When the Fort Worth Zoo decided to update their brand messaging for 2013, Schaefer decided to pick up where our last campaign left off – clean, uncluttered imagery that kept the animals as the stars of the show.
We saw this new campaign as an opportunity to communicate the experiential and entertainment value the Zoo offers by reminding the people of Fort Worth and surrounding areas of their wilder neighbors. We did this by trying to keep animals as close to actual size as possible throughout the varying media.
We kept backgrounds simple to further call attention to the animals as they cropped up around their “natural habitat” of Fort Worth.
Our approach led us to the headline: Real. Fun. On the one hand, it’s self explanatory, but it’s also a subtle comparison to movies, video games and other virtual forms of entertainment.
Our poster for the 2013 Zoo Ball features custom illustration by creative director Todd Lancaster. In keeping with the event’s psychedelic theme, we printed this poster in the style of blacklight posters from the ’70s using UV inks and purple flocking for a textural element. Posters were delivered in a tube that included a blacklight bulb, so the recipient could get the full effect. Other printed materials for the event were illustrated in the same style to further the theme.
We created this spot for TCU last summer for their inaugural season in the Big 12. With TCU’s first game tomorrow against LSU it felt like a good time to post the spot. We were very proud to work with TCU on this project and be apart of the historic moment for the university.
In anticipation of the Clearfork Main Street Bridge opening, which would open up traffic through Clearfork for the first time, we wanted to develop on-site signage that would call motorists’ attention to sheer size of the land and tease what was to come.
Rather than putting up traditional banners or billboard signage, we created a concept that used larger than life words to describe the soul of Clearfork. The words were placed at strategic points on the property and were made to appear as if they had grown out of the land. Thus, we referred to the project internally as the Clearfork word crops.
The headlining band at this year’s Beastro – a food tasting and live music event at the Fort Worth Zoo – was Starship. Creative director Todd Lancaster decided to take it in a Close Encounters of the Third Kind direction, and it turned out to be the winning concept. (Despite the illustration, no giraffes were served as food at this event.)
Along with more traditional media like outdoor, direct mail and banner ads, we went guerrilla on this project as well. We created a stencil based on Todd’s artwork along with spray chalk to advertise the event on Fort Worth sidewalks. The cans of spray chalk say they’re wash off in a week or so. The fact that we could still see them several months after the event had ended would indicate otherwise. Oops.
Anyway, the event was a lot of fun, Starship rocked the party and a ton of Fort Worth food fans got to stuff their faces and make new friends.
