Against the Grain: Creative

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. 

Every year, local advertising agencies compete in the OUTY Awards for a chance to showcase some fun, creative outdoor advertising. This year, our own Interactive Design Director Paul Burger brought home the win with this board for our new division, Trilix Research. http://www.outyawards.com/

When taking on your first “real” project as an intern, a lot of thoughts go through your mind, “Am I ready for this? Where do I start? I hope I don’t blow this,” but none can beat the rush you get when you realize it’s time to prove your worth. It can be scary taking on a project with such a high value to our company when you have never done anything like it before. It’s like being thrown into an ocean, not knowing how to swim, and having to fend for yourself. Well, with no arm floaties, I had to learn on my own.

I soon found out that meetings are critical to the success of a project. It’s so easy to get the right group of talented people together, each from different departments, sit down and come up with tactical options on how to complete a project in the allotted timeframe and within the budget. My one-man project quickly turned into a group effort. Unlike class up at school, I was able to delegate tasks to each department at hand that specialized in that particular work. The creative ideas went to our creative department, the press release and announcements to our PR department and the website specifications to our interactive/online team. With follow-up meetings, I was able to put together a great marketing plan for the project. What would have been a semester-long project in school was put together in a little over a week.

The implementation of the marketing plan would not have happened had the plan not been approved with oversight from the CEO, President, account executive and head of the research department. This was a little intimidating to say the least. Facing a panel of four of your superiors and pitching a marketing plan that was little more than an idea a week ago was not an easy thing to do. All in all, I thought the presentation went over fairly well. Of course, for being the first “real” project I have put together, there were a couple tweaks here and there. But the project got approved. (That’s gotta’ mean something right?) Overall, it has been a great learning experience putting together a “real” full-blown marketing plan. Now comes the execution…