May 19, 2008
American Marketing Association ACE Awards
The Reno Tahoe Chapter of the AMA hosted their annual ACE Awards event last Thursday at a black tie soirée at Harrah’s. We had a fine time with all the fine dining, festivities, and the cheep beer we snuck inside our chrome courier bags. Events like this are a great time to hang out with all the fun and talented people in Reno-Tahoe and a for the Twelve Horses team to celebrate what we do best: results driven online marketing campaigns.
Top honors went to our work with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for the Heavenly Mountain Resort Website. The judging, which was done by the Tampa Bay Chapter this year, focuses heavily on the results of the campaign. Through a combination of keyword analysis, optimization of code and navigations structure, pay-per-click advertising, link building, blogging, and social marketing we have elevated them in the organic search results for many different branded and non-branded keywords. The results have been impressive and the amount of qualified traffic has steadily increased.
An Award of Excellence went to the Las Vegas Monorail Ticketing System, a fully custom built interface that lets the Las Vegas Monorail sell, redeem and service tickets online and through channel partners. This carefully thought out system has boosted sales for the Las Vegas Monorail and exposed them to new revenue opportunities all while being easy to administer, maintain and modify. This entry was by far the most technical, but online marketers need to be able to strategize and scope the design and development of an online application such as this in order to achieve the best results for their company.
We grabbed another award for Heavenly who walked away with an Award of Excellence for their Flash Promotion Widget. Wanting to increase online bookings by featuring different promotions and services on their homepage, but faced with the challenge of limited real estate on the homepage of their website, they needed a new approach. The answer was a fully customizable flash-driven widget that would overlay on the homepage and drive customers to their commerce site, The widget could also be taken on and off the homepage and moved to other areas as needed. Now Heavenly can prominently push packages and last minute deals on the homepage without sacrificing other promotions or compromising the design of the website.
Finally, we took home a Certificate of Excellence for our Bobofest Social Media Marketing campaign for the Reno-Sparks Convention and Visitor’s Authority (RSCVA). The RSCVA is always seeking to enhance the “America’s Adventure Place” message and they wanted to have a greater new media impact online. To that end we coordinated with their traditional Public Relations and Marketing campaigns to take images, video and content surrounding an exciting basejumping stunt that happened in downtown Reno, and spread it far and wide on the web. It garnered a lot of results for them and even today it is relevant and generating lots of views and traffic..
Thanks to the AMA for the recognition, and congrats to all the other talented local marketers honored by the AMA. Super special congratulations to our good friend Dave Archer, who, not only looked super slick in his tuxedo, but also ran off with the Marketer of the Year Award for his work with the Nevada’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology!
-Mike
Posted in Company News, Marketing, Reno-Tahoe, Social, Travel & Tourism, Web & SEO
