Insights from Nebo

The rules have changed. At the September 15, 2011 TAG Marketing “State of the Media” panel, business reporter Kristi Swartz (Atlanta Journal-Constitution), technology and healthcare writer Urvaksh Karkaria (Atlanta Business Chronicle), and I-Team Consumer Reporter Dana Fowle (FOX5) joined media consultants Mike Rothman (Securosis) and Grayson Daughters (WaySouth Media) for an important discussion on how media interacts with business in 2011. Here are several “new rules” that you may not have expected. If you don’t follow them, your marketing and public relations attempts may be futile.

Every time Nebo launches a new website, we hit our gong. It is loud. And no matter how many times we launch a new site, the gong always startles us.

Clearly, ringing the gong is a celebration of another finished site, another achievement by our award-winning design and development teams. But we also ring it to celebrate work that is easy to take for granted.

What is the most overhyped aspect of interactive marketing?

Sometimes we have questions. But we don’t have all of the answers.

Question of the Day is a new feature representing the questions Nebo thinks about in the process of doing our work. Only, we’re sharing our questions with you and opening up our conversations to friends, colleagues, and the wider marketing community.

Our questions may range from the visionary-philosophical to the down-and-dirty-practical. We’re curious by nature, so we’re always looking for that extra flash of insight. Asking good questions is more difficult than it looks, but the discussion resulting from a good question can open up new ways of looking at the world.

Even if you don't have the answers, we hope you'll join the conversation, discuss some difficult topics, and learn with us.

In late July, a few weeks after I joined Nebo Agency, I witnessed my colleague Chris Allison eat a ghost pepper – the hottest pepper in the world – in front of the entire Nebo team. Nebo called it the Ghost Pepper challenge. The team filmed it, took pictures, and watched in amusement and sympathy as Chris rolled around on the ground dealing with the effects of the fiery pepper. As the ghost pepper’s intensity waned over the next hour, he met the challenge and won $1000.

When NeboWeb first started, we never went through a proper branding process. Client work came first and we never gave the brand identity the attention it deserved.

Our original logo was created on a whim after I traded a few emails with a designer named Walter Stevenson. He’d found a typeface for the “n” & “w” that I liked, and that mockup became our logo for the next 7 years.  It was a great logo, but we felt like it was time for a change. The word “web” felt dated, and the old brand identity didn’t feel like us anymore.

So in 2010, we decided to rebrand.