
Aha! :: Elliance Blog

I bet I can explain all the talk about the Internet of things (IoT) and the phrase “smarter planet” in a few short paragraphs. Thirty years ago, I co-oped at GE. Our goal was to improve the efficiency of a fluorescent lighting assembly line. We implemented a four-step process: Step 1: Install Sensors: we installed 200 […]

Since the day I walked into Elliance, a digital marketing agency, for a “meet and greet”, my preconceived idea of what life looked like inside “the business world” was shattered. Elliance was something I’d never expected – a place full of life and character and uniqueness. I have been working here now for roughly two […]

A smart way for higher ed marketers to reach prospects on Facebook is to target by demographic. Are you using this paid marketing medium to its full potential?

As discussed in a previous blog post, we recently redesigned the Carnegie Mellon Today online magazine. With this redesign, the focus changed from a print-based quarterly issue to an online-only site with new stories both produced and promoted on a weekly basis. With roughly 80% of existing site traffic coming to articles (a number that […]

I was asked to write a blog. ‘Write about what you love,’ they said. Well, I love many things, but the two things that came to mind, besides my wonderful family of course, were my job (a project manager with an advertising agency) and fantasy football. Now you may think how in the world could […]

The Greeks called it their Muse. The Romans called it the Ingenium (the genius). I call it whatever that magic is that gets some meaningful words onto the page. Inspiration. I recently heard a great re-air of a RadioLab interview with Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love. In it, she tells the story of […]

The art of the interactive newsletter is alive and well. Here Kathy talks about Maine’s Office of Tourism’s creative execution of their vision.

Why, despite our best intentions and efforts, can we all make bad decisions? Social scientists point to the phenomenon of “cognitive bias” — a scholarly and polite way of saying that we should not so quickly and easily believe everything we initially perceive or think. The more complex the set of choices and decisions, the […]

Why relaunch the online Carnegie Mellon responsive university magazine when it was relaunched just two years ago? Two reasons: big data & branding.

Over the past four years, my personal life as a parent of two college-bound children and my professional life where I spend time in the higher education space have been on one long, yet fascinating, head-on collision. It’s been an eye-opening look at enrollment marketing from two divergent vantage points. In the battle for the […]