Against the Grain: Creative

Are you considering hiring an advertising agency? Before you send out an RFP or start shopping around, determine what kind of relationship you’re pursuing. Do you need a vendor to fulfill orders or a partner to generate new ideas and help guide your strategic marketing efforts?

Vendors help you meet your marketing goals; partners help you set and exceed them. Vendors cut ties during economic challenges and leadership changes; partners weather the storm together. Vendors complete your projects on time. Partners fill a need you never knew existed because they understand your customers and industry.

To maintain a competitive-edge in today’s ever-changing market, you should move beyond the project-vendor relationship and explore an agency partnership. An experienced account team can help you set achievable goals and create a strategic plan to turn an idea into an award-winning solution.

Successful client-agency partnerships are built on trust, and it must be earned. Your agency should demonstrate an unwavering commitment to help you succeed. They should invest the time to get to know you, your company and industry. In turn, you should notify them about internal and external changes and challenges affecting your business. They can analyze the situation objectively and may be able to spot an opportunity.

In any relationship, partners run the risk of growing complacent. Don’t let your marketing efforts get stagnant. Your brand, company and products evolve over time and so should your marketing campaigns. Challenge your agency to bring you creative solutions. Be willing to take risks. Trust your agency to guide you through the rebranding process.

Do you still want a vendor? Consult Google. If you’re looking for a partner, give Trilix a call. We combine innovative ideas with marketing expertise. Together, we can form the sweetest partnership since Ben and Jerry—without the ice cream headache.

If we’ve learned anything from our celebrity-obsessed, reality-TV-addicted and perpetually young culture, it’s that maintaining your image is critical to remaining relevant. A fresh look can be just what a company needs to attract a new audience or keep an existing one. Here are some things to think about when considering updating your brand identity.

• Only refresh the identity because of actual changes in the business, not just because you feel like it.
• Be sure the changes you make don’t affect existing customers’ brand loyalties.
• Get an idea of what customers want and what they have come to expect from your brand. Measure their perceptions of your business and incorporate what they like about your company into the new identity.
• Approach the refresh realistically.
  • You may not have the budget for an entire revamp.
  • You can do small tweaks overtime.
  • Make sure you do what works best for your company.
• Accordingly, your refresh may have to work with the old identity, meaning it will have to fit with your current look without alarming the customer.
• Involve and educate the whole company in the refresh process. This way, employees will understand the reasons behind the change, which helps to create consistency and recognition.

There are a lot of factors to think about when considering your brand identity. Trilix’s creative and account teams can help you figure out what is best for your company.

I love stories – any kind – whether they’re found in the pages of a book or newspaper, flickering from a movie screen or being told aloud. It doesn’t matter if I have heard them a thousand times; stories have the ability to fill me with a renewed sense of wonder and intrigue. It is that passion, that connection and commitment to storytelling that propelled me, and many of my colleagues, to work in advertising.

I find that many of my co-workers share the same passion for their work as I do for words – and we are lucky. We are able to merge what we love to do, with what we do at our jobs everyday. We don’t leave our passion at the door – it extends into our outside interests. By reading a new novel, sketching greeting cards, networking or perusing the ever-evolving world of social media in our spare time, we are expanding our knowledge and discovering new ways to enhance our talents.

These pursuits of our individual passions help us collectively bring innovative ideas and deliver superior results to our clients.

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The end of summer is always bittersweet. Yes, we say goodbye to the scorching heat and oppressive humidity – which has been in abundance this season – but we also say goodbye to the long, sunny days, trips to the lake and running through the grass barefoot. But, there is one tradition that always helps ease Iowans into the fall: the Iowa State Fair.

This year marks the 100-year anniversary of the Iowa State Fair Butter Cow. Now, if you’re not from around here you might be thinking, “Say what?” Yes, it’s the 100-year anniversary of carving a heifer out of butter. The Fair is a proud and fun tradition, and they have asked groups around the Des Moines Metro to help commemorate this event by designing and painting concrete cows that will be placed throughout the fairgrounds.

We were honored when the Fair, a client since 2004, asked us to design and paint our very own concrete butter cow, and we took to the task with enthusiasm. We came up with a design and started painting. We wanted to incorporate design elements from the Fair’s marketing collateral to maintain brand consistency, but we wanted the butter cow to have its own identity. We used color and typeface to accomplish this goal.

Through this unique project, we discovered new ways to reach different audiences that can often be overlooked in the daily hustle and bustle. For example:

Care Packages

As a way to show our appreciation to clients, Trilix put together a “What’s Better than Butta” kit that included fair tickets, a butter recipe book, oven mitt, butter dish and wooden spoons. We can help you create a similar project to promote a new product, service or event. It is a fun and unique way to reach out to your audience, and it breaks through everyday clutter.

Unexpected Signage

The concrete butter cow is a prime example of how unique signage – that catches people off guard – is a great way to communicate a message. The concrete butter cows will be placed in a high-traffic/volume area where people of all different backgrounds will see it and be exposed to its message.

At Trilix, we are constantly exploring creative ways to communicate our messages and sometimes it’s our clients who provide the catalyst for these ideas. This is just another example of how working together, taking chances and creating a collaborative working environment can really get the ideas flowing.

View the commercials Trilix did for the Iowa State Fair.

Colors for 2010

In the movie The Devil Wears Prada, there’s a scene where Anne Hathaway’s character Andrea Sachs, the frumpy assistant to Runway fashion magazine editor Miranda Priestly, scoffs at the fashion team when they struggle to choose between two seemingly identical blue belts for the magazine’s cover shoot. An irritated Priestly schools Sachs with a lecture about the fashion industry’s influence on seasonal color trends. Priestly explains how the shades used by top clothing designers trickle down through the rest of the industry and quickly infiltrate home design and retail stores.

But that’s just a scene from a chick flick. That’s not how color trends really begin, right? Wrong.

Each spring and fall, Pantone®, the company that sets the design industry’s professional color standards, releases a report identifying the 10 most influential colors of the season. The hot new color trends are based on the results of a survey completed by fashion designers during New York Fashion Week.

Color trends typically reflect environmental and economical influences and evolve from year to year. The 2010 “color of the year” is Pantone 15-5519 which, roughly translated, is turquoise. This season’s color trends are brighter than in previous years to reflect people’s excitement about technology, less fear and nesting as memories of 9/11 begin to fade, optimism about an improving economy, embracing our multi-cultural society and eyes that are trained to look at bright colors on a computer screen.   

The next time you ask your creative team to come up with a new design concept for your marketing collateral or new product launch, rest assured that their color choices are not taken lightly. Designers take psychological influences, competitors’ brand strategies, size and strength of the market, usage adoption rate, product name, demographics of the target audience and other brand elements into consideration when they create a new look for your product. Balancing these factors helps ensure that your brand evokes the right emotional response and complements the hottest color trends on the market.