Strategy/Writing/Design | Connecting your message with your markets
This Italian restaurant established its identity with billboards, television, and radio. Television and radio spots shared the same scripts. To tie its menu to family-style comfort food, out-of-home messaging centered around two tag lines: “So good, you’ll leave home for it” and “Every bite as good as it looks.”
[Please note: I’m only allowed to share the scripts of these spots and can’t identify the client’s location.] ——————– Most people mistrust used car sales operations, often with good reason. Many use high-pressure tactics to sell substandard vehicles at inflated prices. Aubrey’s wanted to use humorous depictions of customers’ worst fears to differentiate itself from … Continued…
At Crown Hill Cemetery, the third-largest non-governmental cemetery in the U.S., one of its most famous of its memorials honors Mary Ella McGinnis, who died on August 6, 1875, at the age of six. If you stand in just the right spot at the right time of day, her monument appears to return your gaze. … Continued…
On Your Level Youth Project uses broadcast media, online resources, and face-to-face interactions to encourage teens to explore and accept diversity, communicate honestly and openly, and seek out productive life paths as they forge their way into adulthood. The project is the brainchild of teacher, media personality, and spoken word artist Blair Karsch, a multi-decade … Continued…
The Copper Development Association launched an online microsite designed to promote the advantages of brass in manufacturing. On modern high-speed machine tools, brass offers significant versatility, machines quickly, and leads to minimal tool wear. In many cases, manufacturers can switch parts from other metals to brass and gain a high degree of efficient profitability. This … Continued…
The emerald ash borer first reached the United States in the 1990s, stowing away in wooden shipping crates bound for Michigan from China. In the emerald ash borer’s native habitat, many trees display natural immunity to it. Not so in the U.S., where thousands fall prey to the insect’s devastating effects every year. At historic … Continued…
The Indiana Dental Association represents the professional and personal well being of approximately 80% of the state’s dentists. The IDA’s Midwest Dental Assembly, formerly called the Annual Session, combines continuing education with trade-show displays and social interaction for practitioners, office staff, and family members. Among the suite of marketing collateral that publicizes this event, the … Continued…
The Indiana War Memorial Commission preserves and showcases a portfolio of museums, monuments, and artifacts, telling the stories of Hoosier veterans and their service from the American Revolution to the present day. Among the IWM’s most treasured holdings: irreplaceable hand-made battle flags, many from the American Civil War, the majority endangered by wear, age, contaminants, … Continued…
In Indiana’s Decatur County, the Greensburg area serves as a focus of travel and tourism. The 501(c)(6) non-profit Decatur County Visitors and Recreation Commission needed a headquarters location with enough programming space, parking, and public amenities to host its own functions and offer a home for other, smaller non-profits. A $1.5 million capital campaign sought … Continued…
The City of Indianapolis committed $19.6 million to a project targeting one of its major east/west arteries, 38th Street, originally dubbed Maple Road. This busy thoroughfare evolved from a residential corridor to a site for small commercial districts that served burgeoning northern suburbs, and eventually became a conduit across the city rather than a destination … Continued…
This 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization serving persons with disabilities needed a headquarters building that could bring all its staff together within the community they serve. To assist with fundraising efforts targeting the costs of designing and building the facility, I researched, wrote, designed, laid out, typeset, and produced a brochure that told the organization’s unique story … Continued…
A publishing executive who attended the 1963 March on Washington was moved by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech to create an organization designed to increase the representation of people of color in influential positions within American corporations. He established INROADS as a non-profit network of locally incorporated non-profits serving … Continued…
Nearly a decade after the events of September 11, 2001, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey began accepting petitions from communities that wanted to develop local 9/11 memorials. Petitioners whose plans gained acceptance received Ground Zero artifacts to incorporate into their sites of remembrance. Indianapolis firefighter and paramedic Greg Hess, who had … Continued…
[Please note: I’m only allowed to share the scripts of these spots and can’t identify the client’s location.] ——————– Lake Shore Community College attracts non-traditional students including single parents, 30- to 40-somethings who find their career prospects blunted by the lack of a degree, and recent high school graduates who want to complete general education … Continued…
Madam C. J. Walker became America’s first self-made female millionaire. This dynamic entrepreneur founded a cosmetics empire with a product she created to treat her own hair loss. She built her company in Indianapolis, Indiana, along with an architectural gem of a facility that combined a theatre with spaces devoted to community use. This building … Continued…
ARCA racing team WebeRacing needed a high-visibility logo for its primary car, one that would be easy to prepare on a computer-driven vinyl cutter. My design highlights the “W” in the team’s name (also the last initial of its driver) with a look that spells “speed.”
Orthopaedics Indianapolis wanted to promote its services directly to employers and parents. I wrote two ads that used original illustrations based on the character of Humpty Dumpty, the fallen egg in need of rescue. One message promoted the need for expert orthopaedic care to resolve workplace injuries. The other, addressing families with athletic youngsters, pointed … Continued…
When the accounting firm of Lee R. Ford & Associates wanted a new logo, I created a two-color identity design featuring a trio of interlocking plus signs, symbolizing the mathematical underpinnings and precision of the firm’s practice. An optical illusion produces one of the plus signs out of the void between the other two, giving … Continued…
After this Italian restaurant established its identity, it switched its messaging to emphasize its focus on fresh local ingredients and thereby set itself apart from national chains.
Many not-for-profit organizations, especially those that provide vital social services to otherwise under-served populations, stand or fall on their infrastructure’s ability to support their programming. When Boone County Senior Services outgrew its longtime headquarters in Lebanon, Indiana, its not-for-profit foundation embarked on a capital campaign aimed at raising the $2,000,000 necessary to build a new … Continued…