Case Study: B.W.A.M.M. from Ad2 Denver (rough draft)

For this case study, I will cover the BWAMM project done by the people of Ad2 Denver.

Ad2 Denver is a professional Advertising organization, meaning they do everything for free for their clients; their materials and money are collected from donations. Each year they have a competition for local organizations and other businesses that submit an application to become the year’s pro bono project.

Ad2 picked the Bradford Washington American Mountaineering Museum to help out for their pro bono project of the year. I contacted Lindsey McCune from Ad2 Denver for an interview to help answer some questions. The reason they picked to help the museum came from several stand points. One reason was they had an influential board of directors, every well known bunch of people. The curator of the museum at the time was Beth Heller who was a curator in the Smithsonian organization. Second, because this was the museum first year of business, this would make them better clients for Ad2’s first year. The museum turned out to be a good client to work with, they were flexible is scheduling meetings and could bear with them in their process in making their advertising campaign. After meeting with their client for two weeks, they had the accountant team write up their Creative Brief and went over the details with the board and were given two months (usually have about a year with paying clients) to create everything they needed for a brand identity: Logo, color palette, print ads, public relations, sponsorship kits, website, social network pages, web banner ads, etc…

First step in the process was conduct research to find data that answered some questions as to what was the best way to create their identity. In the interview, Lindsey McCune said that they mostly did quantitative research, looked through databases on how to position themselves. They found that the Museum was the only mountaineering museum in the entire country. In their research, they kept sticking to their focus group of people who like the mountains and activities in the mountains, because that was their target group for the museum rather than gather a wide crowd. In their results it turned up that the brand personality was to express: fun, entertaining, adventurous, fascination, and inspiring.

One of the difficulties in working with the museum was that they weren’t sure in what it was they wanted, but their creative and media teams were quickly able to come up with some options and narrow it down for the board. In the interview with Lindsey, she stated how the designers had to be playful in their work when coming up with the concept for the campaign. Their creative director for the creative team was Justin Baluch. The creative team had to work closely with the media team. In the interview with Lindsey, she stated how it is not a good idea to present too many choices to a client. At the time they had to present their work to the board, they had given three different choices for their campaign, the board the chose the safest choice since it was a mix the two more extreme choices.

In the interview with Lindsey I found more about the choices they made with what the board chose. They mostly used this shade of blue for the fact that had a calming effect for their targeted group and also aligned with reference to the mountains. This shade of blue was also easier to print for all their deliverables such as posters at bus stops, billboards, brochures, magazine covers, etc… and also easy to use for web banners and other web ads. When it came down to the logo, the creative team and the board had a sort of tug-o-war over it until it was finally justifed by the board. So no matter what, when they made a choice, it was for in the best interest of the client, even if the client didn’t know at the time what it was they needed.

 

 

 

 

Finally their grand opening came and the board’s results went way past their expectations. They had 800 people visit the museum on the opening weekend and nearly 3,000 people visited the museum from Feb. 16 – June 1. They were also able to get 2 corporate sponsors for their opening weekend. The museum was able to appear in 31 different public articles. Lindsey stated that their process for the project was overall average, the difference between this process from other s they have done is that they relyed more on the teams rather than the individuals and they got a lot of experience in a short amount of time.

1. 

   jesswellington Said:

   on September 8, 2009 at 8:36 AM

   Nicely written case study. I would have liked to seen more depth in the actual production process phase of the product. You briefly mentioned somethings but more information would have been good.

   Reply

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