Every year at its Continental Congress, the Daughters of the American Revolution awards its Americanism Medal to a naturalized U.S. citizen who has shown extraordinary qualities of leadership, trustworthiness, service and patriotism. And for the five years that I have been invited to the event, this is the award presentation that chokes me up—without fail.
Last evening, during opening ceremonies of the 117th annual Congress, DAR awarded the 2008 medal to Rev. Luis León, a Cuban immigrant who is now pastor of St. John’s Episcopal in Washington, D.C., one of the country’s most prominent and historic churches. In 1961, the 12-year-old León came to the United States with his sister on one of the “Operation Peter Pan” flights. He arrived in Miami with $3 in cash and the promise of a foster home until his parents could join him. It has proved more than enough to propel him to a successful career and compassion-filled life.
Baptized into the Episcopal Church in Guantanamo, Cuba, he went on to serve as rector of Trinity Church in Delaware and St. Paul’s Church in New Jersey, specializing in building inner city parishes. León has been rector of St. John’s and the “President’s Priest” since 1994, offering the invocation at the second inauguration of President Bush.
In his remarks at last night’s event, León joked that this wasn’t his first encounter with the DAR. When at Berry Academy in Rome, Ga., he won the DAR Good Citizen award—well before he had become a citizen. The lump in the throat moment started when he talked about his affection for his adopted country—once an unknown place, but now a known and loved world.
Did you know? DAR members have long been noted for their devotion to new immigrants. In 1921, the National Society published the DAR Manual for Citizenship, which was distributed to American immigrants at Ellis Island and other ports of entry. To date, more than 10 million manuals have been distributed.
Hammock salutes its client, the DAR, for all its important and ongoing service to the country. Best wishes for a successful Congress.

A report recently released by Junta42 and BtoB magazine reveals that business marketers spend on average 29.42 percent of their budgets on custom content. This is slightly higher than that the 2007 studies by the Custom Publishing Council and Publications Management, which found marketers spending 27 percent on average for B2B and B2C. Spending on custom products is on the rise, too. In 2008, 42 percent of business marketers increased their spending on customized content marketing.

Find the full list of custom products used by marketers responding to the study here.

An article a couple of weeks back in the New York Times
about the upcoming season of Mad Men on AMC (which begins July 27)
got me thinking about what’s changed in the world of advertising.
Mad Men, which won a Golden Globe for its first season, focuses on a Madison Avenue advertising agency in the early 1960s. It chronicles what workplaces were like when smoking, drinking and womanizing were all part of the work culture. Mad Men also gives a pretty good glimpse into the creative process of developing ad campaigns.
At Hammock, we are particularly interested in advertising agencies because in addition to creative development, media buyers reside in those shops. Media buyers and their clients buy the advertising that we run in several Hammock-published magazines. Hammock manages the sale of advertising as part of the services we provide to clients.
My most senior colleague in the world of advertising, Dennis Connaughton, corporate general manager at the James G. Elliott Co., is far too young to have worked in advertising in the early 60s, but he does have more than 30 years of experience in working for agencies, as well as experience on the client side for Chevrolet, and even as a former publisher of Field & Stream.
I work with Dennis on the sale of NFIB‘s MyBusiness magazine to media buyers. Dennis’ perspective is particularly useful to all of our clients who carry advertising in their publications. The current advertising environment has changed dramatically in the past five years, not to mention the past 30 years.
So I decided to ask Dennis whether he’d be willing to give us a perspective on the changing dynamics of advertising over the course of his career. I doubted he would share many tales of drinking or smoking or womanizing. (If that’s what you’re looking for, you may want to stop reading now, and buy the first season of Mad Men on Amazon instead.)
Otherwise, tune into a Q&A podcast with Dennis here (Just over 22 minutes, 10.3 MB, mp3).

We enjoy our work here at Hammock Inc., and we get a great deal of satisfaction from knowing that it’s done well. But we won’t lie and tell you we don’t enjoy a pat on the back from time to time. So we’ve been grinning all day at our recent mention in Folio:, the magazine of the magazine industry.
The article on Folio:’s website details our work in redesigning and repositioning American Spirit, the member magazine we publish for the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution.
Read on to see how we helped the DAR:

• Position the magazine as a resource on American history
• Reach younger readers
• Improve circulation

Hammock Inc.’s client, the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution, is exhibiting a collection of newly acquired documents related to one of the Revolutionary War’s unsung heroes, General Henry Knox. Recently, Rex Hammock visited DAR archivist Tracy Robinson to learn more about Knox and the collection on display.

Happy Fourth of July!

When the night has come/And the land is dark/
And the moon is the only light we’ll see …
The opening lines to Ben E. King’s classic song “Stand By Me” describe the situation American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan face every night when their enemies are on the move. Fortunately, the U.S. leads the world in night-vision technology, which helps deny the bad guys their would-be invisibility cloak.

“Magazine” originally meant a storehouse for supplies — especially weapons and ammunition. So magazines held a variety of things in all shapes and sizes. For most people today, “magazine” means a periodic publication filled with — you guessed it — a variety of items in all shapes and sizes. Today, small is the new big.

A visually arresting image is the first thing readers notice about a cover, as Art Director Kerri Davis explains in this post. But in that brief moment of attention you also have to have the right words to whet their appetites and invite them to actually open the issue and sample all the delicious content. So how do we make ’em dig in?

Word games. Cover blurb time is word play time at Hammock. Depending on the audience, we might play with puns (“Arts, Cynics and Old Lace” promotes the history of the lace-making industry), tease with phrases that carry double meanings (“Iron Lady” profiles the woman who helped build the Brooklyn Bridge) or play it straight with needed solutions (“Beat Burnout”) or timely information (“Warriors’ Weekend”).

Promises, promises. Who doesn’t want to be better, stronger, faster, smarter? We try not to over-do it, but if we can deliver the goods to help our readers do their jobs or live their lives more successfully, we’ll promote it with blurbs like “7 Steps to Faster Growth,” “10 Ways to Save Gas” or even “How to Cook a Colonial Breakfast.” That said, we don’t over-promise–if it’s not the first time we’ve done this or if she’s not the only woman to have done that, we won’t say so just for the hook.

I’m talking to you. We question, listen to and study our audiences to learn what topics they want to read about most–and then give the people what they want. What excites our readers? Do they enjoy stories about genealogy? We’ll use related words on the cover to signal, “Hey, we heard you! Take a look at this story about finding your family photos online.”

Want more? Take a look at this expanded post on Hammock’s Custom Media Craft blog.

We’re talking about what makes a great cover today at Hammock. We follow some guidelines when we design a cover, but there’s a lot of feel to it, as well. I thought I’d share a few of my thoughts here.

Fonts
I like to use bold fonts to deliver a sense of confidence and authority. A narrow font could appear wimpy. I also like to play with the size of the main headline on the cover. I usually like to see it really small and then blow it up really big to see what direction to go.

Juxtaposing the image and the banner
If you have a person on the cover, it’s important to play with the size and crop. Sometimes you have to figure out how much of the banner you can cover up and still be able to read it. With national titles, that’s not so important. Time or Sports Illustrated could cover most of the banner and still have an effective, instantly recognizable cover, but with our custom magazines and our clients, seeing the banner clearly is more important.

The role of the banner
A lot of our banners stay the same color from issue to issue. If they do change, finding the right color for that is very important. Sometimes, I like for the banner to blend in more with the image so that the focus is on the person. I don’t want the color of the banner to overpower the image in any way.

Color
You also need to be careful choosing colors for other text blocks on the cover. You don’t want it to look like a Crayola box. I usually keep the colors choices to about two or three colors, with white or black being the main choice.

Finding the right person and shot
When a person is on the cover, their expression has to be engaging. You just know when you see a cover expression. Something about the eyes making a connection or the tilt of the head or the body posture.

When you receive a magazine in the mail, or purchase one at the newsstand, it’s easy not to notice the many elements in common that most magazines share. There is a bit of science behind the art of building a good cover. Check some recent covers we have published to see our notes on the science of a cover — the standard elements that most covers share in common:

• Banner (sometimes called “nameplate”)
• Tagline
• Image
• Cover blurbs
• UPC code
• Price
• Date/Volume number

But the art of a cover remains more elusive, more difficult to nail down. The same elements go into a mundane magazine cover and into an award-winning one. What’s the difference between blah and wow?
I asked Jamie Roberts, our editorial director, and Kerri Davis, our art director, to give me some insight into the thoughts and planning that go into an award-winning magazine cover.