#create something more

At Traction, a designer is never really just a designer. Our designers are problem solvers, brainstormers, planners, and collaborators. Around here, we don’t segregate by title or experience. We don’t believe in Seniors or Juniors or Production-ors. 

We do, however, believe in talent, and work ethic, and teamwork, and structure, and the desire to master new areas of your craft.

So, if you’re a designer of handsome things that have purpose, and you don’t really care what the title on your business card says as long as you get to roll up your sleeves and Create Something More, the empty seat in the design loft may just have your name all over it.

Here at Traction, we’ve had the good fortune of cultivating an active client list that includes some of the most revered and longest-running companies in our market. Names like BC Clark Jewelers, Lyric Theatre of Oklahoma, Allied Arts, The Skirvin Hilton, and Dunlap Codding are always fun to drop when people ask us who some of our clients are.

The newest addition to that list is Earl’s Rib Palace, the consensus pick for OKC’s best BBQ over the last 20 years.

Hoping to pro-up and maximize their marketing strategy leading into their 20th anniversary this June, and looking for a longterm marketing partnership, the Earl’s brass gave us a shout back in February to see what Traction was all about.

Thanks to a mutual respect for BBQ and creativity, the conversation casually evolved into a revelation that Earl’s needed not only a 20th anniversary campaign, but also a brand platform to define their voice and purpose, a branding campaign to deliver it, and a website to reinforce it.

With their June anniversary right around the corner, we quickly realized we were cramming a lot into a really small window. We also realized that anything is possible when you’re fueled by great BBQ.

In six short weeks, we conducted an intensive DIG Brand Discovery workshop, laid out a comprehensive brand platform, produced a branding campaign, developed a new website, and planned their 20th anniversary campaign.

EarlsRibPalace.com. This is Oklahoma BBQ.

Over the last couple of months, we’ve slowly and systematically rolled out BC Clark’s new From the Heart of Oklahoma campaign with the plan of achieving maximum recognizability and familiarity leading up to a heavy holiday push, while still having fresh messaging for the long haul.

In case you’ve missed our previous posts about From the Heart of Oklahoma campaign, we helped BC Clark Jewelers craft and coordinate this effort to shine a light on their deep Oklahoma roots, their commitment to the local community, and their promise to always offer customers hand-selected diamonds from ethical, responsible sources.

The last piece of the From the Heart of Oklahoma TV campaign, From the Heart of Oklahoma - Institutional, is currently catching viewers’ attention during high-profile local and national programming.

While the first two spots to air, From the Heart of Oklahoma - Engagement and From the Heart of Oklahoma - Jewelry (both embedded below) mixed campaign and product messaging, our latest shifts the focus to OKC and the Clark family’s 123-year commitment  to the local spirit that makes our city and state what it is today.

If storing and sharing files is part of your everyday life (and thanks all those devices full of apps, photos and videos, it probably is) there's a good chance you're already familiar with the secure file hosting/synching/sharing platform Dropbox. And if you're not, you really should check it out.

We've actually been huge fans and early adopters of the service going back to 2009 when everyone else was just discovering YouSendIt.com (now HighTail.com) in place of the then-ubiquitous USB stick.

During our first couple of years with Dropbox, we leveraged their friendly referral program to build up one of our accounts to brag-worthy 10GB+ of storage space, which was used to conveniently pass files back and forth, internally and with clients and vendors.

But soon, our storage needs surpassed our storage capacity and we were forced to upgrade to a centralized paid "Pro" account with 1TB of space. And even though we had yet to run out of room in that sizable box, we knew it would just be a matter of time before those walls started closing in us. Which made us step back and ask ourselves why, in 2015/16, should anyone be worrying about a defined amount of space.

Enter Dropbox Business.

The time has come to go all in. The time has come to go to the cloud - to infinity and beyond!

Dropbox has been trying to get us to convert to Dropbox Business for a while now. They've sent countless emails professing the benefits and features. They've served up ads that follow us to the ends of the Internet. They've been constant and consistent and relentless.

But there were a few things keeping us on high-center. For one, the price. We were skating by with barely any monetary investment in Dropbox, but reaping big benefits from their $99/yr Pro account.

And because several of us were also using personal Dropbox accounts for work and personal purposes, ignoring Dropbox's advances meant we didn't have to worry about the logistics of managing multiple accounts per computer/device.

But then we got an email telling us we could upgrade FREE for 30 days to give Dropbox Biz a test run. After some quick research into how it works, running the pricing for our team a few different ways, and meeting on it a time or two to discuss how it would help Traction, we decided to finally pull the trigger.

You might be thinking, “But why did you run pricing? It’s just a free trial!” Well, because we had the foresight to realize that 30 days would probably be just enough time for the new features and benefits to get ingrained into our workflow.

We were prepared for the likelihood that, once we dove in, there would be no turning back.

Biz And Beyond

We’ll skip over all the technical tidbits about how we went about setting things up (easily) and how we’re currently incorporating Dropbox Business into our day-to-day (conveniently). Instead, we'll get straight to how it’s working out. The important thing here is that Dropbox for Business is good – really good.

After the week or so of tasking our machines and internet service (thank goodness we are on Cox’s fastest business plan), everything was pushed securely upstream from our machines to the cloud. We now work directly from our Dropbox folders, and every time we save a file, it quietly and quickly duplicates itself within Dropbox and makes it a breeze to then share any file, even directly from the iOS app.

A quick glance in the Admin Console tells us we’ve collectively synched just over 500GB. Considering we each get twice that amount of storage (10TB total), it's safe to assume that Dropbox Business will be the guardian of the entire 2TB catalog of digital files we've amassed over the years... with the exception of the numerous video drives that, for the time being, will remain backed up to other hard drives because they're just too big to move.

The Initial Last Word

Every project starts with a brief.

So South by Southwest (SXSW) is in full effect right about now. No, we aren't there. Honestly, and thank goodness, we're too busy with work to take the time away from the office to attend conferences, conventions, and festivals. But we can't escape it on social media. And we just saw this video drop on Facebook & Twitter from local creatives (and fellow partners in crime via IgniteOKC) The Idea Collective featuring 13 Okie natives who create, including agency friend and client, Justin Briggs, with Baton, an app branded by us and formulated by his startup Chorus Labs.