Advertising campaigns

Craft powerful messages to attract customers

By delivering a powerful message that resonates with consumers you can increase product awareness, drive purchase intent, increase brand advocacy, differentiate from competitors, increase perceived value, increase customer loyalty, educate on features and benefits, and open new markets. To reach potential customers in today’s crowded marketplace your advertising needs to be smart, attractive, brand relevant, and appear in the right places at the right time.

Our Creative Directors have won Cannes Lions awards for their work and contributed to campaigns for companies like GM, Ford, Intel, Compaq, Colgate, Cathay Pacific, Rogers, Duracell, Nike, Kraft, and Unilever. We also have online and digital Media Planners that have handled international multi million dollars accounts like Telus, A&W Foods, Safeway, Shell, VW, Lush Cosmetics, BC Hydro, and Pacific Newspaper Group.

At FRANK we’re aware that campaigns need to be intelligent, strategic, financially realistic, have appropriate interactive elements and social connectivity, be measureable, be integrated across all relevant media formats… and of course be quick to market. Typically, activating a campaign demands careful consideration of:

• Message development (what’s the best aspect of the product to focus on)
• Customer definition (demographics and psychographic profiles)
• Competitive gap analysis (what market space is available for domination)
• Geographic reach (what markets to penetrate, and what idiosyncrasies they have)
• Media apertures (where and when will customers be most responsive to the message)
• The big idea (what’s going to make this campaign get noticed)
• Budget adherence (how is the finite budget best spent)
• Project management (getting the ads produced and in media on time)

If you’d like to talk with us about how to get your message in bright lights please contact us to schedule a conversation.

Marketing Strategy

Develop a clear plan of action

A good marketing strategy will focus finite resources towards increased sales and competitive differentiation. A ‘great’ marketing strategy will also have a touch of creative genius that inspires all those it comes into contact with. This added dimension is applied through an explicit understanding of market dynamics and customer psychology… combined with a spark of rare ingenuity.

At FRANK we are brave and honest with our thoughts and opinions, enabling us to write hard hitting and lucid strategies that focus on the right business dimensions. The Strategists at FRANK have developed plans within numerous industries including packaged consumer goods, technology, fashion, retail, utilities, wireless, biotech, communications, and more.

Combining ideas and un-common sense has proved powerful for our clients. If you’d like to explore how to get your product to market please contact us.

Creative Services

Breath life into your brand

Using strong imagery in your marketing communications enables you to appeal to people on a deeper emotional level, prompting positive responses like amiability, trust, competence, innovation, scale and much more (i.e. whatever your brand attributes are). Strong brands use this technique consistently to keep the attention of consumers and create a visual dialogue that words cannot touch.

In today’s’ cluttered market place, where senses are stimulated every few seconds, a brand needs a distinct and consistent voice in order to be heard and understood. Articulating your brand to emotionally engage your audience is vital to your success.

FRANK has a fast and nimble creative studio capable of sophisticated design and production for both print and web. We have relationships with great printers and can handle most production techniques. We also have senior print production staff well versed in mail shop procedures and all aspects of direct mail, packaging and collateral. We’ve created stunning layouts for most media formats including:

• Billboard
• Newspaper and magazine
• Transit shelter
• Vehicle decal (large and small)
• Direct mail
• Stationery
• Annual general reports
• Email
• Websites
• Web Advertising (HTML and Flash)
• Store signage
• Packaging
• Point of sale

To find out what our studio could do for you, please contact us to schedule an informal chat.

Ideas

Solve problems

Ideas are everything. To cut through the clutter of everyday noise and inspire people everything you do needs to hinge on a good idea. Whether its an advertising campaign, a piece of collateral, a business idea, or a piece of packaging… the idea will be the factor that makes it win or loose.

Not everyone can generate good ideas as they require abstract thought and alternate understanding of concepts. At FRANK we have good ideas because we interrogate life to find the moments that mean something. These insights are what we tap into when we need an idea. Again, ideas are everything.

To milk us of ideas, please contact us and arrange a chat.

Branding

Dominate your category

Effective branding helps you differentiate your product, increase perceived value, attract and retain great staff/suppliers/customers, increase customer loyalty, drive acquisition costs down, drive sale prices up, increase customer intimacy, and more.

Bringing brands to life and injecting them with possibility is our favorite thing to do. We pride ourselves in finding sparks of energy in brands, and help clients create an internal culture of acceptability that allows them to prosper. Our Brand Strategists have worked internationally on household brands including Colgate, Telus, Intel, VW, GM, Safeway, Duracell, Ford, Nike, Unilever and Happy Planet.

Defining the personality of a company is an enlightening and energizing process, typically consisting of these inputs:

• Internal audit of opinion/understanding at all levels of staff and leadership
• Review business and marketing plans
• Understand the product and its idiosyncrasies
• Interview customers and suppliers
• Assess the market and map out competitive positioning
• Define the audience and their values/beliefs/behaviors

To understand branding and what it can do for you please contact us to schedule a chat.

Naming

Achieve Differentiation

A great name can springboard you way ahead of the competition saving you thousands of dollars in marketing, making emotional connections with customers, and contributing to a brand that evokes meaning and relevance. Boiling down a positioning strategy into a few words may appear to be witchcraft, but its not. We have customizable processes that distill the inputs through the minds of wordsmiths to come up with lightning bolts. The outputs of this exercise will enable you to:

• Achieve differentiation from competitors
• Make a statement of individuality
• Truly represent your positioning strategy
• Engage your audience and set the expectation level
• Be memorable, notorious and buzz worthy
• Stir up positive emotional resonances
• Be a rudder for the brand and steer it into greatness
• Dominate a category

If you’d like some help naming a product or company please contact us to schedule an informal chat.

Interactive Advertising

Make the internet work for you

Reaching millions of customers with ads, search terms, video content, and editorial on a cost per click, or cost per view basis is now a standard marketing notion. Mainstream organizations are now spending large percentages of their media and marketing budgets on digital campaigns, instead of traditional campaigns, to raise awareness, drive purchase intent, elevate the brand, and physically complete a sale.

Strategy + Creative Thinking + Execution

At FRANK we’ve been working in the interactive space since its inception. We understand the cognitive space, the tools, the interdependencies, and how it all comes together to create a meaningful dialogue (which in turn sells stuff). We can help with strategic thinking (i.e. what type of Interactive Advertising is relevant to your situation), creative thinking (i.e. what’s the big idea that will make anyone pay attention), and the tactical execution (i.e. we build it, launch it, maintain it, and measure it).

Typical Interactive Advertising services include:

• Campaign micro-site, or full website design and build (creating a home for your brand so people can engage with you)
• Search engine optimization (getting your site highly ranked by search engines)
• Search engine marketing (buying search terms to get prime position on search engines)
• Online media planning and buying (securing media on the high value websites)
• An ad placement campaign (creating and placing adverts on targeted websites to attract customers)
• Creative strategy and execution (coming up with a compelling idea and bringing it to life through words, graphics and functionality)
• Analytics (examining website activity to improve fulfillment rates)
• A mobile website (a website that looks great and works well on a Blackberry or iPhone)
• Mobile advertising (placement of ads on mobile phones like Blackberry and iPhone)
• Advertising within popular entertainment games (placing adverts within virtual environments like ‘second life’ or ‘grand theft auto’).
• Digital PR (editorial placement with PR support on targeted online properties)
• Email marketing campaigns (customer contact mechanisms with creative support and database management)

If you’d like help figuring out how to make the Internet work for you, feel free to contact us for an informal chat.

Media Planning and Buying

Get the best media for your money

Whether managing traditional, interactive, or integrated campaigns; effective Media Planning ensures you spend your budget in the right places. Accurate research through industry tools (PMB, NADBank, COMbase, IMS, and BBM) enable us to precisely target your customers and create plans with a high ROI potential. Additionally, we drive tight negotiations to secure media at competitive rates on your behalf.

We have local, national and international reach for all media including TV, print, radio, billboard, transit, indoor, mall, web banners and much more. We are agnostic media planners without affiliation to any particular media suppliers; we buy media based on your requirements, not on our commission rates. To support this philosophy our billing is transparent (you have the option to receive the invoices directly from the supplier) and we don’t charge commission on media buys.

If you need help getting your message to the right people please contact us for a chat.

Social Media Marketing

embrace the new marketing paradigm

Social Media Marketing is a new form of marketing that’s a result of Internet applications allowing content ‘consumers’ to also become content ‘creators’. Within social media, information and ideas are exchanged in a purely democratized manner (i.e. there is little room for marketers to sway opinion). This has forced marketing messages out of the conversations people have about products, and changed the dynamics between seller and buyer.

Sales pitches are no longer based on a ‘one to many’ or ‘one to one’ paradigm (i.e. create a print ad telling everyone the product is faster than it’s competitors). Instead, the masses are swapping information on the product and coming up with their own aggregated opinion of its merits.

This shift from ‘one to many’ to ‘many to many’ means organizations are no longer 100% in control of their marketing message (ironically, their customers are). However, there are strategies and tactics to make sure you’re taking part in the right conversations, and using the right tools to stay relevant in the market.  Typical social media services include:

• Content creation (attention worthy content to publish across social networks i.e. viral video)
• Creative strategy and execution (coming up with a compelling idea and bringing it to life through words, graphics and functionality)
• A seeding or blogging outreach campaign (getting your message out in gorilla style to high value groups)
• A Facebook application (use this already established vast social network to acquire interest in your brand and create an online following)
• Social media management (the set up and management of existing social networks including youtube, twitter, and facebook)
• Social network development (create a dedicated social network around your brand i.e. www.changeeverything.ca)
• Blog set up (create a branded blog for key members of the organization to comment on pertinent activities)
• Forum set up (create a forum for people to discuss matters relevant to you within your branded digital environment)

If you want to discover social media and find out how to initiate your own conversation, contact us for a…conversation

Event planning and activation

Take your brand to the people

Bringing your brand or product to life through experiential marketing is a powerful technique that provides high customer intimacy and advocacy. Well planned and executed events allow you to showcase new developments for PR purposes, create stable relationships with highly targeted customers, collect customer data for profiling, sample new products in live environments, associate with higher tier brands, entertain high value partners/dealers/retails, and demonstrate the brand to its full potential to boost morale and promote loyalty.

Frank has activated large-scale events for companies like Telus, Virgin, Ginch Gonch, Greenpeace, Envision, and Fido. We also use specialized partners for specific situations that deal specifically in PR style events, data capture, electronic booths, or within the financial markets. A typical Event planning and activation project includes:

• Defining objectives and metrics for success
• Concept development
• PR hook and broadcast strategy
• Stage, uniform, and collateral design
• Equipment procurement
• Staffing and training
• Logistics
• Set up and tear down
• Budgetary adherence
• Review and measure

If you’d like to take your brand on the road, contact us for an informal chat.

Business to Business

Reach clients effectively

Marketing and advertising principles still apply in the B2B space and all the things we do at FRANK within the consumer space are relevant to this category. Marketing between businesses has its nuances, but ‘people’ run businesses and therefore the rules of sensory delight and persuasion are still in effect. At FRANK we look at the B2B space with new eyes and create refreshing campaigns and collateral that stand out from the pinstripe.

At FRANK we have marketing strategists with deep experience in business, politics, public, private and non profit organizations across multiple vertical markets. We understand the need for clean, clear communications that serve multiple goals within contextually sensitive environments.

To see what we’ve done in this space please contact us for an informal chat.