, and then dump PPC, will usually see a decline in organic traffic. Scowley, the author of the post, writes:

“The presence of paid placement in search results as a complement to normal organic rankings is a major trust indicator. If two SERP text snippets both point the searcher to the same site, the ‘strength in numbers’ quality signal increases click-through, regardless of whether one of those is paid.”

A final reason why SEO and PPC make a fine pair is because together, they dominate more search real estate, especially when it comes to competitors’ turf. What is better than owning every result on page 1 of Google for your branded keywords? Owning land at the top of the hill on the first page of results for your competitors’ branded keywords, too!

With strategic SEO, you can own all organic results for your branded keywords, but the only way to have visibility when searchers are looking for your competitors is to bid on their keywords in paid search. The cool thing is that not only does that give you visibility on your competitors’ turf, it can give you visibility at the top of their turf, meaning searchers initially with the intent to find your competitor, may actually see your result first, and choose to visit you instead.

Ready to Ask PPC to Marry Your SEO?

If you answered yes, then great! If you are still unsure, then maybe some of my search marketing industry peers will kindly share their optimistic insights and experiences with you in the comments below. We’re always open to your thoughts.

Operation Big Bird, named after an inside joke that stuck, is an experiment in content marketing that has taken a life of its own. But it also represents a marketing case study where the power of content takes center stage.

It started with two—actually independent—events: 1) a content experiment on a client’s website, and 2) hitting it big with good writers who write useful information.

The Content Experiment

Last July, while running a keyword audit on a real estate client’s website, we identified 40 pages that plainly weren’t maximizing their potential for SEO: no apparent keyword direction, some duplication and so on. It was a no-brainer: spend about a week conducting keyword research and drafting content for those pages, update them, and voila, more search traffic.

What we didn’t anticipate was how much more traffic—a 50% increase within 3 months. But it didn’t stop there. The client’s web traffic then jumped to to a new plateau, then continued growing. (Below: SEMRush graph for keyword rankings—the arrow marks the publication date of the initial content experiment.)

And with the addition of new, non-branded search traffic came a new benchmark of unique visits and lead generation. In one month, our client was marveling at our jump from 50K weekly unique visits to 70K. In the next month, 70K uniques was considered a low-end traffic week.

With that came the next obvious decision: More webpages. And in a snarky nod to Google’s Penguin update, or something Mitt Romney said—okay, maybe we were just sleep deprived and loopy—we called that Operation Big Bird. As I post this blog, over a 100 new pages of awesome, useful content are going live on the client’s site.

But before we start making the popcorn I want to share a few recipe items that go into “awesome, useful content:”

Good writers—It goes without saying that a great writer could chart the journey of a snail across a driveway beautifully, while a hack could make love and war a boring read. Use good writers, check. Now for the science:

Keyword logic—Everyone knows that Google updates its algorithm almost twice a day on average, but the big picture is that Google is striving for authentic returns. People who are looking for “apartments for rent” are also looking for “commuting time to downtown [city]“. Google has enough earned intelligence to know that people looking for apartments are also concerned about commuting distances, and if you don’t have content modeled around that keyword, you’re missing an opportunity to validate your site as a search result option to Google.

Internal linking and URL structure—These are given considerations for any SEO, but I point them out only to emphasize that these components are essential to driving home your keyword logic. Keywords, after all, are not sugary sprinklings for search engines, they’re a narrative pathway.

Hitting it Big with Guest Blog Post Link Building

This is actually the fourth bullet point, but it deserves its own place. As any content marketer or SEO knows, guest blog posting can be a rigorous, thankless journey of rejection and bartering. Wouldn’t it be great if every blog you approached said “Sure! Post away and include as many links as you want!”

And officially, Google actually frowns on building links to rank, because that practice can—and does—lead to an internet cluttered with links placed under irrelevant pretenses. Such a World Wide Web isn’t conducive to the search engine business model. So why not play along with Google and generate really useful content in your guest blog posting agenda?

The first step is to find online publications that need your writing. In our case we found a few trade publications that covered the industry our client serves, but were missing a certain level of analysis among their contributions. (This is where you have to put yourself in the editor’s shoes: What’s missing from this trade publication?)

Once we identified the missing editorial link, we simply filled it, and with great writing. Now they ask our writer back every week, because the content that writer generates gets shared, tweeted and linked to. Finally, that writing has relevance to everything that went into Operation Big Bird, and it’s leading people to find what they need within that content, shortly after reading something useful in a trade publication.

Thus the circle is complete.

Located in Annapolis’ exciting retail district, Crosswinds at Annapolis Towne Centre offers a vibrant, urban atmosphere perfect for shopping, dining, and entertainment. It also happens to be a community by The Bozzuto Group—launched with branding, design, and marketing initiatives by HZDG (HZ).

Just minutes from the waterfront, Crosswinds brings upscale luxury apartments to the area’s energetic social scene. With the young, hip demographic in mind, HZ designed an integrated range of marketing materials for the property to reach consumers at multiple touch points.

A simple, sophisticated logo was designed to capture the pristine, upscale nature of the building while also capturing its effortless charm.

Warm shades of blue, relaxed patterns, and a clean set of fonts bring life to the collateral by reflecting the building’s nautical theme. Such characteristics were incorporated across the property’s business cards, outdoor banners, stationery, signage, and leasing materials.

The website serves as an interactive experience of what life is like at Crosswinds. Comprehensive floor plans, scenic photography, and highly stylistic design elements— including a digital brochure—echo the chic, vibrant atmosphere. The site is built to be responsive and provide seamless navigation for users to browse property features.

In addition, HZ designed various email blast templates to drive traffic to the website and corresponding social channels—all before the doors open to the public.

HZ continues to work with Bozzuto on Crosswinds at Annapolis Towne Centre to integrate all branding initiatives for the property, available for lease summer 2013.

The ADDY® Awards Competition is a three‐tiered national competition conducted annually by the American Advertising Federation (AAF), its chapters, and districts. With 40,000 entries nationwide, the ADDY Awards Competition is the advertising industry’s largest and most representative competition for creative excellence.

The competition received 686 entries from 99 agencies, design firms, in‐house marketing departments, freelancers, interactive firms, production companies, PR firms, and students. A panel of 9 judges—general market and interactive—convened to review and score the entries based on creativity, originality, and creative strategy.

HZDG (HZ) was proud to receive three Gold ADDYs for our work in the following categories:

Advertising Industry Self-Promo Direct Marketing, Specialty Items:
HZDG T-Shirt Gift/HZDG Inc.

Digital Advertising – Social Media Campaign:
Rockefeller Center – Valentine’s Day Campaign/Tishman Speyer/Rock Center

Collateral Brochure Four-Color:
Osprey Cove Brochure/Roseland Property/Osprey Cove