Spokane ad agency Magner Sanborn was named best small agency in the West Coast in a competition arranged by media publication Ad Age.

The award was presented to company principals at a recent event in Minneapolis.

Ad Age gives out a gold and silver award for small, medium and large agencies in four U.S. regions. Small agencies are those with fewer than 150 workers.

Magner Sanborn won the gold for the West Coast region, which includes California and Oregon. The silver winner was an ad agency from San Francisco, said Dennis Magner, one of the company’s founders.

“For us, this validates what we’ve done here, and says that small is great,” he said.

“So often the larger conglomerates get the attention, but the awards recognize that great work is done in smaller agencies,” he said.

Magner Sanborn, launched in 2003 and with offices in downtown Spokane, has 40 workers. Its clients include Amtrak, Thomas Hammer Coffee, Yoke's Fresh Markets, Netflix and others.
  

Spokane ad agency Magner Sanborn is ready for its second shot at Super Bowl advertising fame. This year’s game will include a 60-second spot built around the the secret life of shopping carts.

Two years ago the firm developed three spots for a short-lived new technology product, Flo Tv.

This year’s spot, which will run just before kickoff at 3:30 p.m., is a commercial for Yoke’s Fresh Markets, one of Magner Sanborn’s longstanding clients.

 Dennis Magner, one of the firm’s principals, declined to offer too many details about the project.

“I'd describe it as, ‘eye-opening.’  It’s a revealing look at why shopping carts do what they do,” he said.

The Flo TV ad was shot for a national company and landed in prime Super Bowl slots.

The Yoke’s ad is set for a local time slot made available by KHQ, the Spokane NBC affiliate.

Magner and company partner Jeff Sanborn developed the concept on their own late Monday while working at the firm’s downtown office.

The idea is meant to be catchy and slightly offbeat. No human faces are show, but there is music and voice-over narrative.

Magner and Sanborn contacted Yoke’s the next day and got the green light. They made a call to KHQ and grabbed one spot that was still available.

The spot was shot at exterior locations Wednesday and Thursday. Magner said the goal is a high-level, national-quality ad that gets across a fun message.

Once it airs, the ad will get posted to YouTube and Vimeo. Yoke’s site will also likely feature the spot, said Magner.

 The spot will also be used on local broadcasts beyond Sunday, Magner said

For six months Spokane ad firm Magner Sanborn developed a logo and an extensive brand and marketing components for Qwikster, a top-secret business plan by Netflix to split its company into a new division.

The weekend surprise from Netflix was the news that it dropped plans to spin off its streaming service and rename the DVD-only service as Qwikster.

Instead, the company has just gone back to the way it was. 

That flip and flop won't affect the nearest Netflix distribution center, on Spokane's West Plains near the Spokane Airport.   See the map here showing all the Netflix distribution locations: http://www.moviesinhouse.com/articles/netflix-shipping-centers.html

We'll have a local angle on the Qwikster-Netflix development next week in the business pages of The Spokesman-Review.

Our newsroom colleague Paul Turner mentioned in his Slice column recently the appearance in downtown Spokane of the word “think.” on a mural not far from the heart of town. The source, at the time, was unknown. He later got a message from Dennis Magner, one of the founders of Spokane ad agency Magner Sanborn. Magner explained how the word got there.

The company had just moved this summer into newly remodeled offices on the third and fourth floors of the Banner Bank Building, 111 N. Post.

Magner and partner Jeff Sanborn were looking for some way to crystallize ideas, especially for people in the company’s brand new conference room, which looks out to the east over the roofs of the next block.

They settled on a single word, painted on a wall 50 yards away.

In his note to Paul, Dennis wrote:

So at one level, it’s like having something staring back at us when we’re staring out the window. At another level it’s a reminder to our staff that good “thinking” is the core product that we provide. And hopefully it reminds some other folks to think along the way as well.

 Can anyone else find something similar in the community, a calling card or corporate slogan that has  become a quiet (or noisy) part of the landscape?  Please let us know if you know of something that fits.