When: Friday, February 10th, 4 pm  to 1 am
Where: 4850 35th Street West, Minneapolis
Visit adventureadvertising.com for directions.

If you can picture it, we can make it reality. Case in point: with Adventure Studios on the road and a brewing editor’s photo deadline looming, one of our designers virtually took matters into his own hands.

He created these Brainerd Lakes Beer images digitally without any existing photography assets. You’d swear a camera took these shots. We met the deadline and secured some good press on OhBeautifulBeer.com.

We can do the same kind of digital renderings for your new product designs, packaging, graphics or anything you can think of. No sweat – unless of course you want sweat.

For the fourth year, Adventure™ Advertising had the pleasure of complementing Creative Memories’ in-house creative departments on a wide variety of projects. Among them, the 2011 Holiday Collections.

Creative Memories is the leading direct-marketing company in the scrapbooking industry. With their internal artists swamped with projects, they asked us to help out with designs for their holiday scrapbook papers, albums, embellishments and more. Adventure Studios then stepped in to photograph the new products for Creative Memories’ Mini and Fall catalogs.

The close working relationship we have with Creative Memories allows us to bring a fresh perspective to design. As a result, their consultants around the world can offer exciting new products to their customers. That’s reason for everyone to celebrate.

Is still a bank. BlackRidgeBANK to be specific. They’re a financial holding company with several banks in their portfolio – previously under several different names. It made fiscal and organizational sense to have all their institutions under one brand, so they looked to Adventure to make that a seamless name change for customers in their Minnesota and North Dakota markets.

We accomplished the task with a unified logo polish, print ads, statement stuffers, exterior electronic signage and in-bank counter cards and posters. This assured customers that even though the name had changed, their bank and the people who serve them remained the same.

Adventure Studios shot many of the images in these communications, capturing the professional yet approachable personality that BlackRidgeBANK representatives provide to their customers.

With offices in Brainerd and St. Cloud, Adventure™ Advertising has expanded again with a third office in Minneapolis. The location lets us tap into the cities’ creative culture, people and resources to better serve clients located in the metro and nationwide.

We seem to be very much drawn to water when selecting our office locations. In Brainerd we’re right on the Mississippi River. The St. Cloud office is a block from the river. And Adventure’s metro headquarters is near Lake Calhoun.

We share the space with SixSpeed, a firm that Adventure has collaborated with for several years. This is a new location for both companies. Together, we’ll throw an open house party in mid-February. Invitations to join us in the City of Lakes will be mailed out in the coming weeks.

Visual Marketing is a book of 99 marketing campaigns that demonstrate top selling strategies. Authors David Langton and Anita Campbell chose an Adventure Advertising campaign as one of their 99 select case studies.

They admire the way Adventure’s Northern Eye Center campaign engages readers through an ad-within-an-ad format. By achieving this unique perspective, consumers can reflect on their own visual impairments and immediately relate to Northern Eye Center as their source for vision correction. The magazine ads tie directly into the format and content of a Northern Eye Center website that Adventure also designed and developed.

Following the campaign launch, Northern Eye Center added a significant number of new patients and successfully got the attention of a younger demographic – which was one of their key objectives.

For more information on the book, visit VisualMarketingBook.com.

Leave it to Red Bull to create something like the Mississippi Grind Tour! Built on a massive barge, this floating skatepark traveled 1,705 miles from St. Paul to New Orleans. Our colleagues at Six Speed helped Red Bull produce and promote the event, and Adventure Studios handled the photography at stops in Davenport, St. Louis and New Orleans.

At each stop, we got great shots of professional Red Bull boarders showing off for thousands of spectators. Some of the big names included Zered Bassett, Ron Deily, Steven Webb, Ray Maldonado, Ryan Decenzo and Kenny Anderson. We also photographed amateur riders competing in Red Bull’s “Ticket to Grind” contest.

In addition to capturing action on the barge, we shot at an Iowa farm with a barn converted into a skate park. In St. Louis we got permission to ride in the City Museum for some very unique skateboarding images. And in New Orleans, we photographed pro riders as they took their skills down Bourbon Street.

You can see a wide selection of Mississippi Grind images at http://www.adventure-studios.com/work/detail/red-bull-mississippi-grind-tour. In addition to USA Today and other national news spots, these images continue to appear in skateboarding magazines and are distributed to media outlets through the Red Bull Content Pool (https://images.redbullcontentpool.com/).

Adventure’s strategic planning team attended the Health Care Social Media Summit at the Mayo Clinic last week. Areas of focus included social media marketing and PR, mobile health care communications and social media for medical professionals.

There are many channels and formats of social media. But the focus should remain on quality content that reflects well on a brand’s promise, yet still has enough interest to be shared socially.

Simple exposure is not the only goal. As with all other media, social media needs to generate ROI. And in some cases ROE (Return-on-Experience) for the target audience. It needs to provide two-way participation, transparency, credibility and mutual trust between a brand and the individuals it serves.

Like most viral social content, the now famous Mayo Clinic atrium piano video was captured happenstance. With nearly 8 million views, it provided great social exposure for Mayo and ignited a complete “Happiness” social program.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RI-l0tK8Ok0

With presenters from all over the world and worldwide web gladly sharing information and attending cocktail receptions, you could say we found the entire conference very socially engaging.

Matt Jensen recently joined our team here at Adventure™.  Matt will focus on business development, public relations and strategic planning for our regional and national client brands.

Prior to joining Adventure, Matt was Director of Creative Services at Tastefully Simple, a national brand specializing in gourmet food products. His experience also includes several years of advertising agency experience.

While in Vegas to attend the Interbike Show, Team Adventure volunteered to catch athletes as they crossed the finish line at the Ironman World Championships.

Being there to help and support some of the world’s most conditioned athletes was something to remember. Our duties were to receive the athletes as they came across the line; give them hydration and physical support if they needed it; help them to the recovery and medical area – basically assist them in any way.

After a 1.2-mile swim, 56-mile bike and 13.1-mile run, some of the competitors crossed the finish line as if they hadn’t pushed their bodies to the limit at all. Just another day at the office for world-class athletes. Other participants finished on the edge of total muscle failure, and needed shoulders to be carried on. Because it was 100+ degrees that day, several required IVs to curb their dehydration.

So, there we were for more than 8 hours in the scorching Nevada sun. Sweating, while hundreds of slippery, slimy competitors leaned on us all day. When we got into the limo to go back to the hotel and a much-needed shower, we smelled like all 3,600 armpits from around the world, all rolled into one Lincoln Continental.

Oh the poor passengers who took the next ride.