Hometown ad agency grows with technology

By Samantha Roberts
Las Cruces Bulletin

The story is actually quite ironic.

As a young boy, David Wilson, partner and account executive of Wilson Binkley Advertising & Marketing (WBAM), thought he was going to be an automotive mechanic. His father owned the first Volkswagen dealership in New Mexico. However, Wilson's parents had bigger dreams for their son, so he enrolled at New Mexico State University and graduated from the university in 1981.

After working for large-scale ad agencies for eight years, Wilson took a job at Borman Autoplex where he oversaw the company's marketing and advertising.

"The company was called Borman Motor Co. back then," Wilson said. "After a while, we started adding so much business that we decided to make advertising a separate business."

Imagine you're having car problems. There you are, minding your own business, happily slurping on your double-soy mocha-latte with your Bluetooth earpiece buzzing away, when the car shudders, groans, and dies. What do you do?

Why, you engage your handy Bluetooth earpiece and you call your mechanic, who dispatches a tow truck to your location, and your defunct machine is hauled away to the shop you have turned to for salvation. "Thank you, Mister Goodwrench," you might say. "Please fix this for me."

Over the years, we have had several clients ask us about the idea of using testimonials in advertising, an technique that is almost as old as sending people out into the streets wearing sandwich boards and ringing bells. It's not that we don't think testimonials are workable - they can be! But as in counterfeiting $100 bills, the devil is in the details, and it takes a lot of work to make a believable testimonial. See this article we read today in the Toronto Globe & Mail.

So what does WBAM have to say about testimonials?

God bless the boys from IT. To stay relevant in to new world of binary wonder, Wilson Binkley is now diving headfirst into the so-called blogosphere, and the IT department has asked for some content. Which pretty much describes the entire day of an Ad Man: give me some content.

One of the coolest things about the ad business is that I don't know what I'm going to write about today. It can be a health-related topic that I know nothing about, or it can be some flowery language to describe the most serene property a shopper can buy. It can be a dry, mechanical press release or it can be a headline for a retail ad. Take this blog for instance -- 20 minutes ago, I didn't know I'd be doing this!