Each year, the Fort Worth Zoo brings together some of the best restaurants and music acts in town for a tasting and music event called Beastro. For this year’s campaign, we boiled it down to the essentials.
We love our neighborhood of Near Southside here in Fort Worth, and we try to be neighborly whenever possible. So when residents started complaining about business patrons parking in front of their houses, we were there to help. See, there’s this perfectly good parking garage just off Magnolia street, but a lot of people didn’t know about it. How do we remedy this? With advertising, of course!
Schaefer created the “Park the Garage” campaign using eye-catching street banners to point people in the right direction. We also provided table tents, buck slips and coasters to local businesses to help reinforce the message. With all that hot pink, there was basically no way for upstanding gourmands to miss that great, big, juicy parking garage just waiting for their vehicles.
Today, the garage is in use, the neighbors are happy and there is peace and tranquility in Near Southside once again. All thanks to some well-placed, brightly colored information.
Four years ago, Schaefer was asked to create a spokesman character for TTI, Inc., a $2B electronic components distributer that had just been acquired by Berkshire Hathaway. Thus the Specialist was born, and since then he’s been fighting bad guys and saving production lines both in videos and a comic book series. Both have been very successful within the industry. “TTI – you’re the guys with the Specialist, right?”
Wanting to maintain our momentum but keep things fresh, Schaefer went back to the drawing board to think of a new way to capitalize on The Specialist character’s infinite knowledge of all things electronic.
Now, Schaefer is proud to introduce Ask the Specialist, a new video series that features our intrepid hero answering questions on a wide range of topics – everything from parts and components to relationship advice.
Click the link to see the first episode, and be sure to check back each month for more answers to life’s burning questions.
http://www.ttiinc.com/page/ask-the-specialist
The Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce’s annual meeting began with a red lanyard at check-in, private access and the declaration: “We’re making you all reporters today!” from none other than retired ABC News White House Correspondent Ann Compton. As the keynote speaker, she offered objective insight into upcoming campaign media coverage. The Chamber enlisted her 40 years of covering seven presidents and First Families to offer entertainment and nostalgia in an upper-level business audience challenged by regulations and taxes.
Our charge was to create collateral materials that would grant access to the “confidential” White House details regarding business or public policy. We established a political look and feel, with a patriotic color palette and layered “press badges.” In place of a ticket, each of the 700+ business leader attendees received a lanyard and folder of collateral that detailed Chamber activity and relevant articles. Our team even had the honor of meeting the decorated as they received “Off The Record” comments about local business.
Based on how often it’s promised in advertising, “becoming one’s true self” must be a near-universal obsession. New clothes, tanning salons, gym memberships, eyeglasses, Colorado tourism – the real you is out there. You just need to change in order to find it.
Well, we’ve changed. But we’re more “us” now than we’ve ever been, dig?
Welcome to the brand-new, same ol’ Schaefer Advertising Co. As you can see, we’ve gotten a haircut. But the advertising in us means we’re not going to wait for you to notice.
Our new website and refined logo are just the beginning – we’ll be rolling out little goodies as often as we feel like it. So why the change? Are we not still making notes on napkins?
What’s the saying? The cobbler’s children have no shoes? Advertising agencies are like that, too. We do what we do for you and often don’t have time to do our thing for ourselves. Years go by, and we suddenly don’t recognize ourselves in the mirror. So we go off to the desert, sit in a tepee for a while and come back with a new perspective.
Or something like that. In reality, we just had a lot of conversations over the course of the year. Who are we? How do we represent a diverse group of people in a single, unified way? Rather than dumping out a year’s worth of notes and revisions, let’s just skip to the result.
And you’re here. Allow us to reintroduce ourselves. We’re Schaefer Advertising Co. We’re an explorer brand. Schaefer is our hub, and we are spokes – each of us going out in our own way, gathering information and bringing it back to our home base. We pursue our interests and talents and share them with the group. We’re confident; we’re not afraid to say, “I don’t know,” then go figure it out. Our new tagline is also our mantra: Seek what’s possible.
One of the main things you’ll notice is our updated logo. There’s really nothing “pre-packaged” about Schaefer, so moving away from a stock font was a must. (We’ll do a dedicated post on that later so senior designer Charlie Howlett can geek out about it to his heart’s content.)
We’ll have a lot more to show and tell in the near future, including new ways to stay up on our adventures. But for now, you’ve got our new website to explore! Go forth, pioneers!
Yours truly,
The Schaefer team
In April, I had the amazing opportunity to travel to London for 8 days with my family. Before leaving, we made plans to do our best to visit everything that we possibly could in the time that we had there. We were all over the city, only taking breaks to rest our feet or sleep. We visited St. Paul’s Cathedral, Hyde Park, Buckingham and Kensington Palaces, Harrods and so many other places.
I am also not ashamed to admit that I tried to adopt the English accent. It’s easy to get carried away over there – by the end of the trip I think I had it down pretty well. Now, I am sure that if I tried it out on a local, they would have told me I was crazy!
On the trip I learned that I have an interest buying things that are just not necessary. For example, I came back with three pens, a planner, a paperweight, a keychain, too many coffee mugs, and many more things that will most likely never leave my bedroom. But darn it… I will have those souvenirs for the rest of my life, and THAT is what matters.
When I came back from my trip, my coworkers wanted to hear all about my adventures. Someone suggested that I pull together a blog with some cool images from my trip. When flipping through my phone, I made the joke that I could make a blog post out of the embarrassing amount of selfies I took. In true Schaefer fashion, what I thought was a joke ended up being a reality (you have to be careful what you say around here). So here it is. Makes you feel like you’re in England, right?
-Taylor
Spring is in the air, and sleepy animals are emerging from their caves to venture out into the sunlight once more. Sorry, I meant people. Emerging from their homes. After another typically unpredictable winter, spring is back, which means a lot of moms and dads are ready to get their kids out of the house before they all go crazy.
The old axiom says: You don’t know what you have until it’s gone. So we thought there was no better way to put on the 2015 American Advertising Awards, than to take it away.
In late 2014, with the help of the People’s League for the Abolition of Advertising (plAAd), the United States government passed Amendment 28 to end the practice of Advertising as it was rampant with persuasion and coercion. Local agencies were canvassed with official cease and desist notices and instructions on how to package and submit their, now illegal, advertising materials.
To keep advertising and our livelihoods alive, AAF Fort Worth swept into action and the AAFFXFW underground advertising movement was born. The group intercepted the government submissions and threw an Addy Awards celebration under the cover of “bingo night” at the local Masonic Temple. Our craft was celebrated, awards were won and Amendment 28 was repealed by night’s end.
Long Live Advertising.
Our friends at Fort Worth South Inc. asked us to create the collateral for their twentieth anniversary celebration earlier this year. FWSI began as a small coalition of Near Southside businesses and community leaders and has grown dramatically over the last two decades. The redevelopment of Fort Worth’s Near Southside was the story we wanted to showcase. Schaefer worked with them to find headlines from the past 20 years that helped to tell the story of how this community has become a vibrant, urban, mixed-use neighborhood.
Our very own Ken Schaefer was one of the speakers, talking about the growing creative scene in the Southside. He rocked a bow tie and shared some great insights about the unique opportunities that are available in this culturally rich community. His message focused on how important creative organizations are to helping this area flourish.
