Even with small-space ads and almost no budgets, restaurants can say tons about what awaits diners. A tone, a mood, a manner of speaking. The Red Star ads addressed some specific issues of their location as well as extolled the virtues of this hip eating/drinking establishment. With Taste, we set up and paid off the upscale food but relaxed atmosphere from word one. It wasn’t really our fault when their Tuesday night business went from 28 people one week to 240 the next…we warned them.
Eden Apartments in downtown Baltimore epitomize luxury living. And convenience. And what it’s like to be 20- to 30-something living in a trend-o neighborhood and be, well, beautiful (no dogs allowed!). But targeting these sought-after would-be-tenants is harder with newspapers failing and so many of them not watching TV commercials. So we hit ‘em where they live…on the streets (with mobile, scrolling ads and a 36-foot wide banner), online (with a cool new blog site) and in their favorite watering holes (with t-shirts and a coaster campaign at 13 bars) enticing them to text in to win a prize, and build our client’s database at the same time. Occupancy up. Client happiness up. Bottoms up!
Good advertising gets people talking. Marketers just need to lodge a thought in overwhelmed consumers’ heads to have a chance. For a litter prevention campaign with partners Hill & Knowlton and Keep America Beautiful, we took things to extremes. Wrong extremes, to frame up how most people perceive littering (it’s wrong, you know). Our outlandish wrongs set up the payoff: LitteringIsWrongToo.org. We even gave folks a place to chime in with their wrongs. And, in the end, we got people thinking about (not) littering. Nothing wrong with that. The campaign also garnered TWO PR industry awards for excellence. Nothing wrong with that, either.