Pumping Out A Brand

Evan Schultz , Art Director at Adams Outdoor does a terrific job of presenting his creative ideas on paper.  Insider especially likes the sketches he includes to help understand his process. Here is his latest article.

Do you bleed for your client? Does your client bleed for their customers? Or do their customers bleed for them? Well, in this case… maybe all three. This was maybe the perfect scenario for an advertising campaign. We had done a couple previous billboard designs for Interstate Blood & Plasma, and they were happy with the results. In this next campaign, they didn’t necessarily want more people to walk in their doors to donate. The client was more interested in making their name synonymous with what they do.

That meant the board could be clean. We sketched up a couple ideas. A couple concepts ended up tongue-in-cheek, and one fairly straightforward with the benefit: getting money for donating blood.

One thing the client was not comfortable with, though, was the fact that focusing on the money aspect was cheapening the act of giving blood. Donating blood is a noble cause, saving lives. So we felt, what we needed to do is glamorize their business, and capture the pride a person feels when donating. Visually, we thought what would work best would be an image typically used in a health club advertisement. Images like that speak power, pride, and confidence… pretty much the same emotions we wanted to elicit. So we sketched again.

We even thought the headline could be a play on “Pump Up”… twisting it into “Pump Out”. The more we thought about it, the more we thought this was perfect. We put all the sketches together in a presentation, stapled it together, and met with the client. We flipped the cover over, and pitched the “Pump Out” concept, and that was all. We never turned to any of the other pages. The more we talked, the less the others seemed viable. Why bloody up the water? The client was leaving it up to our expertise.

The next step was making the sketch a reality. A black and white image would allow the red of the logo, line and ball to “pop.” We decided to shorten the line to just “Pump” so it could be big, bold and simple. We also thought the red “U” would be an interesting element. After all, “you” are giving blood, but it was really meant as a curiosity, hopefully getting people to wonder what it meant. A little more engagement, via a mystery, can keep it in someone’s mind just a little longer.

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