Custom, Branded Program Taps Social Media to Engage ConsumersCINCINNATI, May 25, 2010 – One of the latest promotions on Epicurious.com, the premier food and recipe website, is designed to engage foodies, salad enthusiasts and gourmets alike.

Working with Girard’s Salad Dressing and a creative concept developed and designed by Empower MediaMarketing, Epicurious.com launched Everyday Elegance: From San Francisco to your table. The Everyday Elegance blog is sponsored by Girard’s and hosted by Epicurious.com. It features insights from food bloggers, 14 recipes using Girard’s premium salad dressings as well as access to coupons to encourage product trial.

The sponsored blog helps to increase awareness and trial of Girard’s Salad Dressings by highlighting its newest flavors: Apple Poppyseed, Peach Mimosa and Creamy Balsamic through recipes like a Grilled Chicken and Waldorf Salad Wrap. 

“Epicurious enjoyed helping execute this innovative program – wrapping content, ads, recipes and coupons together to go beyond conventional paid media sponsorships and engage with our discerning readers,” said Tanya Wenman Steel, editor in chief of Epicurious.com. 

As part of the program, paid media highlights recipes on Epicurious.com, Bon Appetit and the popular Epicurious iPhone app. With 1.6 million downloads of their free iPhone app alone, users can browse and search Epicurious.com’s database of over 28,000 recipes. 

Branded Content Creates Conversations
“Girard’s needed a partner that was a peer brand and appealing to the gourmet and foodie communities,” said Jim Price, president of Empower MediaMarketing. “We knew an engaging creative concept was key and decided to blend the benefits of paid and earned media. This approach helps generate conversation while establishing credibility to the Girard’s brand and encouraging trial.” 

To view the Girard blog featuring a wide variety of recipes added to Epicurious, please visit: Everyday Elegance: From San Francisco to Your Table online.

About Epicurious.com
Epicurious.com, a Condé Nast Digital site, is a premier award-winning food Web site, which incorporates more than 28,000 professionally tested recipes from leading magazines and chefs, 115,000 member-submitted recipes, and web-exclusive original content from Epicurious.com editors and leading food authorities around the world. Epicurious offers a wealth of articles, tips, and videos focused on cooking, entertaining, wine, cocktails, and shopping.

About Girard’s Salad Dressing
Girard’s is a premium quality line of dressings that was created in San Francisco by Chef Pierre Girard in 1939. Girard’s dressings gained prominence for their premium quality and distinctive triangular bottle. Girard’s Salad Dressings are available in more than 18 unique varieties and are owned by The T. Marzetti Company, the specialty food subsidiary of Lancaster Colony Corporation (Nasdaq: LANC). More information about Girard’s Salad Dressing is available online. 

About Empower MediaMarketing
Empower MediaMarketing specializes in communicating to and with its clients’ customers through an integrated combination of media. Its services include a full-service digital team as well as mobile marketing, word of mouth, social media, consumer research and media planning, buying and strategy. For more information, visit us at the Empower web site, or join the conversation at our blog, Social Study, on Facebook or via Twitter.

Ad Pilot With Global Scar Brand Mederma^® and Empower MediaMarketing Outperforms Traditional Search, Display Advertising

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA–(Marketwire – April 20, 2010) –  ShareThis, the world’s largest sharing network, today released results from the first-ever advertising campaign using ShareThis Influence, a segmentation methodology which helps advertisers and publishers reach and identify social influencers. The company also announced new features for ShareThis Influence Insights, which gives publishers a better understanding of their audiences and how to monetize them.

Media and marketing agency Empower MediaMarketing used ShareThis Influence to create a test campaign for Mederma^®, a leading U.S. scar management brand for which Empower plans and places media, which would engage women with scars. As the largest sharing network, reaching over 400 million consumers and analyzing millions of social topics a month, ShareThis is able to find the “Influencers” (the people who share around topics targeted in the campaign), as well as their “Affected” friends (the people who respond to shared information). ShareThis ran influence-segmented creative against identical control creative, analyzing results across multiple segments based on the varying types of influence signals.

The results found that:

• Sharers are the most engaged. Target Influencers had a higher “intent to redeem” compared to search and display control campaigns. Half of the Influencers clicked through to a coupon download page, compared to 1-in-4 for usual search campaigns and 1-in-10 for contextual display campaigns. 
• Sharing begets sharing. The Affected group, who responded to shared information from an Influencer, is an integral part of the sharing experience and value. These highly valuable consumers, who were influenced by their peers, were 1.6 times more likely to redeem than a contextual display campaign. 
• Sharing outperformed search. Sharing performed as well or better than search in most metrics, while providing richer social context and less saturated targeting than traditional search campaigns can provide.

“Tapping into sharing on the web is an effective way to increase engagement and connect brands with extremely engaged audiences in a meaningful way,” said Jim Price, president of Empower MediaMarketing. “Empower was the first to use ShareThis’ Influence products, and it helped us increase intent to convert compared to other forms of search and display advertising we had conducted in the past.”

ShareThis also announced new reports in the private beta of ShareThis Influence Insights, which lets publishers using ShareThis better understand the interests and behavior of their audiences in order to maximize advertising value. ShareThis Influence Insights allows participating publishers to:

• Better understand their site’s social influence.
• Define and value custom social segments.
• Enter broad or niche topics for a campaign and choose a target CPM.

“As an innovator in all things social, Break Media believes in using signals like sharing to drive audience-based advertising campaigns,” said Greg Huntoon, director of social media for Break Media. “We look forward to increasing the value of our premium display inventory by connecting brand advertisers with sought-after influencers on the hundreds of topics covered by the Break Media network.”

Schigel from ShareThis, and Price from Empower MediaMarketing will give a presentation about the results of Mederma’s campaign called “A New World of Word of Mouth: Using Influence to Re-invent the Impression” during ad:tech San Francisco at 4 p.m. on April 20 at Moscone Center North. Speakers can be found on Twitter here.

About ShareThis
ShareThis makes it easy to share ideas and get to the good stuff online. Reaching over 400 million users across 135,000 sites across the web, ShareThis is changing the economics of online publishing by creating a market of influence across the Web. ShareThis allows users to share content from anywhere to anyone while simultaneously enabling publishers and advertisers to tap the value of sharing. Based in Mountain View, Calif., the company is privately held with funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Blue Chip Venture Company, DFJ Mercury, Reservoir Partners, Illinois Ventures, Queen City Angels and RPM Ventures.

About Empower MediaMarketing
Empower MediaMarketing specializes in communicating to and with its clients’ customers through an integrated combination of media. For more information, visit us at the Empower web site, or join the conversation at our blog, Social Study, on Facebook or via Twitter.

Industry Trend Brings Empower MediaMarketing $30 Million LCA-Vision Account on the Heels of 2nd Best New Business Year in Agency’s History

CINCINNATI, April 7, 2010 – Emerging from the economic downturn, major brands are shifting media and marketing responsibilities to a new breed of agencies to get more effective strategies from a media-neutral approach that more closely aligns creative with media to address the impact of digital on all media channels.

“Navigating a constantly evolving media and channel environment, today’s clients are gravitating to fewer agency partners and holistic, channel-neutral communications planning where creative and media are aligned at the get go and digital is at the core,” said Catherine Bension, CEO of agency search firm SelectResources International. “Finding one media firm that can bring best in breed capabilities and experience across the digital realm including social media, mobile emerging media and search is key.”

Empower MediaMarketing is a beneficiary of this trend. Empower, which celebrated its 25th anniversary in February, announced that it is already building on its second best new business year ever in 2009 with a major, Q1 account win to start 2010.

Empower has been assigned digital creative and all media planning and buying duties by LCA-Vision Inc. (Nasdaq: LCAV), a leading provider of laser vision correction services under the LasikPlus® brand. Last year, LCA-Vision spent in excess of $30 million on media placement.

“We chose Empower because of their understanding of our business and their ability to integrate all media channels down to the local level,” says Bharat Kakar, vice president of marketing at LCA-Vision. “With the assistance of Empower, we expect to continue to grow our business at our 62 existing vision centers across the U.S.”

The win puts Empower ahead of its new business pace in 2009, when the agency recorded its second best growth year on record by landing more than a dozen accounts including Hoover, Rustoleum, T. Marzetti and several brands from The Sunny Delight Beverages Company, including Fruit Simple, Bossa Nova, Fruit2O and Fruit2O Essentials.

“Empower’s recent success can be attributed to brands like LCA-Vision who understand the benefit of talking to and with their consumers using an integrated mix of media and marketing services,” said Jim Price, Empower MediaMarketing’s president. “To do this it is critical that brands see digital as a thread through all media channels as opposed to its own media channel.”

Empower’s media and marketing services include media planning and buying, a full-service digital practice, word of mouth marketing, social media marketing, media marketing strategy and consulting, and a consumer insights group that offers consumer research, ROI analysis and several proprietary analytic tools.

About LCA-Vision Inc./LasikPlus®
LCA-Vision Inc., a leading provider of laser vision correction services under the LasikPlus® brand, operates 62 LasikPlus® fixed-site laser vision correction centers in 29 states and 45 markets in the United States. Additional company information is available at www.lca-vision.com and www.lasikplus.com or on Twitter and Facebook.

About Empower MediaMarketing
Empower MediaMarketing specializes in communicating to and with its clients’ customers through an integrated combination of media. For more information, visit us at the Empower web site, or join the conversation at our blog, Social Study, on Facebook or via Twitter.

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Media Contact:
Mark Braff, Braff Communications LLC / 201-612-0707

Taylor Wiegert joins Execs from Associated Press, Apple Computer
on Reynolds Journalism Institute panel discussion

CINCINNATI – March 15, 2010 – Taylor Wiegert will be participating in the Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI) Symposium: “Business, Technology and the Media: Charting a Course Through Chaos” from March 14 through March 16, 2010. The symposium is designed to explore ideas for the future of media. Wiegert will sit on the panel “How Will We Consume News And Information In The Next 10 Years?” with Associated Press Vice President & Director of Strategic Planning, Jim Kennedy and Apple Computer’s Development Executive, Vin Capone.

At Empower MediaMarketing Wiegert generates results for a variety of Empower’s CPG and retail clients by developing and executing social media and marketing programs. He immerses himself in the latest news across the fields of social media, interactive technology, online video and gaming to better educate clients and Empower colleagues. Taylor was recently chosen to present on the future of news by The Cincinnati Enquirer and provides social media consulting to the Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce’s HYPE program. Taylor can be found online at http://www.braveadworld.com, a new blog and podcast featuring a Digital Native’s perspective on new media, and on Twitter @twiegert.

About RJI
The Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI) exists to develop and test ways to improve journalism through new technology and improved processes. In partnership with media organizations and nonprofits, RJI delivers technological and strategic innovations in journalism and advertising. It can be found online at http://www.rjionline.org.

About Empower MediaMarketing
Empower MediaMarketing specializes in communicating to and with its clients’ customers through an integrated combination of media. For more information, visit us online at http://www.empowermm.com, or join the conversation on our blog http://empowermm.posterous.com or on Twitter at @empowermm.

Company-Wide Service Project and Social Media Effort to Benefit Local Non-Profit

CINCINNATI – Feb. 18, 2010 – In recognition of Empower MediaMarketing’s founding in February, 1985, the media and marketing agency is taking an unconventional approach – giving back instead of looking back. The agency’s 160 employees are rolling up their sleeves for a 24-hour-long service project starting at 5 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 18 and ending at 5 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 19. The project taps into social media to make a larger impact.

Empower employees are taking shifts helping the Brighton Center in Northern Kentucky. The Brighton Center is a non-profit organization offering community support services through its Family Center, Bright Days Early Childhood Education Program, Homeward Bound Runaway Shelter, Two Rivers Senior Facility and Saratoga Place Senior Facility. The projects are being documented across several social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. All of the activity is being aggregated on Empower’s site to help tell the Brighton Center’s story.

“While we’re celebrating this milestone, our culture promotes sharing our skills, passion and resources with local organizations in need,” says Jim Price, Empower MediaMarketing President. “This is our way of showing gratitude for the support from the Cincinnati-area community over the last 25 years. It’s helped us become a successful, national agency.”

Offline and Online Support
Empower’s ultimate goal is to use social media to make sure their effort has an impact beyond one day.

“Our micro site is designed to increase advocacy for the Brighton Center,” says Price. “By increasing awareness through social media, our experience tells us that the Brighton Center will see additional volunteers and donations over time. It’s a well-deserving organization with a variety of needs.”

Empower clients and service partners are also supporting the effort, including donations from Hoover, Marco’s Pizza, Meijer, Michael’s and Rust-Oleum.

About Brighton Center
Last year Brighton Center served over 66,000 individuals and families through 41 different programs that support Northern Kentucky. The mission of Brighton Center, Inc. is to create opportunities for individuals and families to reach self-sufficiency through family support services, education and leadership throughout the communities of Northern Kentucky. Brighton Center will achieve this mission by creating an environment which rewards excellence and innovation, encourages mutual respect and maximizes resources. For more information, visit us online.

About Empower MediaMarketing
Empower MediaMarketing specializes in communicating to and with its clients’ consumers through an integrated combination of media. Empower’s services include media planning and buying, a full-service digital practice, word of mouth marketing, social media marketing, media marketing strategy and consulting, and a consumer insights group that offers consumer research, ROI analysis and several proprietary tools. For more information, visit us online or on Twitter.

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CINCINNATI, OH, Jan. 20, 2010 — Empower MediaMarketing announced today it has been named media agency of record for Hoover, Inc., a leading manufacturer and distributor in the floor care category owned by TTI Floor Care North America. Annual billings are estimated at $30 million by Nielsen Monitor-Plus.

Brian Kirkendall, vice president of marketing for Hoover, said, “We chose Empower MediaMarketing based on the team’s extensive experience in the category and outstanding track record in the development and execution of national media strategies that get results.”

As media agency of record, Empower will handle all of Hoover’s media planning and buying, including national television, magazines and digital. Empower also will handle digital creative.

Jim Price, president of Empower MediaMarketing, said, “As Hoover implements its 2010 strategy, we are focused on helping them reinvigorate their iconic brand by leveraging their history and staying relevant to their customers as they reclaim their position in the category.”

About Hoover
From the first Hoover vacuum launched in 1907, to today’s new T-Series line of high-performance lightweight floor cleaners, the Hoover brand continues a tradition of innovation through a comprehensive line of floor care products, including lithium-ion battery powered cordless vacuums, full-size, bagged and cyclonic upright and canister vacuums, carpet cleaners, hard-floor cleaners and central vacuum systems. A part of the TTI Floor Care family, Hoover appliances and accessories are available at major retailers and independent dealers throughout the United States and Canada. For more information, visit www.Hoover.com.

About Empower MediaMarketing
Empower specializes in helping its clients communicate to and with consumers through an integrated combination of media. Empower’s services include Media Planning and Buying, a full-service Digital practice, Word of Mouth Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Media Marketing Strategy and consulting, and a Consumer Insights group that offers consumer research, ROI analysis and several proprietary tools. For more information, visit us online, read our latest thinking on our blog and follow us on Twitter.

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