Today is Sticky Advertising’s 3rd birthday.

Its hard to believe the changes that have taken place in the 3 years since Newcastle’s longest serving advertising agency changed hands in September 2005. New staff, new clients, new services and substantial growth.

Back in 2005 my immediate aim was to build on a small but viable business, retain our client base and create quality advertising for them.

Three years later Sticky is a vastly different agency. We recently relaunched as Newcastle’s first digital, social and traditional media agency, pursuing an aggressive agenda to introduce new and effective marketing options to our clients and potential clients. The reaction has been extremely positive and our digital offerings have met with early success.

The old agency was extremely focused on traditional media with a lot of print and television work, while the modern Sticky was recently identified by Marketing Magazine as possible “top dog in social media by 2010″. The same magazine had two Sticky blogs, The Marketer and Media Hunter ranked in the Top 50 Australian Marketing Pioneers list, the only Australian advertising agency to do so.

We are now creating cutting-edge websites and implementing highly effective search engine optimisation to help our clients achieve better Google rankings and being interviewed on radio about digital marketing.

We have also been privileged to be able to contribute to two international marketing books covering the rise of social media: The Age of Conversation and Age of Conversation 2, Why don’t people get it?

Its been an exciting ride and it’s far from over. Very soon we will be announcing more news and changes.

Thanks to everyone, our clients and suppliers and my hard working team for your support.

The Hunter Valley’s top ranked golf course, has just launched its new Sticky Digital website. Newcastle Golf Club’s new state-of-the-art site went live today introducing visitors to a stunning new layout and a raft of user-friendly features.

Sticky has designed a site that allows members a greater range of relevant information, up-to-the-minute golf news and feedback.

The site is also designed to allow the management, directors and club pro to post regular updates quickly and easily.

We have built-in an ability for the club to sell advertising on the site and offer members additional services and benefits.

Newcastle Golf Club was rated in the top 15 courses in Australia (Australian Golf Digest 2008), the only public access golf course in the Hunter Valley to be so highly ranked.

Web design in Newcastle seems to be stuck in the Web 1.0 era at best. A quick look around the sites produced by leading Newcastle web designers reveals fairly standard formats that deliver the old-fashioned “brochure-style” efforts we were all discovering a decade ago.

Its like Web 2.0 never made it up the F3 to Newcastle.

This is a big concern and means that many businesses in Newcastle and the Hunter Valley are missing out on the benefits of modern web strategy and social media concepts. Some of Newcastle’s agencies are designing extremely attractive Flash websites that look great and do almost nothing for the businesses they serve.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sticky account executive and all-round sports star Jane Altschwager has been picked by the Adelaide Thunderbirds in the ANZ Championship Netball League. This is exciting news for Jane, allowing her to resume her successful netball career after a few seasons out of the game.

Obviously it also means that Jane will be moving home to South Australia and leaving Sticky after 3 years of great service.

Jane won’t be leaving Newcastle until early November and will be assisting in a smooth transition with her replacement.

An announcement will be made shortly regarding the newest member of the Sticky crew.

Meanwhile, please join us in congratulating Jane on her selection and wishing her further success.

How to find new customers, obtain information, broaden your geographic reach, streamline operations, improve customer relations, lower communication costs, generate PR and free publicity, look like an industry leader and…..have complete marketing measurability.

A few years ago a Newcastle web designer told me there was no future in the website design business because it was becoming so easy for anyone to create their own sites. “The company receptionist will be knocking together websites in a few hours”, he said.

He was both right and wrong.

The advent of blogging templates such as Typepad, Blogger and other user-friendly platforms certainly have made it very easy and cheap to create a “site’ for anyone who wants one. And yes, my kids could probably build a reasonably good-looking site in a day if they put their minds to it.

Unfortunately, many business sites look exactly like the receptionist or the owner’s children did make them. On that count my friend was right.

The part he got wrong was that it meant the demise of the web design business. The fact that every man and his dog has or can build a basic site means there is more imperative than ever on creating not just a good site, but a great web strategy.

There is an enormous difference.

Read the rest of this entry »

Newcastle based whale and dolphin swimming adventure company Dolphcom has had immediate SEO success with the launch of their new website.

Dolphcom owner Andrew Parker asked Sticky to design a new website for him to facilitate the growth of his business. The site had to be able to facilitate online inquiries, be easy to upload video to and perform substantially better in online searches.

Dolphcom’s previous website, while visually attractive, was difficult to update and performed woefully in Google and Yahoo organic searches. Analysis of all key search terms revealed that Dolphcom did no better than the fourth page in most searches, and much lower in others.

Sticky designed a completely new website to suit Dolphcom’s criteria and then applied our search engine optimisation process to the site. Within 2 weeks of launching the new website, Dolphcom was ranking on the first page of Google and Yahoo searches for relevent search terms and web traffic had doubled.

Andrew’s recent trip to swim with the whales in Tonga can now be viewed on Dolphcom and plenty more sensational content will be added to the website in coming weeks.

In this month’s issue of Marketing Magazine, regular marketing columnist Julian Cole has announced his Top 50 Australian Marketing Pioneers Blogs and Sticky Advertising’s very own bloggers Media Hunter and The Marketer claimed the number 18 and 22 spots, respectively.

According to Julian Cole: ”With Sticky Advertising having the minds of Media Hunter (Craig Wilson) and The Marketer (Gordon Whitehead) it would not be surprised if it was top dog in social media by 2010.”

Julian Cole and the team at Marketing Magazine saw a need for a filtering of the insightful marketing blogs from the total time wasters. While many marketers realize the power of blogs, they often don’t read them, simply because they don’t know where to find them.

“Blog’s excel at breaking news stories related to their industry, generating new marketing strategies or showcasing advice on marketing challenges. Believe it or not, blogs are now influencing the rest of your learning sources too.” says Julian.

Read the rest of this entry »