When budgets don’t allow for live-action footage, clients come to us for animated, graphic-only spots that catch the viewers eye as much as the live action would. The trick is to combine individuals with strong motion graphics skills with individuals with strong storyboarding skills (rarely do both skills exist in one individual). These spots were so successful at achieving this goal that Charter continued to come to us for more and more.
Sometimes our job is to work within strict, esthetic guidelines while stretching the boundaries to create something that visually grabs people and gets results. Here’s a good example of that delicate balancing act:
To supplement the marketing tactics for her line of books, the folks at Martha Stewart Living approached us to write, design and execute direct mail campaigns. It was both a thrill and a challenge working with such a high-profile client. Their attention to brand consistency forced us to design within very strict graphical rules. Dircks was the only team to balance performance with aesthetic to create winning direct mail and print advertising for 4 years.
How do you get a company from 5 million subscribers to 25 million subscribers? You flood the world with FREE Trial CDs and you test, test, test! That’s exactly what we did for America Online. For over ten years, Dircks was AOL’s leading creative agency, creating high response rates not only in the thousands of direct mail packages we created, but also in other medias including advertising, in-store, outdoor billboard, interactive, multi-media and co-marketed promotions.
The key to our success? The incessant desire to beat our own creatives time and time again. That means constantly analyzing test data and trend data and dipping it do a deep well of creative ideas and capabilities.
We’ve worked with many tech companies over the years. Often, we are challenged to not only communicate their brand promise, but also to help prospects understand and embrace the new technology their product(s) uses. In the case of Vonage, VoiIP services were just starting to enter the market and Vonage hired us to help them gain a foothold in this wide-open industry. As was the case with our relationship with AOL, we proved our effectiveness in direct mail, then went on to help them in just about every other facet of their marketing.
This acquisitions piece achieved double-digit increase in response and was one of many direct mail packages that helped Vonage grow their subscribers from 1 million to 2.4 million in a little over a year.
Around the time we decided to focus more on film and TV, we were approached by Briggs and Riley – the luggage company that first introduced rolling luggage to travelers worldwide. It was the 40th anniversary of that product breakthrough and they needed some B-roll to use for various TV and public relations events which featured Briggs and Riley. It was a good opportunity for use to use our growing arsenal of film and video production equipment – including dollies, booms, portable lighting, jibs and more. Briggs and Riley was surprised at the level of quality and polish we were able to deliver at a fraction of the cost of hiring a NYC production house. We were happy that they were happy.
From static ad banners to animated gifs to flash banners to video banners, we’ve done it all. And more so than any other media, it’s fast and easy to gauge the effectiveness of an ad banner campaign – which has kept us on our toes to always be learning and growing so that we can deliver predictable results as well as fancy-schmancy looking banners.
Online Banner and Landing Page Combinations
Vonage Controls
Banner, Landing Page
Banner, Landing Page
Guthy-Renker
Banner, Landing Page
Ancestry.ca
Banner, Landing Page
Ellis College Online
Banner, Landing Page
Online Banner Advertising Samples
AOL
Campaign 1, Campaign 2, Campaign 3
Interactive Flash Video
AOL Call Alert Premium Service
AOL Yellow Pages Search
AOL Pictures House Ad
Toolbar House Ad
AOL Search Site Pop-up 1, Pop-up 2
AOL Banners Banner 1, Banner 2, Banner 3, Banner 4, Banner 5
Xdrive
Music Now (Concept 1, Concept 2)
Vonage
Campaign 1, Campaign 2, Campaign 3
Campaign 4, Campaign 5, Campaign 6
Campaign 7, Campaign 8, Campaign 9
Campaign 10
LowerMyBills.com
Campaign 1, Campaign 2, Campaign 3, Campaign 4
Monster.com
Campaign 1, Campaign 2, Campaign 3, Campaign 4
Netscape ISP
Campaign 1
Client: Vonage
Ongoing landing page testing optimized Vonage’s online orders – ours was the online winner, iterated for over a year.
Client: Monster.com
Here are more examples of ad banners and landing page we’ve done – this time for monster.com.
For the launch of the Washington Post’s new dining and entertainment guide, “Going Out Guide” we had a problem: how do you tell people that a 130-year-old newspaper is their best source for what’s hip in DC? The answer: we used the newspaper itself as the visual punchline. And the launch was a success.
