Thinking Outside the Bin It’s fun to pit the playful, irreverent tone of this successful campaign against cold, hard numbers. By engaging people and compelling them (and not preaching to them), we increased requests for bins (our primary mission) 522% over the same period the prior year: some 3,940 requests. Nearly 5,000 people visited the website we created for the campaign – 82% of whom were first-time visitors. They tallied more than 18,000 page views – the most popular of which, as we predicted, was the bin request page. Just as telling: half of all the people who visited to enter our contest also requested a bin, proving that relevant messaging and memorable messaging can reside in the same campaign. In the field, 68% of households requesting bins did not appear to have one previously; and half were already using them (no small accomplishment) just a few short weeks after receiving them. Hillsborough County, and our partners Curbside Value Partnership and Hill & Knowlton asked us to increase bin requests, and that’s exactly what we did!

Things are picking up. We unveiled our decidedly wrong campaign for a three-month test in Cincinnati with goals of audience engagement, community awareness and local media and business partnerships. We engaged, to be sure (it seems everyone has a wrong or two they’d like to share with the world). With paid and donated advertising, with 13 print articles and six broadcast news stories, with 18 radio stations picking up our PSAs, with street teams at 20 events … we engaged. 822 people at events had their photos taken and uploaded to our site with their personal wrongs (many vying for prizes donated by local businesses). Online, just shy of 1,300 people submitted wrongs, of the 6,500+ unique site visitors. At the end of the run, in post-campaign research, 1 in 3 people recognized the “Littering is Wrong, Too” campaign; 4 of 10 said the awareness caused them to be more aware of others’ littering, and a similar proportion said it made them more aware of their own littering. Most impressive to us, when we consider affecting consumer behaviors, the percentage of our 18-34 target who considered reducing litter to be “extremely important” grew from 19% to 32% - a staggering 68% increase. Most recently, our campaign, and its achievements earned TWO Silver Anvils, the PR industry’s standard for creative excellence.

We’re Not Kidding It paid (off) to zig when everyone else zagged. Working with partners Hill & Knowlton and Curbside Value Partnership, we not only leveraged some bombastic characters in starting communities talking about recycling, but we leveraged media budgets (at a rate of $3 realized for every $1 invested) and scores of volunteers to put our You Gotta Be Kidding campaign into 100 communities. It was also featured at 127 events and the subject of 175+ news stories. Our consumer website holds its own, after just six months, against comparable sites several years old. Some 168 community leaders or municipalities statewide have downloaded 1,300 materials for their local efforts from a specially designed site called Campaign Central. Socially (media) speaking, 2,200 Facebook Cause members have joined us, which is 400% more than a long-standing, highly regarded comparable recycling effort elsewhere. 20,000 website hits, 1,700 photos posted to our gallery…we’ve got the state talking (one of our primary objectives). And we’ve had requests from other states wanting to use the campaign there, too. Most telling, though, as we’ve ingrained ourselves in the psyches of Georgians: some communities report recycling rate increases of more than 50% over last year!

When digital printing first became affordable and accessible, we were asked to tell people it was affordable and accessible. We tasked ourselves with also making it entertaining, lest it be lost in a sea of literature to businesses from printers, caterers, document shredders and office-plant watering services. These preposterously written and designed direct mail pieces compelled a trial of this new printing freedom, asking readers to input their own information on a fun website, which generated a totally customized return postcard within days with the customer’s information woven in. Product demonstration: the oldest trick in the book…modernized.

Even with all the high-tech communication devices at our disposal, it can be difficult to communicate with a group of people efficiently. Some want old-fashioned landline phone calls (think Baby Boomers); some want emails (think office worker-bees); some want texts (think almost everyone under age 25). YellY’all makes it easy—provided they can break through the super-saturated clutter of life today and tell folks about their service. Enter DMC, giving them their memorable new name, a hardworking logo, a clean, easy-to-navigate website and some spiffy die-cut biz cards. Breakthrough branding for a breakthrough service.

It’s hard to tout a golf course without lots of beauty shots at sunset/rise…at least that was the popular thinking. Do that, we reasoned, and run the risk of looking like every other golf course in that most-crucial of settings, in the media. So our crack creatives came up with a spoof of a then-popular Tiger Woods spot that used humor to garner consideration among Washington D.C.’s golfing community…not to mention garnering a Best of Show in the D.C. Addy’s that year.

M’s ROI There are far fewer moving pieces in this b-2-b campaign, but no less stellar results. Via a re-branding effort, a simple print ad campaign, and a new corporate brochure, we breathed new life into our client’s marketing and sales efforts. A modest print ad campaign investment yielded an ROI of 8 to 1! With more in the hopper. And, proving the power of great design, their corporate brochure has buoyed the sales force, which has praised it…and a happy, energized sales force is a productive sales force. Our collective branding approach also raised our client’s visibility at their industry’s largest trade show of the year. Return on a branding investment isn’t always quantifiable, but in this case, it was both: a campaign that not only paid for itself eight times over, but created an important internal and external buzz to boot.

Waiter, what's this ROI doing in my soup? Small advertisers often have bigger challenges-per-marketing-dollar ratios than larger marketers. This was the case with Red Star and Taste restaurants. Taste had gotten off to a bit of a false start in culinary circles in Baltimore, and needed a fix. But they didn't have unlimited funds to do it. Working with an existing color palette and logo, we conceived a new tagline that spoke to their desires to be that neighborhood place where people went on a Tuesday night...even though most of their meager business before we took the marketing reins was on Fridays and Saturdays. We upped the informal tone of their materials and plugged it into a hard-working media plan that worked like a charm: we literally flooded the place with customers on traditionally off nights and increased trial among first-timers, with an ROI that helped the marketing campaign be self-funding within six weeks. Red Star had it all (almost) going for it. Fabulous space, fantastic service, great eats and drinks...in one of Baltimore's hippest neighborhoods. Except that this hip neighborhood came with challenges like parking and many, many competing businesses. A fun branding campaign paid off in spades, doling out Red Star's messages in memorable ways, and changing misperceptions that had kept more people from flocking there. Tellingly, Red Star still thrives these five or so years later, no small feat for a restaurant these days.

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!

This super hip, not-your-average-fitness studio needed an above-average web presence. With so many other Barre studios popping up out there, we decided to let the benefits of Barre help us differentiate our client's site (and studio) from the rest. We gave them a unique look while highlighting the long, lean benefits by using sophisticated photos and smart, descriptive copy to match. A straightforward approach to health deserves a straightforward approach to touting it. Beautiful.