When company leaders come up with ideas for marketing and advertising their businesses, they will often seek the guidance of agency partners to help them craft the best strategy for implementing an original campaign. Over time, refining the unique concepts their clients come up with can help agency leaders build deep expertise, creative agility, and an extensive knowledge base.
Below, nine members of the Forbes Agency Council discuss unique campaigns they have helped their clients execute and the lessons they learned that others in their field can benefit from.
1. Marketing A Privately Owned City
We are working on a campaign to market a privately owned city. It’s a tourist attraction, but the city also has several successful businesses with e-commerce channels. Maintaining the brand for a city as well as its many businesses is, in our opinion, rather unique. This is a great chance to learn how to create one brand with several niches that all need to be marketed in somewhat differing ways. – Jayant Chaudhary, JLB USA
2. Working For Local Nonprofits
Working for local nonprofits and hospitals that focus on a particular patient population, such as children, is gratifying not only from a “greater social good” perspective but also as a local market experience. You can become part of the community and expand your reach via all mediums, from digital to out of the home. – Jessica Hawthorne-Castro, Hawthorne LLC
3. Creating A Unique Influencer Partnership
My agency was charged with developing a new way to handle influencer marketing for Arizona tourism. We created an influencer partnership with Mattel using Barbie. It was tremendously successful and became one of the top five social media campaigns that year at the Webby Awards. The lesson for brands is that they need to look beyond what everyone else is doing and explore the craziest of options. – Roger Hurni, Off Madison Ave
4. Live-Sketching Concepts During A Focus Group
One of the most unique projects we worked on was character development for a video game design company. Rather than simply using player feedback in the process, this project involved live-sketching concepts during a focus group as feedback was given. Projects such as this are a great reminder that creativity extends beyond the creative outputs and into the strategic design as well. – Chris Martin, FlexMR
5. Prioritizing People Over Profit
A home decor client asked us to team him up with high-profile charities and celebrities for give-backs while leveraging that for media exposure. We partnered him with Megan Fox, Amber Heard, Lance Bass, and others, which not only raised millions of dollars but also got all of them on major TV shows (“The Kelly Clarkson Show,” the “Today” show, and more) for free. “People over profit” goes a long way! – Zack Teperman, ZTPR
6. Cultivating Local Brand Awareness
Local brand awareness is big for many businesses and professions. However, not every industry appears to be the right fit from the outset for “shop local.” With creativity, you can make it work! For example, an accounting firm may not be thought of for community content, but promoting and sponsoring local initiatives helps spread the brand name, which makes it more likely for businesses to turn to it. – Lisa Montenegro, Digital Marketing Experts – DMX Marketing
7. Working With A Young Client
We landed a very unique client: a 14-year-old soccer athlete. While working with her, we have had to develop creative ways to explain the impact of the image, the timing of campaigns, and the long-term goals. We realized that explaining marketing in ways she could comprehend aided in her success. It’s become a standard across our whole agency, whereas we used to stay reserved. – Logan Rae, Argon Agency
8. Delivering A ‘Shoppertainment’ Campaign
We have been working with a client who produces and sells high-end flatware. In a very saturated market, they needed an “out of the box” idea to really differentiate their product line. We delivered a “shoppertainment” campaign for Facebook and Instagram—basically doing a live social version of a QVC-type pitch that sent sales soaring. The lesson? Everything old is new again! – Bernard May, National Positions
9. Creating Overarching Messaging For Diverse Applications
When a technical company’s product or intellectual property can be used in many diverse applications, it can be challenging to market. We solve this by first creating overarching messaging that can be used as a base along with an arsenal of differentiators. We then launch industry-vertical campaigns that leverage this messaging along with application-specific language, examples, and imagery. – Wendy Covey, TREW Marketing
Source: https://dmxmarketing.com/nine-unique-client-campaigns-and-lessons-their-agencies-learned/
