Awards:

MMA SMARTIES Category Platinum, MMA SMARTIES X (worldwide) Bronze, MarCom Platinum

Challenge:

FPL Services and Miami International Airport collaborated on a 10-year project to overhaul the airport, saving massive quantities of energy and water. They wanted to share the good news, but this particular good news is kind of, well, geeky.

Idea:

We created an augmented reality app featuring the entire energy overhaul recreated in a model of MIA. We featured trivia, videos and other goodies to bring the project to life, as well as some fun easter eggs (hello, working helipad). Our thesis was that an app would create far more engagement among travelers than a standard video or website.

Execution:

The campaign included creating a new brand for the initiative – FlyGreen MIA – as well as in-terminal advertising, videos, a website and the AR app.

Results:

This unique approach created engagements with travelers and Miami locals of 2+ minutes, far greater than a standard website and social approach.

Awards:

ADDY Gold (local), PRSA Radiance Award (statewide)

Challenge:

Nova Southeastern University is reinventing itself for national prominence as NSU Florida. They needed a piece of visual storytelling to bring to life why an NSU education gives students a lifelong edge.

Idea:

Create a visual storyline to bring to life that NSU Edge for students, prospects, faculty and alumni.

Execution:

Throughout the video, we use glimpses of the Mako shark mascot as a visual motif, we brought to life how NSU cultivates a student’s own desires and aptitudes into a difference every employer can see. This video was actually part of an overall suite of video storytelling that’s tailored to specific audiences – from community supporters to prospective students.

Results:

The video premiered to a standing ovation of major donors at the NSU Celebration of Excellence in early 2020. It’s now an ongoing part of the NSU brand relaunch, playing a role in every meeting and every open campus day.

Awards:
American Advertising Awards District Gold ADDYs for Data-Driven Media and Digital Campaign, Platinum Hermes Award

Challenge:
Inspire mid-Atlantic and northeastern travelers to book late winter/early spring travel to Amelia Island.

Idea:
Tapping into my own experiences of winter blues and cabin fever during my time in St. Louis and Kansas City, we created a conceptual direction around escaping your own “wintertude” by escaping winter altogether.

Execution:
The ad creative would be triggered by 1) temps dropping below a certain point; 2) snowfall in target geographies. As the weather got worse, our campaign creative would ramp up the escapism vibes for our audience.

Results:
Our two different ads received 8x and 16x the average response rate for PadSquad creative. Engagement scores were double and triple industry averages, and the campaign led to an attributable double-digit increase in Amelia Island bookings within the following four months.

Awards:

MMA SMARTIES Metaverse Bronze, Flagler Best in Show

Challenge:

During the pandemic, travel restrictions cut off the main way Boggy Creek Airboat Adventures grew its business – through familiarity trips for overseas travel planners. Without overseas tour group busses, Boggy Creek would lose a significant portion of its revenue.

Idea:

Starmark help new way to get in front of overseas travel planners – in VR. Instead of bringing travel planners to Kissimmee, FL, we’d bring Boggy Creek Airboat Adventures to them via Meta Quest headset.

Execution:

Starmark recreated the Boggy Creek experience within VR, allowing a virtual visitor to see what a real visitor would experience. The award-winning 1.0 release focused on creating versions of each experience – a video overview, the butterfly garden, critter corner, native village and the general grounds of the park. The 2.0 release amped up the immersion with sound design, lighting modifications, a gem mining experience with a trackable giveaway and four Boggy Creek guide avatars of real employees.

Results:

In addition to the awards and accolades for this projects technical and creative merits, the best part of the success of the Boggy Creek VR Experience is that it worked even better than the conventional fam trip approach. Within a month of launch, we actually had inbound requests from new travel planners who wanted to set up VR meetings because they had been referred by industry peers. After a year and a half, with version 2.0 out in the market and no more travel restrictions, Boggy Creek is still conducting more of its travel planner meetings in VR than in person, due to preference by the audience – and cost savings.

Awards:
National Silver ADDY

Challenge:

It started with a black truck and a dream of selling frozen custard, a midwest favorite, in sunny southern California.

Idea:

Joe Wilper and I wanted to create a brand that was just as cold and elusive as frozen custard in California. So we created Yeti (this was way before those overbuilt coolers came along).

Execution:

Using Andy’s (the founder) story, we crafted a legend and world for Yeti, encompassing everything from the truck itself to packaging to a digital footprint to customer loyalty to packaging.

Results:

In the four years since we helped name, brand and launch Yeti frozen custard, the brand has created new flavors, catered to celebrities expanded into retail packaging and scored a major food retail distribution deal. It's a Sasquatch-sized success story.

Awards:

National ADDY Award

Challenge:

Selling any product, much less a living one, in a grocery store produce department is a challenge. We wanted to find a way for Cal-Ann Farms Living Basil to command more presence without more cash.

Idea:

By creating an integrated display and coordinated product packaging, we were able to draw more eyes and more sales. Our entire pitch was making living basil as fun as the flavor it brings to home cooking.

Execution:

Using hand-washed wood as a base, we printed a series of fun sayings on all four sides of each box. Each one spoke to a different reason to love fresh basil (local, garden-fresh flavor without gardening, etc.). The boxes were custom designed to house Cal-Ann’s existing plastic transport equipment, cutting down on logistics.

We created one version for sweet basil and another for assorted flavors, and we included additional signage to drive cross-traffic with other fresh herbs in the cooler cases.

Results:

This effort started as a pilot in a single store. In a matter of months, every store that stocked the product was clamoring for the new displays. And the effort landed Cal-Ann preferential produce space in a series of new stores, as well.

Awards:

U.S. Ad Review - pork chop package

National NAMA award – pork.org

Challenge:

As part of our work with the Pork Checkoff, we were tasked with sharing with farmers how their checkoff dollars paid them back. One initiative focused on how the checkoff packaged demand for farmers with its Don’t Be Blah consumer campaign.

The pork.org work showcased the easy-to-use new website for the checkoff, as well as its shorter URL.

Idea:

We figured there was no better way to show farmers the impact of consumer marketing efforts than taking them straight to the meat counter of the grocery store.

For the new website, we created a series of Mad Magazine-style reduction ads.

Execution:

Each packaging demand ad in the series featured a different packaged pork product and unique messaging on pricing stickers. We wanted the images to feel like they were leaping out of magazines at the audience, so everything from the lighting to the slightly offset stickers had to be just-so.

For pork.org, each piece of creative transformed in some way to reveal the new URL. Mouse pads had a dotted line for a mouse. Postcards perfed out. Ads folded. The hardest but most rewarding part was writing copy that reads perfectly both before and after the ad is transformed.

I spent hours in InDesign writing, wrapping, rewriting and rewrapping the copy so that it would read correctly both folded and unfolded. Maybe I'm the only one who noticed, but I still think it was worth the trouble.

Results:

On farmer surveys after each of these campaigns ran, they were two of the most remembered efforts by our audience. Not only that, overall checkoff support rose among contributors, and these two programs were cited as reasons why.

Challenge:

While at SHS, we pitched and won the Kansas City Chiefs business. First order of business was to celebrate the team's 50th season in Kansas City. 

Idea and Execution:

It’s almost unheard of for a NFL team to stay in a single city for half a century. As a result, hundreds of Kansas City families had treasure troves of Chiefs history in their homes. We sent our a call to season ticket holders soliciting renewals and also giving them the ability to contribute to Chiefs history through a living digital timeline.

Results:

Season ticket renewals outpaced previous years by a significant margin. And we were able to collect a massive wealth of Chiefs history for preservation. That Mahomes guy may be a big reason for the recent Super Bowl win, but I feel like the turnaround might have started with this effort.

During my time there, Sullivan Higdon and Sink (now Signal Theory) celebrated it's 40th anniversary with the Much Ballyhooed Mustachioed Festival of Big Hair. We created invites and decorations to play off of some questionable style choices by employees, both past and present, throughout the years. Not pictured here are the poster-sized Wooly Willy-style portraits of the current company leadership.

As a Thanksgiving gift, we sent out these lovely blanket turkeys to all of Signal Theory (neé Sullivan Higdon and Sink) clients. Each one was meticulously hand-folded and tied, placed in a roasting pan and drop-shipped to the recipient. 

Poultry farmers are just as serious about nutrition as that annoying neighbor down the street with the 26.2 sticker on his Honda CR-V. Seriously, fuck that guy. 

Anyway, Novus wanted some novel ways to showcase how well their mineral products worked for commercial poultry birds. Of course, the natural solution is a chicken maze and an egg castle. What I won't tell you is which came first.

Challenge:

Play+ is a sportsbetting and gaming financial vehicle offered by Sightline Payments. It’s a specialized account you can use to fund your betting and get paid when you win. As sports betting became the law in more states, the 2021/22 NFL playoffs season was the perfect time to create new fans and re-engage previous ones.

Solution:

This campaign was based on understanding what makes sports bettors tick. That and a whole bunch of data crunching to create a media plan that would reach and convert them at different spends rates across different states (because sports betting is regulated am a state level). Starmark created a video and animation-driven multimedia campaign across OTT, CTV, display and social hyper-focused on those behavioral insights and propensity targeting.

Insight:

To inform the concepting exercise, I dove into the research on betting psychology. There’s plenty of that, by the way. Then we used those insights on key drivers of betting behavior to develop benefits we could test to determine which emotional drivers were most effective with prospective sports bettors. The winners became our creative brief.

The winning concept, “Get in the Game,” paired the idea of instant cashouts with the emotional trigger of being a winner.

Execution:

You’d never know it by looking at the final product, but the shoot to capture this work only lasted one day. We created the still and motion assets for hundreds of media insertions within just one 16 hour shoot day. From 16 master spots, to 32 refresh spots, to retargeting versions, to 80 additional assets, this campaign took an enormous amount of pre-planning and coordination between creative and media to map everything out beforehand.

Results:

The campaign was a massive success. In addition to re-engaging thousands of existing Play+ accountholders, the effort created more than 100,000 new sign-ups during the three months between the campaign launch and the big game in February.