I’m sure there are those of you who still use this stuff often, but I’ve managed to get mine down to once or twice a year.

Who still has a “box” sitting around to use with the Spray Mount? And special scissors, rulers and xacto knives that are already caked with sticky?

The digital world has made it easier to present concepts than ever before, but sometimes you still have to do a good old fashioned mock-up for the client. Brochures, mailers and other printed pieces need to be held and felt and worked with to be sure they’re right before production. What holds these mock-ups together? Spray Mount.

I had a coordinator once who learned the hard way not to use this stuff near her desk. All her pens, her calculator, stapler and papers were sticky for weeks.

And if you had to spray it more than once or twice (Lets do mock-ups of all four versions of the tri-fold pocket folder!) you were treated to a toxic cloud that would hang in the air for the rest of the day.

Also, sticky fingers.

This is a photo of an ad proof from 1998.

Magellan Laboratories was the client (now a part of Catalent). And this ad was most likely sent in to Pharmaceutical Technology or BioPharm – both pharma industry pubs that have been around for more than a few years.

Back then the art director would work up the files for the ad and send them in to a print house that would create a proof. Markups were marked on transparency taped over the proof, and we looked with painstaking detail at the colors, coverage and layout. Because exactly what was in the proof, was exactly what would be printed in the magazine.

After multiple proofing rounds, including client approvals and sign-offs, we would ship the final via FedEx to the publication for printing.

Each individual ad took weeks to get right, and that was AFTER the copy and layout direction were already planned out. We typically worked about three months out – meaning that since this ad proof is dated 4/29/98, it probably would run in the July or August issue.

It’s fun to go back and look through the archives some times. It’s also fun to remember how different things were only a few years ago. The advertising world has changed, but the basics of good strategy, design and writing will always be the constants.

Since we’ve been out of the blogging game for a little while, we thought we’d say hello again.

A couple of years back, we launched Sinclairity to offer our unique perspectives on marketing, branding and the day-to-day insights and experiences we have along the way.

Well, we’re still at it. Only today, things are more fast-paced than ever. Every minute of the day, people all over the world are busy creating things.

At Sinclair & Co. we’re working to help our clients gain attention for their products and services. And even though the delivery mechanisms have changed, the base that we build good marketing on is still the same: well thought-out strategy and engaging creative.

We look forward to sharing our insights with you!

Emily Almasy

Professionally
This year marked my twelfth year working with one of my favorite clients – Metrics. And it was a great year for them, one that I’m happy to have been a part of!

Personally
If you know me at all, you know that Pete and I embarked on a home renovation in January. Well, I’m proud to say that we made it through – still married – and have completed 98% of our planned work. It was a huge undertaking, but one I would do again, now that I know what its like to have a bigger kitchen and new bathrooms!

Shelley Bainter

Professionally
In 2012 we worked on several projects that I really enjoyed, but I have to pick one of our biggest digital marketing projects of 2012: Renovating Metrics’ website. It was a great experience to create for them a website that captures the company’s and its employees’ personality, while giving a lot of organized information to their web visitors.

Personally
I finished my first marathon, the Marine Corps Marathon on Oct. 28 in 4:18:44. Receiving cheers and support from US Marines while running through the nation’s capital was an incredible experience. I’ve run somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,250 miles this year!

Candice Hogan

Professionally
As a college graduate in 2008, at the start of the downward spiral known as the US economy, there weren’t too many options for jobs. You took what you could get and were happy with a job. Since then, through a few jobs, I’ve learned more about what I’m good at, what kind of work I want to do and the type of environment I want to work in. And this year I feel like I’m doing the work I’m good at and like to do, in the environment that facilitates the best version of my working self. I think this is what it looks like when your job grows up, into a career.

Personally
Anyone that’s known me for the past year probably knows I’ve been planning my wedding. Getting engaged at the top of the Rockefeller Center Building in NYC has to be one of my favorite memories of 2012 and planning our March 2013 wedding has been a lot of fun. But planning a wedding is also a lot of work and I’m really proud of the way things are coming together.

Karen Sinclair

Professionally
I continue to be amazed at the longevity of both our client relationships and of my wonderful coworkers at Sinclair & Co. This year marked the twelfth year of supporting pharmaceutical development and manufacturing client Metrics, which has celebrated its own big news this year, as well as launched a new website that we created and developed for them. Inside the agency, which I’ve steered for 24 years, I’m proud of the seasoned, smart, talented, and most of all, FUN individuals I get to work with everyday. Collectively, the five of us have more than 50 years working within Sinclair & Co. We have a great team.

Personally
I helped initiate, organize and execute a multigenerational Sinclair family reunion in November in Southern Pines. We traced the paths of our ancestors through the Sandhills of North Carolina, visiting old home places, schools, churches and long lost cemeteries, and in the process rediscovered that tie that holds us all together…the love and memory of our late grandmother and the good humor we were all fortunate to be blessed with. Of course, no Sinclair gathering is complete without good food, good wine and lots and lots of laughter.

Emily Almasy is one of the three of us who has caught the Game of Thrones bug and will continue reading:

• A Clash of Kings (book 2) by George R. R. Martin

She also enjoys reading cookbooks cover-to-cover:

• Barefoot Contessa Foolproof: Recipes you can Trust by Ina Garten
• Cooking Light The New Way to Cook Light: Fresh Food & Bold Flavors for Today’s Home Cook from the editors of Cooking Light
• The Mom 100 Cookbook: 100 Recipes Every Mom Needs in Her Back Pocket by Katie Workman

Shelley Bainter is taking two books on her trip to small-town America:

• The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America by Bill Bryson
• The Lifeboat: A Novel by Charlotte Rogan

Candice Hogan continues the A Song of Fire and Ice series with:

• A Dance with Dragons (book 5) by George R. R. Martin

And if Santa sees fit to bring these requested titles:

• The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir (P.S.) by Josh Kilmer-Purcell
• The Beekman 1802 Heirloom Cookbook: Heirloom fruits and vegetables, and more than 100 heritage recipes to inspire every generation by Dr. Brent Ridge

Karen Sinclair has been enjoying and will finish:

• Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies by Ben Macintyre

Karen Stinneford has this wonderful variety of books to see her through the end of the year:

• Drums of Autumn by Diana Gabaldon (p.s. this is one of Shelley’s favorites!)
• Lord of the Flies by William Golding
• Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore (also one of Shelley’s favorites)
• Plainsong by Kent Haruf
• South of Broad by Pat Conroy
• In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American family in Hitler’s Berlin by Erik Larson

The first party is for some of the most important people in our professional lives – our partners. These are the folks behind the scenes who make us look so darned good. People like our designers, web developers, photographers, videographers, representatives from printing companies and other close friends and colleagues. The talents of these wonderful professionals make it possible for us to do good work and have happy clients.

We hold this celebration after work at the Raleigh Times over delicious bar snacks and beer and wine. The other great thing about our partners is that they’re all good folks with whom we’re happy to lift a glass (or two… or three… or four) with.

Tonight is our smaller company celebration. With spouses in tow, we’ll enjoy a delicious dinner at a local restaurant, then retire to Karen Sinclair’s house for dessert and a dirty Santa gift exchange. And laughing. Lots of laughing. Some years the gift exchange is dirtier than others – we’ll get back to you Friday about how this year’s goes.

Some of us stay here for the holidays. Others travel to hometowns. Our office will be closed Dec. 24th – 26th. We’ll re-open on the 27th to close out 2012.

At a recent tradeshow it was apparent that people are running out of ideas when it comes to giveaways. I didn’t see the quantity of stuff that’s normally out there, and what I did see lacked in creativity.

Over the years we’ve had a couple of clients who were firm believers in giveaways. And we agree! They’re more than just trinkets, they are concept builders and memory makers.

Here are two of our concepts that have stood out over the years:

Metrics Inc. used a baseball theme in 2009 to promote their team of scientists and their approach to client work. Each person at the booth had their own baseball card, complete with a picture on the front and stats on the back. We also gave out baseballs (stress balls), peanuts and popcorn in the exhibition hall

The concept was rounded out with:

• Ads in trade publications (printed front/back – very innovative!),
• A networking event where we gave out baseball-themed prizes and showed baseball movies and blooper reels on screens around the room, and
• A creative website implementation.

The concept was a hit and Metrics is still asked about it at shows.

Another good example is from Mulkey, a Raleigh-based engineering firm. Taking from their updated branding color palette, they gave out ice cold bottles of Orange Crush and Mulkey branded bottle openers at events, which reinforced their unique brand and connected them to a Southern favorite that folks were sure to remember.

I was pleased this year when Metrics told me that he’d been told that “Metrics had the best giveaway of the whole show.” Made my day!

Metrics trust message was communicated through a custom backscratcher imprinted with “We’ve got your back!”

Many people see a giveaway as just that, but it’s important to integrate a giveaway into a show or event and make it a memorable branding opportunity.

We’d love to hear how you’ve used giveaways at your shows and events. Tell us in the comments what your favorite was!

The commonalities: They’re all there to get exposure, make connections, get new leads, catch up with key clients, etc. And of course, they all want to feel like the trip (and the expense) was worth it in the end.

But there are quite a few differences. Each one had a different booth size, different strategy and a very different outlook on the show.

The challenge for me is to support each one with the right amount of attention. And to be there when they need me and to get things done for them. Whether it’s helping with basic booth strategy, troubleshooting structure or booth layout problems, or executing a PR campaign during the show, I really enjoy working with each one and helping them get the most out of the show.

I also enjoy going around and looking at the companies who are new, who have rebranded, or who have invested in a new booth or campaign. And it seemed that 2012 was a year for added expense when it came to booth space and branding. Quite a few companies added to their space with more and bigger structures, or with new creative campaigns.

I look forward each year to assisting in the planning and strategy sessions for AAPS – and to seeing those plans being implemented.

We’re already thinking about next year and what we can do that’s new and different in San Antonio!

If you look at the date of this blog post and the previous blog post, you’ll see that somewhere along the way, we lost some of our Sinclairity. So when we caution our clients that a blog is big commitment, we say so while shamefully remembering our neglected blog.

When the going gets tough due to busy schedules, unexpected changes or a lack of focus, a blog is one of the easiest things to let slide. So how do you regain that focus? Here’s what we’ve done.

1. Review where you were.

Read your previous posts and see what you think of them. Use the distance and perspective to think about what you’d like to do differently.

2. Document where you want to be.

The big takeaway from our blog review is that we didn’t always focus on our four core competencies: marketing strategy, creative, digital and PR. We meandered a bit from our strengths and how we execute on them on a weekly basis. So our plan is to take a more introspective approach to future blog posts and share our perspectives on these areas.

Another idea that we’ve helped our clients with is to brainstorm a list of potential topics and put them on paper. These could be evergreen topics that you can pull from any time to quickly write on a topic you know well. These are good supplemental materials to the day-to-day work you’re doing or current events in your outside world – from your local community to your industry.

3. Repurpose!

The time it takes to put together a blog post seems like a better use of time when you’re using that content multiple ways. We will strive to integrate our Pinterest, Twitter, blog and our newly updated website to tell an ongoing story in a few different ways.

Since we last left our blog in 2010, a lot has changed in the social media world. Many of us at the agency are more involved in Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook and LinkedIn for ourselves and our clients and have been integrating them in interesting ways. We’ll talk more about that in another post.

4. Don’t go it alone.

We are a team of authors who hold each other responsible for generating new content. That’ll help.

If your blog has a single author, then reach out to your network, audience or colleagues for inspiration. Sometimes blogging can seem like shouting into a black hole, but knowing that you have a support network that is listening to what you have to say can add purpose to your posts. And it’s never a bad idea to keep your audience in mind for anything you’re writing.

5. It happens.

I recently heard from one of my favorite blogger friends who had slowed the pace of posting to his own blog. He shared that he was taking some time to reassess his material. I liked hearing this for a couple of reasons.

First, it’s a great idea to proactively take a step back and review your content and see if it is speaking to your own perspective and adding to the conversation. How are people responding to your posts: which ones draw the most comments, which the least?

Second, it is comforting to know that even a very good blogger who is an author and has a strong, unique perspective struggles. It happens.

We are excited to announce that we will be partnering with Dress for Success, an international not-for-profit organization that maintains a mission to promote the economic independence of disadvantaged women by providing professional attire, a network of support and career development tools to help women thrive in work and in life.

We encourage our friends, family, clients and vendors to join us in cleaning out our closets! Through our collected donations we hope to contribute to the confidence needed for women to jump-start their careers.

Please look for more information on our website in the weeks to come. And don’t hesitate to call one of the Sinclair & Co. team members to find out how you can help!