WELCOME ABOARD!
MWB is excited to be working with four new partner clients: Vertex Aerospace, Vision First Advisors, GRASSBuilt, and the Millsaps College Executive Leadership Program.
Vertex Aerospace is a global single-stop solution for aftermarket aerospace services for both government and private sector clients. Headquartered in Madison, Mississippi, Vertex has over 100 locations and thousands of employees across the globe.
Vision First Advisors is a leading economic development consulting firm offering world-class services to both business and governments, focusing on the greater Southeast U.S. Vision First has offices in Tallahassee and Orlando, Florida and Ridgeland, Mississippi. MWB will be providing marketing services for Vision First’s clients.
GRASSBuilt is a sustainable building materials company focusing on end products and building supply material sourced from North American bamboo. Tapping into the sustainable building and LEED architecture markets, GRASSBuilt is on the leading edge of creating a vibrant, domestic bamboo economy. GRASSBuilt’s manufacturing facility is located in Meridian, Mississippi.
Millsap’s Executive Leadership Program focuses on non-degree executive education, with programs tailored to various levels of business experience. Millsaps is a private college in Jackson, Mississippi, and is consistently named on of the “Best Values” in higher education in the country.
We are excited to help our new partner clients build their creative fires!
Joining the Family
We’re excited to announce two new additions to our creative family.
Damien Blaylock is an accomplished film and documentary maker. Damien joins MWB as the agency’s chief Photographer/Videographer. Staying true to our logo, Damien was immediately immersed in the creative fire! His first two weeks at MWB he managed video shoots for Vertex Aerospace, Entergy Nuclear, Millsaps Executive Education program, and the Sanderson Farms Championship PGA event. Jump right in!
Changes in the Family
We’re happy to report two role changes in our MWB talent pool.
Erica Robinson, who had been serving as MWB’s operations manager, has been promoted to Account Executive. Her primary roles will be in project supervision for MWB partner client Entergy Nuclear, and business development.
Congratulations in the Family
A big congratulations to MWB Senior Account Executive Ray Harris for obtaining her Master’s Degree in Organizational Leadership. Ray is an invaluable MWB talent who is active in strategic planningd project management for MWB partner clients including Visit Jackson, HOPE, the Mississippi State Department of Health, and the Mississippi Emergency Management Association.
We celebrated Ray becoming the “most educated” person at MWB with caramel cake…because NOTHING says leadership quite like caramel cake.
Marketing, with IMPACT
We like to highlight projects that we help develop which align with our company’s CreateForGood mantra. Here are a couple that demonstrate how creativity can lead to positive impact:
Condoms & Comedy: HIV Awareness
HIV isn’t a death sentence anymore, but you MUST get into and remain in a treatment program to live an active, productive life. The issue also hovers around many taboo topics not easily addressable by traditional advertising. With the aid of rising comedian Rita Brent, we helped produce a humor-based HIV awareness campaign that tackled the hyper-sensitive issue. The stand-up comedy promotion received over 120,000 views from within Mississippi, and logged an average watch time of (amazingly) over 18 minutes per viewing. Overall, MWB’s HIV awareness building projects have been part of a successful public health advocacy effort that has helped decrease the number of people living with undiagnosed HIV in the state by 33% since 2012.
Check out the HIV awareness projects here.
WARNING: Some material is NSFW.
City with Soul
We helped Jackson, Mississippi revitalize its brand and make an impact with millennial travelers. Through a unique blend of entertainment-based content, a social-centric branding effort, and pop-culture focused marketing approach, our outreach effort for Visit Jackson has received International acclaim, with the “My City” original song and music video being honored at the London-based International City/Nation/Place awards. Special shout out to creative collaborators AJC & the Envelope Pushers and SpotOn Productions for help with that awesome project. You can see many of the newly-branded Visit Jackson projects we’ve helped produce at JXN.ms.
Highlighted Partner Client
The 2018 Sanderson Farms Championship is being played October 25 – 28, and will be televised on the Golf Network.
This month we’d like to give a special shout out to our partner client, Century Club Charities! Since 1994, they have been the host organization for the Mississippi PGA TOUR event, The Sanderson Farms Championship, raising over $13 million for Mississippi charities. The 2018 Sanderson Farms Championship PGA tournament is in full swing! Held annually at the Jackson Country Club, the tournament raised over $4 million over the past four years for Friends of Children’s Hospital, a charity benefiting the Blair E. Batson Children’s Hospital at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. Additionally, the event brings over $26 million of economic activity each year to the Jackson metro area.
The 2018 Sanderson Farms Championship is being played October 25 – 28, and will be televised on the Golf Network.
Walking the Walk
At MWB, we invest our own resources into powering initiatives that reflect our CreateForGood mantra. Here’s an update on two of our favorite MWB-powered CreateForGood projects.
Spark-O-Matic kicked off it’s robotics education in a big way with two engineering volunteers, Susan and Nathan Hancock from Raytheon, who are leading the students in work study ideas for designing the robot to face this year’s FIRST Tech Challenge.
Spark-o-Matic also received two technology grants: One from Entergy Mississippi and one from Thebeanpath.org, an amazing new non-profit that helps cultivate tech-savvy-ness and startup thinking for all ages. With the grant money, Spark-o-Matic is procuring technology so the kids can delve further into robotics, digital illustration, and video production.
Finally, the students will soon be immersed in a video project with Cindy Ayers-Elliot of Footprint Farms, creating mini-docs of various farming aspects. (Getting digitally back to the earth!) And soon, we’ll find out if the short film they did highlighting the amazing Sister Thea Bowman is a finalist in the upcoming Crossroads Film Fest.
Spark-o-Matic is a program powered by MWB which helps underserved young people in Jackson, Mississippi find their voice and become leaders through active roles in our increasingly digitized world through collaborative digital projects. The program addresses aspects of digital video production, podcasting, animation, and robotics. For more information, contact Marc Leffler.
We have continued our work to advance K-12 computer science education in our state through Kids Code Mississippi, an initiative founded by MWB Creative Director, Randy Lynn, and President, Tim Mask. Randy has worked closely with teams at the Mississippi State University Research and Curriculum Unit to guide the launch and implementation of CS4MS, a K-12 computer science pilot program that has reached over 30,000 students to date.
In July, Randy attended the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s Atlanta Picademy and is planning to use his training there to develop coding and “digital making” opportunities in Mississippi that incorporate the Foundation’s low-cost single board computers. Earlier this month, Randy participated in the 2018 Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP) Conference in Detroit. He will be serving on Mississippi’s ECEP board to develop a 15-year strategic plan for bringing computer science education to every school in Mississippi by 2024.
Kids Code Mississippi is an advocacy and program development initiative dedicated to exposing Mississippi youth to the opportunities associated with computer science education.
Blurbs
TEDxJackson is coming back, January 24, 2019. The theme is “The Next 200.” If you have an “idea worth spreading” and would like to be considered for a TEDxJackson talk, visit and click on “speak.”
On September 27, MWB Account Executive Erica Robinson was a guest speaker via Facebook Live, joining Dr. Vera Tarman, author of Food Junkies. The topic was strategies to get away from sugar addiction, which afflicts millions of people and can be highly detrimental to health.
Shout out to funny lady, uber-rising star, and MWB creative collaborator Rita Brent. Rita finished first runner-up this summer at the prestigious Wings of Comedy competition at the Black Film Festival in Miami. AND, airing November 1 on TruTV, Rita’s classic “S*** Shoes” routine comes to life, as she’s featured on LaffMob. Enjoy!
The Mississippi Coding Academies have been a raging success. With students enrolled in the program’s Jackson and Columbus locations, the academies are developing job-ready coders with an 11-month course. This is a huge win for the innovation ecosystem of Mississippi. Learn more!
From Around The Web: Our Obsessions
Education. Computer Science for all! Many programs are focusing on computer science education for high school or post-high school students. A new concept middle school in Washington D.C. is democratizing computer science and helping to bridge the digital gap by focusing on digital inclusivity along socio-economic lines. Read the full article and follow us on Twitter at @MWB_ed.
Public Health. New research seems to indicate that the same virus that causes cold sores may create lasting brain damage, potentially leading to Alzheimer’s or dementia. This discovery could hold major ramifications for treatment and prevention. Catch the buzz and stay connected via Twitter @mwb_pubhealth
Sports. The Boston Globe has produced an excellent and in depth series on the Aaron Hernandez tragedy called Gladiator. See what roles upbringing, environment, repression, and possibly CTE ayed in the horrible chain of events that affected so many of those around the one-time NFL star. Get the series and connect with us @MWB_sports
WARNING: Some of it may be NSFW.
Space. ispace, a Japanese lunar exploration company, is partnering with SpaceX to send a pair of automated rovers to the lunar surface by 2021. This would represent the first documented private-sector presence on the Moon in our history. Check it out and join us over at @MWB_cosmos
See you next month.
MWB is an idea + creative content company that focuses on creating positive impact in helping partners maximize their brands.
#CreateForGood