One of the biggest casualties of the financial crisis has to be the expense account meal. With the financial industry in turmoil, and unemployment higher than it’s been in decades, it’s easy to understand why those who still have their jobs are hesitant to appear brazen with the corporate card. Upscale steakhouse Maloney & Porcelli sits at 50th and Park, in the heart of expense account country, footsteps away from the likes of Citigroup, Blackrock and Morgan Stanley, and is working hard to help. Their clientele has always considered them a top spot to enjoy a 24 inch steak but with CFOs keeping tabs on every cent, it takes guts to turn in a receipt from a huge meal.
Enter the Maloney & Porcelli expense report generator (expenseasteak.com), a website that makes it easy to turn a decadent meal into a responsible expense. Simply enter the cost of a meal, and the generator will create a printable sheet of expense report-friendly receipts (office supplies, business how-to books and taxis) exactly totaling the amount of the meal. See it here.
And that’s not all we’re doing to help. Maloney & Porcelli is also famous for basketball sized pork shanks that are nearly impossible to finish. This poses its own unique set of problems since coming back to the office with a doggie bag emblazoned with a Maloney & Porcelli logo might raise a few eyebrows. Taking a cue from luxury boutiques who began offering their customers plain white shopping bags earlier this year, M&P’s doggie bags are utilizing a unique form of camouflage - the logos of other, less pricey restaurants. That way, as a small paragraph on the back of the bags reads, a customer will be “free to roam wherever you please, completely invisible to the watchful eyes of the etiquette police.”
Outside the restaurant, if you happen to be passing by - we’ve provided a long list of messages that will help people remember that there’s nothing like a good steak, even if times are tough.
Radar runs ads promoting their online properties in Radar the magazine. House advertising, as it’s known, is often treated as an afterthought (not just by Radar but by magazines in general). Of course, one man’s afterthought is another’s missed opportunity. We set out to turn house ads into something that people would want to tear out rather than pass over. Message-wise, we needed to figure out a way to differentiate the online content, which was updated constantly, from the print content which featured longer, more journalistic fare. In the end we realized that when it comes to online coverage of celebrity and political scandals, every morning is like Christmas morning - it’s as if a mythical being had snuck onto your computer while you slept and filled it with mugshots, and salacious news. (more…)
We were hired to help launch Howard Stern On Demand, a subscription based cable service that features video footage of the daily Sirius Stern radio show. The problem: The appeal of the show is the fact that you could actually see all the nudity and vulgarity. It’s basically porn. Something you most certainly cannot show in the advertising. The question became: how do you show it … without showing it? These rich media banners did a nice job of getting at what we were talking about while remaining G rated.
A companion piece to the rich media banners (see above) the Howard Stern Beaver Salon allowed Stern fans to customize a beaver to their own liking and invite a friend to do the same. 1.1 million people visited the site in the first 30 days with an average interaction time of 4:22.
If you feel like it, you could shave a beaver right now (click here).
CW-X sports bras are unlike anything else on the market - they’re the result of decades of research, and they have a lot of structural bells and whistles. We wanted to let women know all about them, but without forcing them to click over to the CW-X site. Somehow we managed to fit it all in one banner, and keep people entertained at the same time. People interacted for 67 seconds on average (4x the norm).
The Economist hired us to overhaul their RFP response program in order to see if we couldn’t do a better job of engaging media planners (the people who decide what magazines show up on a media plan.) The result was a series of custom books that helped bring the Economist readership to life in a highly visual way. We created easily customizeable templates for four of their biggest categories: automotive, tech, travel and finance, and relied on images rather than words to better carry the story for their attention starved media planning audience. Each book began with the phrase, “Imagine you are an Economist subscriber.”
How do you launch a fragrance for a refreshingly uncommercial company like Lucky Brand and still have the fashion and luxury cues necessary to the category? Do something that’s 80% beautiful and 20% weird.
CW-X conditioning wear is highly technical stuff - it can literally reposition your muscles so they work more efficiently. The science behind all their products is unbelievable, but we wanted to figure out a way to bring the benefit of that science to life. Our solution was turn those intangible benefits - shaving 15 seconds off your best time, being able to run an extra mile, finishing your loop a little faster - into something very tangible. Five years and 12 executions later the campaign is still going strong. Some highlights are below: (more…)
The truth shall set you free. Our honest take on Grand Marnier’s Cuvee du Cent Cinquantenaire, their 150th anniversary reserve earned a full page article in the New York Times upon its debut. In addition, we designed a tasting box to inform people that there were actually three blends of Grand Marnier - a little known fact. We took the opportunity to cover the box with lots of other little known facts. For instance: did you know there’s a Superman somewhere in every episode of Seinfeld? You heard it here first.
RADAR Magazine had shut its doors not once, but twice. The second time, subscribers, media planners and advertisers all got burned. In the Fall of 2006, RADAR was getting ready to come back again.
How do you possibly face all of these people, and ask them to put faith in you again? We recommended owning up to what happened. The first order of business was to do something about the radar homepage. Their website remained suspended in animation from the last day of Radar version 2.0’s existence (it still featured a story about Friends’ star Matthew Perry’s addiction to tranquilizers) Without alerting the media, we swapped the homepage image out for this:
A couple of weeks later, this was posted all over the major media hubs (NY, LA, Chicago):
When the website launched, it led with a fictitious editorial piece (created by us) titled “50 Years of Radar Covers.” When the magazine launched that winter, the covers graced the back page as well.
The abundance of fresh produce everywhere in the U.S., 12 months a year has forced our nation’s food banks to re-adapt. Canned food, once an easily stored and transported Food Bank staple is now on the decline. Food Banks have made the shift, and nowadays a large percentage of the food they provide to soup kitchens, pantries etc. is fresh. This is great for the people who rely on this food for obvious reasons, but it creates obstacles when it comes to acquiring donations. People have always felt good about donating cans of food because they knew that it would directly affect people in need. Whenever you make a financial donation, there’s always that possibility in the back of your mind that it’s going to go to recarpeting the Non-Profit CEO’s billiards room. The Food Bank for New York City has devised a way to make you feel a little bit better about donating money: the virtual food drive. You can go online, and in act more like grocery shopping than anything else, you decide exactly how many meals you want to give and it allocates your donation accordingly. This print campaign reinforced the notion that you’d still be giving food, even though it was digital.
