Jacqui hitches a ride

Our 16 days in South Africa were filled with visits to three different cities: Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town. Plus a trip to Zambia, and lots of adventures along the way including:

· A ride on a six ton elephant named Dan

· Going on a safari where we got to see the “Big 5” (Lion, Leopard, Rhino, Elephant and Cape Buffalo)

· Seeing one of the world’s largest waterfalls-Victoria Falls

· Visiting the African Penguins at Boulders Bay

· Riding bikes to the Cape of Good Hope

· And of course, seeing great soccer!

We were able to get tickets to see the Netherlands vs. Denmark and Spain vs. Switzerland matches, so we got to see both teams that ended up making it to the finals.

One of the things about South Africa that surprised us was how much like Eastern Washington the landscape appeared. We saw a lot more agriculture and farming then we expected. Also, we were surprised that everywhere you go there seemed to be baboons running around. You learn to be careful when opening your bag—or else a smart and quick baboon might snatch your lunch away!

Seeing the World Cup in So. Africa was a great experience—especially since we got to watch the matches with thousands of other fans. It was great fun meeting new people from all over the world who share the same passion for the game as we do.

While we didn’t fall in love with the loud vuvuzelas that were ever-present (if you watched a match on TV, you know what I’m talking about!), we certainly look forward to the next World Cup in Brazil in 2014.

And in the meantime, “go Sounders!”

Biking to Cape of Good Hope

Bringing back a pet

How do we get home

Real football

Seal Island at tip of Africa

Spain beats up on Swiss

Victoria Falls Bridge

World Cup is very big

Yankees at the pitch

Launching this week, The Polyclinic's new "Where You Come First" campaign confirms the benefits of having a health care provider that puts patients first. The physician-run Polyclinic—consisting of more than 150 primary and specialty care physicians in 14 Seattle area locations—offers a healthy dose of physician-independence that leads to better medicine, as showcased in the new work from Hydrogen.

Consisting of three 30-second TV spots, direct mail and outdoor advertising, the campaign illustrates that The Polyclinic is the right choice for people that seek and value collaboration in their family's health decisions and appreciate the relationship that physician independence delivers. The Polyclinic staff gets to know the person, not just the patient, which often leads to better diagnoses and superior outcomes.

"'Where You Come First' is more than a tagline, it's the embodiment of an organization-wide commitment to make 'you the person' as important as 'you the patient,'" said Tracy Corgiat, director of marketing at The Polyclinic. "Every aspect of The Polyclinic is built upon a culture of doing what's right for the patient and connecting each patient to the right care."

With 25 medical specialties in locations throughout the greater Seattle area, The Polyclinic emphasizes the importance of physician-patient communication and collaboration between doctors. Increased coordination between primary and specialty care, and the elimination of bureaucracy whenever possible, are the hallmarks of The Polyclinic's approach to personalized, comprehensive, top-quality health care.

"One of the most important relationships a family can form is with their health care provider, and The Polyclinic is there to open all the health care doors you and your family may need," said Tom Scherer, co-founder and executive creative director, Hydrogen Advertising. "With the new campaign, The Polyclinic is letting people throughout the Seattle region know that Polyclinic doctors have the independence they need to put patients first."

About The Polyclinic
The Polyclinic is one of the largest multi-specialty clinics in the Puget Sound area, with more than 150 primary care and specialty physicians in most areas of medicine. Established in 1917, The Polyclinic has a long tradition of delivering high quality, comprehensive, personalized care. www.polyclinic.com

With the current school year rapidly coming to a close, it’s not too early to start planning for the next. Starting in May, Insight Schools, Inc. is helping parents make education decisions for the upcoming school year with a new advertising campaign demonstrating that online high school may be the ideal option for some students.

The new work includes a 30-second TV spot and direct mail. While appealing to both parents and high school students, the campaign emphasizes to parents that it is possible to see their children enjoy, and even thrive in, high school. Students seeking a personalized learning experience or students with schedules that make attending traditional high schools challenging may benefit greatly by Insight Schools’ online, accredited and tuition-free public high schools.

The new campaign reveals a basic truth about traditional brick-and-mortar high schools—they don’t necessarily offer the best learning environment for each and every student. This message is clearly communicated in the TV spot, airing in Calif., Colo., Kan., Idaho, Minn. and Wash. The media buy in each state will primarily target the adults-with-kids demographic.

Creatively, Hydrogen took care to show students in real-life situations, such as social settings and after school jobs. The visuals demonstrate that students who enroll at Insight Schools continue to live normal lives while gaining an education where, when and how they learn best.

“In a fast-paced world chock full of distractions, having an online high school option is the perfect, tailor-made option for a growing number of our kids,” said Tom Scherer, executive creative director, Hydrogen Advertising. “Our new campaign for Insight Schools shows that online learning may be the perfect environment for students to excel and enjoy earning their diplomas.”

About Insight Schools, Inc.
With nine schools in eight states, Insight Schools, Inc. is one of the nation’s largest networks of tuition-free, diploma-granting, online public high schools. To learn more, call 800-975-8006 or visit www.insightschools.net.

Hydrogen Advertising has added Jacqui Campbell to its client management team as senior account manager. An MBA and veteran of Seattle’s marketing community, Jacqui will support agency clients Agilent Technologies, Insight Schools, eBay and Microsoft.

Jacqui’s marketing career includes working with a number of the Pacific Northwest’s best known companies and brands. Most recently as senior account executive at Wunderman, she oversaw Microsoft’s Enterprise Customer Care business, as well as Microsoft’s Software Management Asset program. Her responsibilities included campaign integration, search engine optimization (SEO) and overall budget management.

Prior to Wunderman, Jacqui guided the strategic planning, creative development and ROI analysis processes as an account executive for DDB West clients, including Holland America, Safeco Insurance and Majestic America Lines. She has also worked as an advertising account executive at King County Journal Newspapers and as a directory advertising consultant at Qwest Dex.

“Jacqui brings a wealth of knowledge to the table in terms of building high-value programs across the spectrum of marketing disciplines,” said Rick Peterson, president, Hydrogen Advertising. “She’s a great fit for Hydrogen and for our clients who continue to seek new, more efficient and more effective ideas that achieve measurable results.”

Jacqui earned her MBA from Regis University in Denver, Colo. Her undergraduate degree in Communications and Advertising is from Washington State University. She was also honored as Microsoft’s quarterly U.S. CMG (Central Marketing Group) Agency Award in 2009 while at Wunderman.

The “Is It MS?” campaign features strikingly beautiful images of the human body, both of men and women. The work demonstrates that while a person may look fine physically, multiple sclerosis (MS) may still be subtly affecting their lives with unpredictable symptoms. The core message is that if someone is experiencing any of a variety of symptoms—fatigue, dizziness and numbness, for example—that person or someone who knows them can call the National MS Society to learn more.

“We made a great impact in local awareness with our last campaign and we are equally impressed by this new work from Hydrogen,” said Patricia Shepherd-Barnes, president, Greater Northwest Chapter of the National MS Society. “The agency delivered a strategy and a creative product that was right on the mark, via a process that was thorough and effective.”

Elements of the new campaign include:

· Five separate, large-format outdoor executions – six located in Seattle and one in Tacoma.

· Three TV spots, to begin airing on PBS in late March.

· An “Is It MS?” microsite, www.isitms.com, including a site designed for iPhones and other mobile-devices.

“We all know knowledge is power and our new advertising campaign for the National MS Society is designed to encourage people to seek out the knowledge that will empower them to make the very best health decisions,” said Tom Scherer, co-founder and executive creative director, Hydrogen Advertising. “We’re extremely confident the new creative will continue to raise awareness of MS and, more importantly, raise awareness of the often subtle symptoms of this disease.”

About Hydrogen Advertising

Founded in 2001 by a group of Seattle’s most seasoned advertising and marketing veterans, Hydrogen Advertising provides a full suite of marketing services—Web marketing, broadcast, print, non-traditional, media planning, PR, DM, campaign measurement, strategic planning—to West Coast companies. The agency’s forte is creating integrated marketing programs that deliver specific outcomes. Among the agency’s clients are Kenworth Truck Company, ÁegisLiving, eBay, Insight Schools, Microsoft and Agilent Technologies. www.hydrogenadvertising.com

About the Greater Northwest Chapter of the National MS Society
Headquartered in Seattle, the Chapter serves over 10,000 people living with MS throughout Alaska and Western and Central Washington and more than 60,000 others including friends, caregivers and health care professionals in Western and Central Washington and Alaska. Our mission is to mobilize people and resources to drive research for a cure and to address the challenges of everyone affected by MS. www.MSnorthwest.org

Development of sophisticated green technologies requires advanced testing products, such as those from Agilent’s Electronic Measurement Group. New print and banner ads from Hydrogen Advertising communicate to engineers that Agilent offers solutions capable of delivering real-world emulation of solar rays. Agilent solar-simulation products are used to design and manufacture solar arrays, fuel cells, inverters and other devices that enable companies to develop green technologies.
The new print and banner ads, currently running in green tech publications, online newsletters and engineering Web sites, feature the following Agilent products:

• • E4360 Series Solar Array Simulators;
• • N3300-Series and 6060-Series eLoads (electronic load testers); and
• • B1505 SMU Power Analyzers.

“The new work emphasizes the primary benefit of our Solar Array Simulators and eLoad products – making the unpredictable predictable,” said Barbara Asbury, EMG advertising manager, Agilent Technologies. “Next generation green-energy products require innovative development techniques and thorough testing. Agilent offers test products that can be used to contribute to this successful and exciting renewable energy market.”
“This execution embodies Agilent’s unique ability to accomplish extremely complex tasks, such as simulating the variability of the sun’s rays, which helps enable the development of cutting-edge products like new alternative energy technologies,” said Tom Scherer, co-founder and executive creative director, Hydrogen Advertising.

But after months of weekday lunchtime training on a StairMaster, and weekends hiking and climbing smaller peaks such as Mt. Si, Meredith found herself atop 14,411-foot Mt. Rainier on a perfectly clear July 27th, together with Joseph, six other climbing mates and four guides.

“You know, it was a lot easier making the actual Mt. Rainier climb than it was training for the climb,” Meredith said. “Our guides set a leisurely pace up the mountain, which felt a lot easier than keeping up with Joseph and the guys on our weekend training climbs.”

Weekend training involved, among other things, climbs packing 30- to 40-pound jugs of water on the way up, to simulate conditions on the face of Mt. Rainier.

“Our Alpine Ascents guides were great,” Meredith said. “They taught us how set a conservative pace, to eat and keep hydrated along the way, and to avoid pausing more than 4-minutes because when you stop moving completely, it’s amazing how quickly the cold sets it—even in July.”

One of Meredith’s guides actually held, for a time, the speed ascent record up Mt. Everest (climbing from Base Camp to the Mt. Everest summit in just 11 hours in 2003).

“As I climbed,” she recalled, “I really tried to avoid monitoring where the top was, and how far away it was. Instead, I just focused on putting one foot in front of the other, breathing correctly, and doing the immediate task at hand—basically, following the advice of our guides.”

It turns out that Meredith, Joseph and their fellow mates were fit enough and fortunate enough (with weather, etc.) to actually make an attempt on the summit at about 3:30 p.m., rather than the more common scenario where climbers are awakened in the dark at midnight to make a “before dawn” dash for the summit.

“The views from the top were incredible. As the sun began to set behind us on our way down the mountain, we could see the growing shadow of Mt. Rainier stretching out in front of us over all the communities and lowlands to the east. It’s something I’ll never forget.”

Would Meredith consider doing it again? “Absolutely.”

SEATTLE – October 13, 2009 – In support of the launch of Agilent’s newest signal analyzers, Hydrogen Advertising has launched new vertical-market print ads for the company. The PXA and CXA signal analyzers, the newest additions to Agilent’s industry-leading X-Series signal analyzers, are supported by new print ads initially reaching engineers in design and manufacturing in the aerospace and defense industries and general-purpose electronics manufacturing, respectively.

The new print ads appear in vertical-market publications around the globe. The key objective is to raise awareness and generate leads for the new X-Series signal analyzers, which are designed to evolve with customers as their engineering and testing needs change, keeping test assets current and extending instrument longevity.

“Hydrogen continues to do an outstanding job identifying the key messages that our highly technical, BtoB customers need to hear to make informed purchasing decisions,” said Barbara Asbury, EMG advertising manager, Agilent Technologies.

The new ads tap into Agilent’s “Power of X” marketing strategy—an overarching effort to educate vertical-market audiences on the speed, scalability and superior quality of new Agilent X-Series products. Agilent X-Series signal analysis spans instrumentation, measurements and software, providing the flexibility to satisfy business and technical requirements across multiple products and programs, now and in the future.

“Through collaboration with Agilent, we were able to develop ads that speak to a technical engineering audience in a way that is credible and appealing,” said Tom Scherer, co-founder and executive creative director, Hydrogen Advertising. “At the same time, we’ve built in messaging that provides a ‘wow factor’ for customers demanding the very best product for today’s and tomorrow’s needs.”

New Ad Campaign Scheduled for 2010

Hydrogen Advertising has partnered with the Greater Washington Chapter of the National MS Society to handle creative duties for the organization on a pro bono basis. The agency will build upon the success of the National MS Society’s recent “Why Here?” campaign, helping further regional awareness and understanding of this debilitating disease.

The new campaign, scheduled to be unveiled in early 2010, will support the National MS Society’s ongoing community affinity and fundraising goals, resulting in innovative programs to meet the needs of people with MS as well as their families. Collaborative development of the overall campaign strategy, messaging and creative concepts has already begun.

“Hydrogen really ‘gets’ us—our culture, our mission and our personality,” said Patricia Shepherd-Barnes, president, Greater Washington Chapter of the National MS Society. “We’re very confident the Hydrogen team will build upon our recent marketing successes and take them to the next level.”

“MS has affected a great many people in the Northwest including friends and relatives of people at Hydrogen,” said Tom Scherer, co-founder and executive creative director, Hydrogen Advertising. “We want to do our part, and creating an ad campaign that opens new eyes to the nature of MS and encourages people to seek more information seemed like the perfect place to start.”

I was joined by esteemed colleagues from both coasts and the hinterland to share five days, bad coffee and several thousand highly solicited opinions.

Once the smoke had cleared, I have to say we were all humbled by some really wonderful work. The best married smart strategy with truly fresh ideas put into the market in ways we haven’t seen before. Emphasis on the latter. Creative use (or misuse) of media was the standout attention getter. I returned enthused, excited and ready break some media rules.