Saturday, September 19, 2009
Advertising wizards put heads together
Red Bull, coffee and creative juices will fuel the artistic minds of members of the Advertising Federation of the Roanoke Valley as they design ad campaigns for nonprofit organizations.
ERIC BRADY The Roanoke Times
Members of the Advertising Federation of the Roanoke Valley participate Friday in CreateAthon, a 24-hour collaborative event.
The latest from The Ticker blog
If an advertising firm's clients don't like their marketing campaign, the ad designers might pull an all-nighter to fix it. Forty of Roanoke's advertising, public relations, design and advertising professionals were planning to forgo sleep Friday night for a host of causes.
They're donating a full 24 hours, from 2 p.m. Friday until 2 today, to nonprofit organizations that need ad campaigns at Roanoke's CreateAthon, a one-day service project of the Advertising Federation of the Roanoke Valley held at Virginia Western Community College.
The creative minds, supported with computers, a printer, design software and tables of junk food in classrooms at the college's humanities building, are designing pro bono advertising campaigns for 18 charities that can't afford to hire professionals but need strategies to reach donors and recipients.
"A campaign that is well executed can result in additional dollars raised for that organization, which in turn can result in more services they can provide to an end user," said Teresa Coles, who co-founded CreateAthon 11 years ago with her West Columbia, S.C.-based firm Riggs Partners.
Red Bull, coffee and artistic juices, along with hula hoops to offer a diversion, are helping the advertising experts to design Web sites, radio public service announcements, logos, posters, brochures and a video. The participating nonprofit organizations will take home one finished project on a digital video or compact disc this afternoon.
The services provided this weekend are worth about $96,000, based on advertising professionals' average rate of $100 an hour, said Jim Dudley, the event's co-chairman and owner of Dudley Creative, a Roanoke-based advertising agency.
"Instead of helping some widget to make a dollar, what we do is help these organizations who are helping people," Dudley said. He's spending the 24 hours working on campaigns for the Special Olympics and Children's Trust Roanoke Valley. The trust works to prevent child abuse with the Children's Advocacy Center and Court Appointed Special Advocates.
His teammates -- Ariel Clark from the Becher Agency; Neathawk, Dubuque & Packett's John Griessmayer; freelancer Erica Gleiner; and Access' Tony Pearman and Rachel Spencer -- volleyed ideas across the table for a campaign to help the Children's Trust weather the recession and continue its work preventing child abuse.
Images of TV screens, stock tickers, help-wanted ads and ATMs could help communicate that the recession isn't the time for "tightening your belt" or for "taking a beating," the team members said.
The Roanoke event is the first time a group of advertising agencies has worked together in a CreateAthon. Past occasions in other cities used professionals from a single firm.
The advertising federation chose the nonprofits, including the Roanoke Symphony Orchestra, Habitat for Humanity and the Virginia Museum of Transportation, through an application process that began in July. The nonprofits told the club what types of marketing projects they needed and their budgets for putting the creative services to use, Dudley said.
The club accepted as many projects as they thought they could handle in one day.
"Part of what attracts people to it is we start it, we do it and we're done, so it doesn't drag on for months and months and become this monkey on our back," Dudley said.
Prompting creative minds in Roanoke to work together -- rather than compete for business as they normally do -- is another benefit of the day, Dudley said.
"It takes a lot of work to recruit people from different agencies and firms to come together," Coles said Thursday, eight hours into this year's CreateAthon. "That's a much taller order than to put an event on with your staff."
This is one of the largest projects of the year for the 120-member advertising federation, next to the Western Virginia ADDY Awards, a first round of the American Advertising Federation's yearly advertising competition.
"We'll be putting more hours in public service in this event than we have in 10 years," Dudley said.
As for sleep, most of the participants plan on getting little. When Dudley said CreateAthon is a 24-hour event, he's not kidding.
"Anybody who takes a nap is going to have a hard time getting up. I think everyone will be rocking and rolling at 4 a.m.," he said Thursday.
