Step Into Liquid – A profile of HV from Twin Cities Business magazine

Many thanks to Gene Rebeck (@generebeck), Senior Editor of Twin Cities Business and blogger at BTW, for his kind profile of Hello Viking: “Step Into Liquid.”

Here’s the piece:

April 08, 2010

Hello Viking: Step Into Liquid

Fluid. The great sea ahead. A fine caffeinated beverage. An ideas-fueled conversation. A business model that recalculates and reconfigures itself with the demands of the market. Minneapolis marketing agency Hello Viking isn’t a solid—it’s a liquid.

(I’ve resisted saying that talking with the founders at their Franklin/Hennepin digs was a gas. Looks like I didn’t. It’s true, anyway.)

What does Hello Viking do? Traditional advertising, branding, and marketing—yeah, some of that. Digital projects (clients include General Mills and Best Buy Mobile via Persuasion Arts & Sciences, a longtime collaborator). Software design—it recently launched an intriguing social-media monitoring, curating, and content-generating tool called Curation Station. Banner ad design, through its offshoot BannerPalooza, for the NBA’s New York Knicks and agencies Fallon, Carmichael Lynch, and 180 La, among many others. Video production has become a big part of its work. Web site design—if by “design” you mean more than pretty pictures. Analytics, strategy, SEO, social media.

“A year ago, I’d say 40 percent of our work was traditional advertising, 40 percent digital, and 20 percent software development,” says Tim Brunelle, who launched Hello Viking’s longship in June 2007 with cofounder Jennifer Iwanicki—both have had advertising and interactive careers mostly on the East Coast.

“Now it’s about 30 to 40 percent strategy, 30 to 40 percent software and Web development—design, coding—and 20 to 30 percent production.”

“We think of ourselves as an innovation agency,” Jennifer says. “Products and companies can be inherently marketed, by what they do.” Not only the product itself, but all the touch points—customer service, packaging, even “back-office” functions like warehousing and distribution.

What’s fascinating is that Hello Viking can do all that it does with a staff of (so far) 12 people. That’s part of the fluidity: the staffers are conversant in many disciplines. (Hello Viking also is plugged into two local creative/marketing consortiums, Magnet 360 and Known Associates.) As Tim says, “You need to be fluent in three or four marketing dialects.”

Clients need to learn how to talk to—and listen to—the languages of younger customers. Contrary to what was sometimes said in the slacker ’90s, Jennifer believes that “younger generations are accessible to being marketed to.” But they want to connect in their own way.

When Tim was working for Arnold on Volkswagen’s Web site, he found that hardly anyone would fill out an online registration form. “But they gladly, gleefully gave out a lot of their personal information to Volkswagen’s Facebook fan page,” he notes.

A growing part of Hello Viking’s work has been recruitment projects. One, for PricewaterhouseCoopers, is Carbon Bigfoot, a Facebook application that calculates the visitor’s carbon footprint. It also positions PwC as a green and globally conscious employer that young people should consider.

Hello Viking’s varied capabilities mean that it’s especially interested in working with clients (says Tim) “who are open to looking for unexpected solutions” to both marketing and business problems, preferably both. “How a company distributes a product, designs it, who it affiliates with, how it operates—these are all marketing issues,” he adds.

Clients are getting this idea in this digitized decade, though as any agency will tell you, not all are quite ready to “look for opportunities under the floorboards” (Tim’s phrase, referring to nontraditional approaches); or “allow a look under the company’s hood” (Jennifer’s, referring to the fact that companies seeking those opportunities need to be transparent, listening to customers and relinquishing some control to them).

One client that Hello Viking says is open to and collaborative with its approach is Jostens, whose Web site Hello Viking is currently redesigning, in collaboration with Capsule Design. “The fluid process,” Tim says, “has been very mutual.”

The next Jostens site will have both new information architecture and user experience. It will comprise not only improved customer interface—it also is incorporating improved business processes as well—more efficient, streamlined sales and database management systems. Marketing, strategy, and operations—all will interflow.

Half-jokingly (maybe less than half), Jennifer and Tim say that they’re looking for that client that gets what Hello Viking’s about, and that together, agency and client can ride the wave of each other’s success—the way Nike and Wieden & Kennedy have done. One hopes that someday their Phil Knight will come.

The name 1: Minnesota didn’t really inspire the name “Hello Viking,” which becomes more wonderfully mysterious the more one contemplates it. According to Tim and Jennifer, the two words just seemed to come together and hit the right note. (Tim is a jazz musician—speaking of notes, and improvising, and fluidity.) Though he does have Norwegian ancestry. And one of the Hello Vikings staffers is named Knute. And before cofounding Hello Viking, Jennifer was director of production at East Coast digital marketing agencyThe Barbarian Group. From Barbarian to Viking. A logical progression.

The name 2: This post’s title was lovingly appropriated from the 2003 surfing documentary of the same name. Maybe you knew that already.

Step into the Twitter stream: Hello Viking, Twin Cities Business, a certain cultural beachcomber.