Specialty gases website wins award

Who knew?

While our Air Liquide America Specialty Gases Marketing Communications team has been preoccupied with trenching in to fight the SEO wars, Matthew Schmidt Design, the agency that masterminded the overall look of our website, submitted their creative handiwork in a national design competition. A couple of days ago Matthew, owner and chief creative whiz , called me during my drive home after work.

I don’t make it a habit of chatting up with my peeps while driving, but when the Photo Shop extraordinaire calls after hours, it’s usually important. So I punched the speaker button and took the call. Had I forgotten all about a pressing deadline, maybe for an ad insertion?

“Is it happy hour yet?” he asked, to which I replied that I was still miles from a favorite watering whole where everyone knows my name. “Well if you decide to belly-up to the bar tonight, make sure you get a ‘mirror seat’ so you can raise a toast to yourself. The website won an award.”

Sweet. A cocktail tastes so much better when one is celebrating.

Editors of Graphic Design USA, a premiere publication for creative professionals, selected ALspecialtygases.com for web design excellence in their 2010 American Graphic Design Awards competition. That’s not too shabby for a new website that’s not much more than six months old, especially considering it’s for a company producing pure and mixed specialty gases and industrial gases.

The American Graphic Design Awards is a forty-year-old competition, and is open to everyone in the graphic arts community—graphic design firms, advertising agencies, in-house corporate and institutional designers, publishers and other media. It honors outstanding new work of all kinds in 23 categories from print and packaging to internet and interactive design. This year, more than 8,000 entries were submitted.

Pardon our hubris, but winning design awards is getting to be a bit… well, a bit de rigueur for our Marketing Communications team. Last year we won an award for our Molecules that Matter™ (see below) logo. Credit goes to the same design firm for the artwork, but I’ll take the bow for dreaming up the tag line–thank you very much. The year before that we and our design firm were recognized for a Scotty dog calendar we produced promoting Air Liquide’s SCOTT™ brand of specialty gases.

I suppose there are those who might argue that award winning design is not necessary to sell specialty and industrial gases and equipment. Maybe not. But when you think about it, for a company such as Air Liquide America Specialty Gases, being a part of a global team of nearly 43,000 employees in 75 countries, it compliments us darn well. We market high-end, high-accuracy and high-purity specialty and industrial gases… it’s appropriate that we do it with high-design.

Them!

How many people recall a 1954 sci-fi movie called THEM! in which an atomic test in the New Mexico desert causes a colony of ants to mutate into giant-sized man-eaters that threaten to mark the extinction of our entire civilization. It gave this youngster a fright or two I’ve gotta say.

Jump ahead 50 years or so.

I recently listened to a Michael Crichton book on CD while driving to and from the office. It’s a novel called Prey that was published in 2002 and deals with a breakthrough manufacturing process of nanoparticles—micro-robots actually—that goes horribly awry. It’s a bit like his Jurassic Park novel, only in reverse. Instead of being brutally terminated by larger than life critters, the characters in this book are insidiously dispatched from the inside out by nanomachines that are 1,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair.

In various passages throughout the book Crichton refers to how computers are increasingly controlled by programs that are based on, believe it or not, animal and insect behavior. Who would have thought that behavioral science technology would become a jumping off point for software engineering, or that computer programming would incorporate and even mimic dynamics learned from something we call predator/prey behavior or swarm intelligence.

Believe.

Somewhere in my gray matter, I’m guessing a neuron or two over from the frightful memory of giant ants attacking, I heard a bell ring. Hadn’t I read somewhere…? I Googled the rather unlikely combination of keywords: Air Liquide and ants. Yep, that’s right, ants. Sure enough, I hadn’t been dreaming after all. There on my 17-inch Mac laptop was a link to a July 2007 article in National Geographic entitled “Swarm Theory.” (How can you not love the Internet?)

The article cites how Air Liquide worked with a firm specializing in artificial intelligence to develop a computer model using algorithms that were inspired by the foraging behavior of Argentine ants. They use swarms of scouts that deposit pheromone trails in their quest for food sources. The individual ants have no intelligence per se, or at least none that we humans understand. Nor do they have leaders to control or dictate their behavior. Collectively however, as a colony (which is where that swarm intelligence comes into play), it amounts to the evolution of an efficient method of finding the best routes throughout their habitat. Strong pheromone scents indicate the shortest travel routes.

Basically, the Air Liquide approach is to mimic this behavior by sending out swarms of “program ants” to discover the most efficient delivery routes. It also adds in various other artificial intelligence techniques in order to consider every permutation of plant scheduling, weather, truck routing and so forth. The short of it is this process produces a unique daily delivery scheme involving over 400 trucks delivering from over a hundred plants to many thousands of end customers across North America.

The end result is three-fold. Firstly it reduces and better utilizes the fuel needed to run our fleet. This saves us money in delivery expenses—savings that we can pass on to our customers to help them contain their own operating costs. Secondly it results in faster, more efficient and dependable on-time delivery of specialty gases and industrial gases to our customers—which helps them further reduce their cost by minimizing their need to maintain on-site gas inventory. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, it hallmarks our on-going commitment to technology and, in this case, to minimize our impact on environmental air quality by reducing our vehicle emissions.

It’s enough to give you an entirely new appreciation for these tiny creatures, as long as we don’t find them in our picnic basket or kitchen pantry. Now, if I could just use their behavior to help me cut down on gasoline used commuting to work, I could spend more money on books on CD and scary movie rentals.

Note: Thanks to Michael Crichton and to National Geographic for some great reads.

Arrrgghh!

Last Friday afternoon I wrote about people… specialty gas customers… not knowing about Air Liquide America Specialty Gases. Only a couple of days later I received a Google Alert about a blog post made by the editor of ICIS Chemical Business in which he states, “And how many industrial gases companies are out there of any size? In the US, you’re down to Air Products, Praxair and Airgas. Outside the US, there are France’s Air Liquide, Germany’s Linde and Japan’s Taiyo Nippon Sanso.”

Arrrghh!

That typo on ‘gases’ wasn’t the editor’s only error. (Me being a writer who repeatedly proves his inadequacy at proofreading his own work–happily I have a crackerjack project manager cum proofreader who saves my bacon every time–I’m willing to let the typo slide.)

Now, about that comment about being down to three players in the US gas marketplace: this makes it sound as if, assuming Air Products is successful with its uninvited offer to purchase Airgas, you’re pretty much gonna have to get your gas from AP or Prax. AS IF. Not by a long shot, a short shot or any other kind of shot.

Way back at the beginning of the year when the nasty business of the takeover began to cook, several members of the journalistic world speculated that (guess who) Air Liquide would be the only other gas company with the financial resources to possibly make a bid for Airgas. That’s not too bad for being a “hardly-worth-mentioning” supplier of industrial and specialty gases in the United States marketplace.

Air Liquide of course has passed on that opportunity. As our Chief Executive, Benoît Potier, stated back in February, “The question doesn’t really come up in the sense that our strategy is one of expansion in emerging countries and in new markets, or essentially in growing markets.”

One of the ways Air Liquide has grown the U.S. market was through acquisition of Scott Specialty Gases, which was the largest producer of EPA protocols and a well-known world supplier of other high-end specialty gases. These gas mixtures, still produced using original Scott technology, are being marketing under the SCOTT™ brand name in Europe, Asia and South America as well as in North America.

Another is the recent Air Liquide Large Industries U.S. LP acquisition of assets and business activities of Lion Copolymer Geismar Services (LCGS), an industrial utilities provider based in Louisiana’s Geismar basin, near Baton Rouge. This complements Air Liquide’s already strong presence in the Geismar basin, which is anchored by two large air separation units producing oxygen and nitrogen for supply via the company’s expansive Mississippi River Pipeline System.

I won’t get into how ALASG is part of a global team of some 43,000 members operating in over 70 countries. Regardless of how the Airgas/Air Products issue shakes out, Air Liquide IS and will remain a major world supplier of industrial and specialty gases for virtually any application imaginable, and that includes in the good ole USA.

P.S.
I had submitted a comment regarding the post I mentioned above. Since writing this post, the editor accepted and published my comment, and indeed acknowledged Air Liquide’s large presence in the US. —THANK YOU, JOE!

Dylan and Air Liquide: the real deal

Call me old-fashioned (I’m getting up there in age, so I can admit to this without apology) but I usually prefer the real deal.

My wife and I were at a pool party a couple of weeks ago, and while she was bobbing in the pool with our grand daughter, I was sitting comfortably in the shade and chatting with a few of the twenty-somethings who were also seated under the umbrella. A tune came on an iPod that was broadcasting music poolside: Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door by Guns ‘N Roses.

It wasn’t my iPod that was playing mind you; nah, I know better than to even attempt to play it at such gatherings. Despite having nearly three thousand songs on my black classic, including Booty Call in a playlist isn’t enough to satisfy partiers these days. Anyway, as the GnR song played, I made the comment that I preferred the original.

As I recall, and in retrospect I should have known better than to phrase it this way, I said something like, “I like old Bob Z’s rendition so much better.” One of the gals gave me a ‘huh?’ look, to which I clarified, “Ya know, Bob Zimmerman.”

Still huh.

“Bob Dylan.”

Double huh.

I added, “His real name is Zimmerman. And most of his songs I like better when someone else does them, but his one I prefer Dylan’s version.” Then I caught on. It turned out the gal barely knew who Bob Dylan was, let alone that he wrote and recorded the song before she was even born. I could see that she was amazed, and even a little bummed, to learn that a song she liked, and assumed belonged to her generation, turned out to belong to mine.

What’s this got to do with specialty gases? My poolside conversation about pop music reminded me of a situation our company encounters in the specialty gas industry. Despite the fact that Air Liquide operates in 73 countries, we are not particularly well known in the United States as a supplier of specialty gases. This is changing, but Air Liquide America Specialty Gases sales people still run into customers who simply don’t know us. So they assume we’re a new comer in the specialty gas industry, then are surprised to learn that we’ve been in the business for over 100 years. They are even more surprised to learn that Air Liquide is world leader in gases for industry, health and the environment.

When it comes to pure and mixed specialty gases, compared to everyone else, we’ve pretty much been there and done that with a dozen or so T-shirts in the drawer. As I said at the beginning of this post, I prefer the real deal, so working (and blogging) for the original is fine by me.

Safety equipment and Ad(non)Sense

Sometimes I think computers and our so-called global connectivity will be our undoing as a society… and even possibly as a species on planet Earth. A few days ago I wrote a post about the availability of our revised Design and Safety Handbook for Specialty Gas Delivery Systems. Whenever I post to this blog, people who subscribe to Google Alerts for certain keywords (such as Air Liquide, specialty gases, etc…) are notified of the post. Neat huh.

But maybe not so much.

The Google Alert for that last post included a link (essentially an ad) for another company that sells unrelated safety equipment. I assume this happened because that particular company participates in Google’s AdSense program. Unlike Google Alerts, that program isn’t free, which is why I have a problem with it. Firstly, whatever money that other company paid to be linked to my post, was, in my opinion, wasted. And so I wonder how many total $$$ of theirs are being wasted on links to other inappropriate posts and searches beside my blog entries. As one of the people responsible for our company’s web presence, it makes me rather skeptical of the AdSense program.

Secondly, what gives Google the right to link another company with MY blog post? I work for Air Liquide, not that other company for petesake. It’s kinda as if Joe sneaks up and attaches one of those magnetic signs to the back of your car without asking, so you can ride around town as a mobile billboard for Joe’s Pizza Parlor. I’m the kind of guy who is amazed at how many people never bother to remove (and dealers know this) the car dealer license plate frame when they buy a car, and for years drive around broadcasting free advertising for the dealership.

You may say, Bob, don’t get yourself all worked up: it’s just a dumb program that blindly picks out keywords to it can attach AdSense links (and generate revenue for Google, thank you very much). Yeah, I know the cha-ching bell won’t chime unless the mouse clicks on the link. Still and all, lots of revenue there… no wonder so much money is being made in California Computerland… and so much money being wasted by companies who apparently blindly trust those analytics that supposedly substantiate the cost.

Being an adman, and a gray-haired one to boot, (I can still sing the “little dab’ll do ya” jingle, yeah–Brylcreem), an old TV ad comes to mind in which John Houseman proclaimed: we make money the old-fashioned way–we EARN it. I woke up this morning thinking how much this also applies to all of us at Air Liquide America Specialty Gases. Making specialty gases… making reliable and accurate specialty gases… is not an easy business. All of our people work very hard at what we do: to make ‘em, to sell ‘em, to deliver ‘em and to make right any problems that a customer may encounter. In the end it’s people–and not dehumanized Internet web crawler programs–that make our company… that make any company for that matter… successful. I hope we never lose sight of that.