New CNP Offices, Coming This May

We're excited to announce that we're expanding our existing office to include the previously unoccupied office space next door (on the corner of 4th Street NW and Avenue A NW).

Construction is already underway, and we anticipate a move-in date of early May.

The new office features 6,400 square feet of open-plan workspace, about 30% more than our existing space. Our staff and clients can look forward to break-out rooms, natural lighting and an open environment perfect for connecting and fostering creativity. Continue Reading

The Hub and Spoke Model for Marketing: The Wheel is Still King

No need to reinvent the wheel. It’s still awesome.

Digital footprints, driving traffic – we’re all on a mission to make our mark and constantly improve our online presences. A marketing strategy based on the Hub & Spoke model can help spread your top notch content across the web and around the (real) world. Luckily, the concept is simple. By making some simple tweaks to your advertising, marketing, PR and social media strategies, you’ll be better much equipped to manage your brand, build up its equity and expand your audience. The execution may require a little work, but the payoff is worth it in the end. Continue Reading

2015 Brings New Talent to CNP

From the team at CNP, we want to wish you a happy 2015! We recently brought a new and energetic face into the office, specifically on our Account Services team. Welcome Maggie! 

Maggie Ross

Culture2A recent college grad, Maggie is the youngest member of the team and fresh into the workforce. As CNP’s new Account Coordinator, she assists familiar faces Whitney and Katrina with their client work. In addition to helping out around the office, Maggie can be found learning even more about agency life than she even knew existed – such as how to throw a frisbee during frisbee breaks at the office or mastering her best poker face in a round of Werewolf after work on Fridays. She brings knowledge of online blogging and social media marketing to the team as well as degrees in Journalism, Advertising, Public Relations and Ad Design. Learn more about Maggie in her agency profile. 

Getting back into the routine around the office since the holidays is always a push, but the team came back with more drive than ever! We can’t wait to see what 2015 has in store for us. 

Interview with a Stock Photograph

I have no problem with the occasional, tactical use of high quality stock photography. But when stock photos become the default choice of imagery – especially those go-to clichés that have a built-in groan factor – I get really worked up. So much so that I can only find relief by imagining conversations like the following…

Interviewer: We’re talking today with “Businessmen Shaking Hands,” ostensibly the most famous stock photograph in the civilized world. How did you become so popular?

Businessmen Shaking Hands (BSH): Well, doesn’t everyone know that? I make a universally appealing visual statement in all languages.

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Creating Sublime Text 3 Plugins – Part 2

Remember that Sublime Text 3 plugin we started? Let's get that bad boy finished so you can get back to pranking your colleagues and then, hopefully, writing meaningful extensions to make your life easier.

Introduction

Thanks for joining me for Part 2 of this series. If you haven’t read Part 1, please do so or most of this won’t make sense. In fact, do it. DO IT NOW.

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Time for a Frisbee Break

There are so many reasons why I love working for CNP but, above all, I love that our company’s personality and culture is what lays the foundation for the great (and often award-winning) work we churn out on a daily basis. Let’s face it – creative problem solving for clients isn’t the most back-breaking work, but it does keep us doing mental pushups pretty much 24/7.

We go home thinking about how to make our design concepts stand out more, which headlines will speak best to a brand’s position and what we can do to provide amazing results with each project we take on – we’re living our work every day of the week. It’s not necessarily something we can turn off and, as we all do, we tend to find ways to free up some mental storage space from time to time.  Continue Reading

Styling Radio Buttons & Select Boxes in Firefox

Thanks to the miracles of CSS, there's not much these days that a front-end developer can't style: we can even put CSS gradients on pseudo-elements, which is pretty nifty.

But one thing, the one thing you should never try styling directly is a radio button. Your CSS hubris will tempt you to do so, but trust me: you’re only in for a world of hurt. I know you may have some questions:

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Becoming a Tourism Marketing Professional

For the last three years I’ve been spending a few days each summer in Dahlonega, Georgia – not to enjoy the Georgia wine trail or to pan for gold, but to take part in Southeast Tourism Society’s annual Marketing College and to receive a Tourism Marketing Professional certification.

Held on the campus of the University of North Georgia, this three-year program gives tourism  professionals like myself the opportunity to learn techniques from all facets of the tourism industry. From generational marketing strategies to data and research, Marketing College introduces new insights from experts with real-world knowledge and experience. Marketing College has allowed me the chance to gain important insight into trends affecting the tourism industry. During my tenure as marketing manager at Bok Tower Gardens I was able to implement tourism marketing strategies to gain traction in positioning the National Historic Landmark to travelers throughout the Central Florida region. Now, since I joined the CNP team earlier this year, I’ll be able to continue to make a meaningful impact marketing our destination to Florida travelers with our partners at Visit Central Florida. Continue Reading

Photo Credit: Norio.NAKAYAMA

How SEO is Like the Art of Bonsai

Aiming for all natural search engine optimization and organic growth? You should be. Cultivate your SEO skill-set by looking at the parallels drawn from the art of bonsai - an art where gentle guidance leads to wondrous developments.

How many times have you meandered past a juniper bush and not paid it any consideration? When have you walked by a meticulously maintained bonsai tree and failed to stop, even for just a moment, and reflect on its purpose and engage in the simplistic beauty? Exactly . . .

SEO is the art and science of tweaking a natural website to become more attractive to an expanded, collective and engaged audience. To entice this audience you need to first identify the primary source of information aggregation used over the past 20 years. Unless you’ve been living under the proverbial rock, then you know the answer is the Internet, and that the true answer is Google. So how do you trick Google into providing preferential ranking to your website? Continue Reading

CNP Makes Tampa Bay Business Journal’s List of Top Agencies

Last week, we were proud to learn that CNP was ranked # 17 on Tampa Bay Business Journal's list of advertising & marketing agencies.

Moving up three notches from number 20 last year, the list is based on the number of agency employees in the Tampa Bay market.   Continue Reading