Great American designer and filmmaker Saul Bass once said “design is thinking made visual.” We added, “yeah, what he said.”
So when it came to our first campaign for MAX Credit Union, we took inspiration from Bass and created a series of television spots that marry kinetic type and animation. And (drumroll please) here they are: Service, Spotlight, Mattress, Loan and Climate.
Long distance high fives to our friends at Shiny Object for helping us birth these bad boys.
Who doesn’t want to be treated like a rock star? We really couldn’t think of anyone, so we created 1-Day Wonder for our friends at Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Biloxi.
Here’s the deal. By becoming a fan on Facebook, you are entered for a chance to be treated like a rock star for a day—free room, tickets to a show, dinner, drinks on the house, spa treatment, you get the idea. Each month, a new 1-Day Wonder will be selected.
So get in there and fan up. Who knows, soon you might be demanding a bowl of M&Ms with the brown ones removed.
Our latest little ditty is for the newly merged Scotch Gulf Lumber. The lumber behemoth is the product of two storied companies, Scotch Lumber Co. and Gulf Lumber Co., joining forces. Think of the resulting business as the Voltron of its industry.
The trick to this project was designing a mark that takes into account the heritage of the two individual brands. We needed something new that feels like it’s been around for a century—without seeming dated. Lucky for us, our man Andy K. has that shot in his bag.
Here’s the new Scotch Gulf mark, in a handy before/after diagram.
The website is super simple and super beautiful, with photography courtesy of wunderkind Miller Mobley. Hope you enjoy it.
The dudes and dudettes here at the Square have been busy cooking up our latest offering to the Internet: America’s Green Oil Change.
We know what you’re thinking. “A green oil change?” In fact our development partners on this, Super Top Secret, pondered the same thing:
We know a green oil change sounds like an oxymoron but it’s an awesome oxymoron. In fact, we added it to our list of favorites. It’s right up there with boneless ribs, Christian gangster, firewater, lady boy, mobile home, real polyester and quiet riot.
Believe it people. So hit the site and do your part.
Building a new website is one thing. Building a new business model is another. With NDI, manufacturer of the finest floral and botanical reproductions in the world, we did both. Here’s the story.
NDI had previously only sold product through high-end retailers, such as Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom. They came to us with a challenge: build a site that sells direct to the consumer without alienating our trade customers. And make it awesome.
We’re happy to present to you our solution: NDI’s new storefront.
Visitors can shop the entire inventory (over 4,000 products) in a very intuitive manner; products are organized by five different filters. The store recommends similar items and optional upgrades for products like trees and greenery. Customers can come back and quickly reorder previous purchases or update their information. The site also serves trade customers, with trade-specific content for logged-in trade users.
From a management standpoint, the site is built with a custom CMS (content management system) that allows NDI to update everything in their online store: track orders, edit individual items or multiple items at once, and reorganize categories for seasonal promos. They can also access their customer database for real-time info on each customer.
In the two weeks that we’ve been live (and debugging), the site has already seen good results. Sales are happening—66 percent of the visitors are new to the site and the average site visit is almost 9 minutes.
Take a look around, buy some flowers. And if you see any bugs in the site, holler at Janine.
As we continue to develop the site, we’ll keep you updated.
One of our newest clients is the Hangout Music Festival. There’s not a whole lot we can say about this yet except: 1) it’s on the beach in Gulf Shores, Alabama; 2) it’s May 14-16; 3) the acts are going to be killer; 4) we’re handling the design, advertising and PR.
According to stories that have run in the press, the festival will be the surfside equivalent to the Rothbury Festival and Coachella.
Acts will be announced soon. You can read more here, and be sure to sign up for email updates.
We love football. We also love advertising. So you can imagine how happy we were to work on the 2010 Senior Bowl. It’s pretty much the perfect storm of awesomeness.
The game is football’s premier pre-draft event, annually featuring the country’s best senior collegiate players and top NFL draft prospects. It also happens to live in our hometown of Mobile, Alabama.
When we began work, our creative team raided the Senior Bowl archives and brought back stacks of old programs and footage from the 1950s and 1960s. We decided the stuff was too cool not to use. So we built a campaign that recalls the rich heritage of the game, packages it as a world-class event and addresses multiple audiences with a single rallying cry.
You can view the campaign here. Or, if you don’t have quicktime, you can see the spot here. It’s up! It’s gooooooood! (Sorry, couldn’t resist the football pun.)
Thanks to our production pals Shiny Object and Stuck On On.
Here’s a sweet new toy that we’ve just launched for The University of Alabama School of Law. We’re working with the college to develop a social media program, and our first order of business involved creating an aggregator site that pulls all of their social media channels and content into one spot. The focus of the overall program is student recruitment, and given the core audience, social media is a logical place to focus. But you’ve got to do it intelligently.
So behold, The Open Brief. The site features a dashboard on the homepage, and the navigation/animation is pretty slick (if we do say so ourselves). Overall, a nice way to organize content.
C-Rowe rocked the design, and our friends at New Uniform slayed the code.
Here at the agency, we do category-defying, intelligent, zig-when-everybody-else-zags type work. But we can’t blow minds and make advertising you talk about without a tightly defined strategy. No strategy means run-away, irrelevant creative. And that’s about as cool as jean shorts.
Our new campaign for Van Kampen Investments and the Alabama State Treasury Department provides a good example as to how we work. First, our task: create a campaign for the 529 college savings plan product that increases enrollment. After conducting research, studying previous efforts and competitive/peer/aspirant work, many internal strategic meetings and client meetings, we arrived at our strategy–the CollegeCounts 529 Fund is a smart gift.
That’s it. Seems really simple, right?
All solid strategies are simple, but as you know, simple takes some doing. Simple requires eliminating, distilling, the stripping away of anything unnecessary. We could’ve arrived at the “invest in your child’s future” strategy, or some other been-done-a-thousand-times thought. Instead, we looked at what kids tend to get when they are young, and most of it winds up in the trash. Or stuck up their nose. Or breaking in five minutes. This isn’t about not giving your grandchild a big wheel. (We’ve got no beef with the big wheel.) It’s about giving him or her something a little smarter than that.
So the campaign, in a nutshell, uses humor to position the college savings plan as a smart gift by juxtaposing it against unwise gifts given to children. Exaggeration is key to pulling off the humor. Why humor? We liked going with that tonality for several reasons. Not a lot of financial brands are using it right now, people like and remember funny advertising and humor communicates confidence. In this economy, confidence is everything.
Here’s the first spot, called “Knives.” In it, a couple explains to their child’s grandfather that giving to his education would be smarter than giving him a knife-throwing set. We’re betting most will agree.
And here’s the second spot, “Nuclear,” in which a father is reminded of what happened when he ordered plutonium off the Internet for his son’s science kit.
The production itself was beautifully and smoothly executed. We were lucky to work with Sam Crawford and MOM Worldwide, Melissa Larson, Technicolor, editor Adam Svatek at Beast, LA and several other incredibly talented people. Here are some great behind-the-scenes production photos.
Many thanks to all of the hard-working and brilliant people at Red Square. From media planning, negotiation and placement to the strategic development, to public relations (which is now working in overdrive), this is a great collective effort.
We hope you enjoy our gift to investment advertising. It’s been and continues to be fun.
Establishing an agency viewpoint on social media has only led us back to a core fundamental of great advertising: you are going to be more successful if you utilize media in concert with an idea or concept that engages, entertains, provokes or generally creates an emotional connection.
Most advertising isn’t liked because it doesn’t give the consumer credit for having intelligence. This goes for traditional media and nontraditional media. Being on the radio to simply be on the radio is okay. Being on Twitter to simply be on Twitter is okay too. To be successful, you’ve got to bring an idea to the table.
For Zea Restaurants’ latest campaign, our creative is simple: their take-out is so good, you’ll find any excuse to order. So on Twitter we’ve created a feed that offers humorous, daily excuses not to cook. You can read and follow it here. Rather than reeling off menu items and prices (Zea’s food is a great value), we’ve chosen to entertain and deliver the value message implicitly. And who doesn’t have the daily, mental tug-of-war over cooking or not cooking?
The bottom line is social media is still media. It’s another channel to your consumer, albeit a two-way (or multi-way) conversational channel to your consumer. You don’t like having conversations with boring people or salesmen, do you? Then don’t talk like that in your advertising, traditional or otherwise. Instead, treat your consumers like people. Entertain them, enlighten them, emotionally connect with them, and they’ll become more than your consumers. They’ll become fans.
