Schaefer is a proud partner of the Kimbell Art Museum, having supported the museum in individual ticket sales and museum memberships for five years. Throughout our time together, we have led project-based initiatives like premiering the exhibitions to the community through unique, hands-on activations. We also support all digital media strategy and management throughout the year.
A benefit to a long-term partner includes the compounded learnings that come from each year and every test. As we all know, the digital landscape is ever-evolving, and it is crucial for your campaigns to grow alongside it.
Photo by Nic Lehoux
What’s Different?
As we closed out 2023, we reflected on what worked and what didn’t. The Kimbell offers museum-goers new exhibitions each year, and while each exhibition differs from one another, the timing stays somewhat regular. This allows us to test media strategies that overlap campaigns, such as brand or membership, with the peak season featuring new exhibitions. In 2023, we tested the use of higher awareness mediums combined with campaign overlap and tactic flighting to compare against 2022’s results.
We found that due to the name recognition of both the Kimbell and the renowned artists featured in the special exhibitions, awareness was less important in our target market. Therefore, we shifted our focus to conversion-based tactics for 2024. However, we also found that having our brand and membership campaigns ‘always on’ allowed for just the right amount of awareness to boost sales year over year. We applied these learnings to our 2024 plan and are eager to track performance as the year progresses.
Photo by Nic Lehoux
What Worked?
Another benefit of a partner like Schaefer is that we are always optimizing mid-campaign. We’re not waiting for end-of-year to review the campaigns, but constantly applying best practices and learnings to our live campaigns. Because of this, we saw significant growth and positive results in 2023:
180% website revenue growth YoY
247% increase in revenue directly attributed to paid media
Within the eyecare industry, the idea of interventional glaucoma treatment has been categorized as an elusive myth for years. ViaLase developed a game-changing system designed to leverage two proven technologies to create a new, non-invasive approach to glaucoma. When this new system is approved by regulatory agencies, the myth will finally become a reality. Therefore, our client needed a campaign that would create attention and support a successful launch of the new concept.
Goals
Develop materials needed for a successful brand launch
Develop a highly visible campaign that would cut through the clutter of a crowded market
Rapidly generate brand awareness
Explain the fundamental technology behind the device
Solicit interest and inquiries from qualified leads
Provide meaningful measurements of the campaign results
Strategy
Schaefer Advertising responded with a showstopping, attention-grabbing campaign that used teaser imagery of a Sasquatch, or “BigFoot”, creature to convey that the “mythical creature” was finally here – and real. The sheer uniqueness of the concept was a huge and dramatic departure from the cold, clinical ads embraced by other players in the industry.
Solution
An integrated campaign was launched that included paid search, organic social, email, and digital display on well-known industry publications and websites. Each medium enabled the client to tell its story and document the response rates as viewers clicked through for downloads, demos and landing-page visits.
Results
By leveraging paid search and strategically-chosen publication placements (such as newsletters, e-blasts, ROS banners, and sponsored social posts), the campaign achieved noteworthy results within the first three months of launch.
Website tracking identified 98% new site visits, with an impressive 53% engagement rate
High clickthrough rates
And, most importantly, awareness started with a bang, with healthy responses from an elite and highly-qualified audience of eyecare and glaucoma specialists
Sessions
15,864
New Users
13,771
Pageviews
17,130
Engagement Rate
53.42%
Summary
The launch campaign accomplished its primary goal of driving brand awareness among surgeons for ViaLase and its innovative design. And, in addition to gaining insights into paid search performance, the client began to forge strategic partnerships with leading industry publications. The geographic spread and engagement metrics highlight the campaign’s effectiveness in reaching a qualified audience, setting a strong foundation for future marketing efforts.
Overall, the campaign was another example of Schaefer’s ability to combine solid knowledge of healthcare markets and attention-grabbing creativity to tell a cohesive and relevant brand story.
The Nutcracker ballet is a timeless performance that has delighted audiences for more than a century. Over time, it has cemented its place as a beloved holiday tradition and one of the most popular ballets of all time. Each holiday season, Texas Ballet Theater (TBT) stages 35 performances between Dallas and Fort Worth, which sets the tone for ticket sales throughout the season. For some ballet companies, sales from The Nutcracker make up more than 85% of a company’s ticket revenue for the season. While its popularity makes it easy to sell performance tickets, The Nutcracker also creates a unique opportunity to attract a broader audience to experience the art of ballet.
As the agency of record for the past six years, Schaefer Advertising has helped TBT increase ticket sales year-over-year to make The Nutcracker a revenue powerhouse. Fresh off a record-setting year in 2022, TBT increased its goals for 2023.
To meet the new goal, our team acted quickly to implement new optimizations that leveraged our current campaign assets, made strategic recommendations for TBT-owned channels, and proposed a few incremental options to get in front of new attendees. A peak-valley-peak approach to paid search led to higher revenue for lower costs, making paid search a key driver of conversion revenue. The coordinated email marketing campaign launched in late November ranked second in revenue generation.
Results
The Nutcracker campaign concluded its 2023 run with record-breaking revenue and ticket sales, surpassing each previous year’s revenue and 2023 goals for both Dallas and Fort Worth. Total revenue closed at 120% to goal, with online sales specifically growing revenue by over 30% from last year.
The American Advertising Federation (AAF) Fort Worth faced declining engagement and participation in their annual ADDY Awards. Agencies and marketers were submitting fewer entries, partly due to perceptions that the competition held less value, while attendees were becoming increasingly apathetic about the gala. These trends threatened AAF Fort Worth’s operational budget and the vitality of the local advertising community. With artificial intelligence (AI) reshaping the industry, AAF Fort Worth also sought to address the growing tension between human creativity and AI, highlighting that both can coexist and thrive together.
Solution:
We worked with Nick Utter of Content Shift and AAF Fort Worth to develop and execute a campaign that embraced the intersection of human creativity and AI. The campaign leaned into the concept of “The Creative Revolution,” presenting a scenario where AI hosted the ADDYs. By using AI both as a subject and a tool, we delivered messaging that was engaging, thought-provoking, and slightly ironic. Headlines such as “It’s time to submit,” “We’ve seen what you’ve done,” and “Victory is Coming” balanced curiosity with a playful acknowledgment of AI’s role in the creative process. The visuals and messaging reinforced that the future isn’t “us vs. them” but “us + them,” highlighting how AI can be a powerful partner rather than a threat.
“This project was an exciting opportunity to address a rapidly evolving topic in our industry—AI—and engage the advertising community in a fresh, unexpected way. By leaning into the irony of using AI to shape a campaign about its own impact, we were able to spark curiosity, start meaningful conversations, and show that embracing new tools doesn’t mean losing the heart of human creativity. I’m incredibly proud of how our team brought this idea to life, blending humor, insight, and artistry to resonate with our audience.
– Charlie Howlett
Outcome:
The campaign sparked renewed interest and conversation within the local creative community. It helped re-establish the ADDYs as a must-attend event and encouraged more entries from agencies, freelancers, and students. By shifting perceptions about both the competition’s value and the evolving relationship between humans and AI, AAF Fort Worth successfully reinvigorated enthusiasm around the event. The campaign demonstrated how creativity and technology can work together, positioning AAF Fort Worth as a forward-thinking organization and cementing the ADDYs as a meaningful celebration of advertising excellence.
This campaign recently earned a Gold ADDY at the 2025 American Advertising Awards, recognized for both its integrated campaign and poster series. This honor highlights the creative team’s thoughtful approach to the concept, their effective execution, and the impact the campaign had within the advertising community.
Every year, Texas Ballet Theater (TBT) launches a season filled with a combination of performance styles, from mixed repertoires to storybook ballets to the beloved holiday tradition, The Nutcracker. And each year, the organization builds revenue goals based on factors such as previous success, attrition, new-to-file trends, name recognition and more. In the last few years, all performing arts organizations have been rebuilding after, for some, more than a year of no programming. It is more critical than ever that these goals be met, which is a challenge we do not take lightly.
Benefits of a Integrated Campaign
As TBT’s agency of record for over five years, we have the pleasure of guiding the organization strategically through a merriment of creative and media targeting each year. This level of integration is ideal, as it allows the team to work on one cohesive plan for success and be proactive with optimizations along the way. We cannot overstate the importance of messaging, design and ad placement all aligning to drive success.
With a robust overarching season revenue goal as well as individual performance goals, we knew this year needed to be on point. Pun intended.
A New Creative Solution
Each year we establish the creative concept for the season which reflects the individual performances, incorporates artistic direction from TBT and provides a consistent look for the entire season. This season, we created custom typography for each performance title to elevate the distinct nature of each performance and provide an additional asset that incorporated elements from the storyline or theme of each ballet. The titles were paired with a wash of color for each performance, and when viewed together created a vibrant kaleidoscope that reflected the varied nature of the range of performances. The ability to utilize a key color and title treatment to support individual performance campaigns beyond dancer imagery alone gave our team a broader range of assets to leverage across mediums.
What We’ve Learned
A benefit of the tenure of our relationship with TBT is that we are able to learn more and evolve every year. We always tell new clients that they are the experts in their field, and we are here to learn and assist. But as we learn more year over year, we build industry expertise that becomes invaluable.
What we continue to see is that video outperforms static ads, which is no surprise when you are promoting a moving art form. We also know that the more digital assets you have, the more opportunities you have to improve visibility, engagement and the overall effectiveness of each deliverable. Video content can be costly to produce, so we focused on creative solutions that maximized the available resources. By incorporating animation, we were able to support each performance with repeatable textures that expand our campaign assets.
Because of this, we were able to produce more formats and sizes to test against each other by incorporating animations and movement in post production. Additionally, we chose to sunset some static ad units in order to focus on video.
Enhancing Ticket Sales
From a media perspective, we adjusted flighting to focus on awareness tactics early and conversion tactics during peak ticket sales, which is traditionally within the final weeks of the promotion.
We also implemented an institutional campaign throughout the year to boost awareness and increase website sessions unrelated to ticket purchases, which in turn allowed our retargeting pools to grow and improve our ticket sale campaigns.
Where We Landed
While we are delighted to see the success of last year come through, it was with intention that our team set out to achieve and surpass these revenue and new ticket buyer goals. The Year of Splendor proved to be successful all season long, seen most notably in The Nutcracker & Alice in Wonderland performances, where goals in both Dallas and Fort Worth were exceeded.
Final revenue exceeded annual goals by 24%
Final revenue increased from previous year by 25%
Opening the season with a new work (which is inherently more challenging to sell due to no name recognition), ROAS was 5:1
The Nutcracker in Dallas finished at over 140% to goal
The season closed with Alice in Wonderland which had almost 10,000 patrons attend clearing goals by over 30%
Promoting a new season each year has its fair share of challenges, and that’s what keeps us going. We’re proud to be a long-standing partner of Texas Ballet Theater and can’t wait to share in their continued success for years to come.
As the holiday season approached, Schaefer faced the familiar challenge of driving revenue for the Fort Worth Zoo through membership and adoption gift purchases. In a marketplace brimming with options, our task was to set the Zoo apart and exceed year-over-year revenue goals for an offering that had remained consistent for a long time. Our strategy focused on positioning the Zoo’s offerings as unique and meaningful gifts, highlighting the value of membership while also reiterating the experiential aspect of these presents.
Positioning for Audience Impact
Emphasizing memberships over adoptions in both messaging and media was key to maximizing revenue. The campaign aimed to convey that the Fort Worth Zoo offers versatile gifting options, from a tangible present for under the tree to a membership for year-long experiences.
We know that the target audience, composed of Zoo-goers and potential members, already enjoy visiting the Zoo with their families. However, they might not have initially considered Zoo memberships or adoptions as compelling gift choices. The campaign’s goal was to shift the audience’s perception, portraying Fort Worth Zoo memberships as a perfect holiday gift due to their numerous benefits, including unlimited admission, free parking, discounts and access to special events. Zoo adoption packages, featuring plush animals, certificates, coloring kits, and more, not only make for delightful presents but also support animal care and conservation efforts. These offerings were positioned as experiential gifts that fostered a lasting connection to the Zoo, encouraging family enjoyment throughout the year.
Showcasing a Unique Gift Experience
Creatively, we met the challenge of maintaining freshness for a campaign that recurs annually as well as distinguishing the campaign in a crowded holiday market. Unconventional elements took the spotlight, with a memorable neck-bending giraffe as the hero visual and playful copywriting like “A Gift Above the Rest” as the primary headline. The campaign also tapped into the universal appeal of baby animals by featuring the recent giraffe births through secondary imagery and messaging to visit the Zoo often while the babies are still small.
Additional supporting imagery featured the immersive membership experience and the physical adoption package complete with plush animals. This comprehensive visual approach provided a well-rounded perspective of the gift options.
Results
As a result of the strategy, creative concept, and media plan working in sync, the campaign was wildly successful. We succeeded in setting the Zoo apart in the bustling holiday market and surpassing revenue goals for both gift offerings.
New and gifted memberships in 2022 were almost triple in quantityand revenue as compared to both goals and previous year sales.
Return on investment for the campaign as a whole was nearly 10:1.
Emails were the top-performing channel, driving a 69% increase in revenue over 2021, led predominately by a Black Friday sale.
In conclusion, Schaefer’s ability to break through the saturated holiday market with a creative and strategically aligned media plan led to an exceptional year-over-year increase in revenue. The campaign not only met, but exceeded goals, emphasizing the power of unique creative and effective media planning in achieving outstanding results.
For a leading third-party manufacturer, rising above the competition began with a new marketing campaign.
The Situation
Argon Medical Devices came to Schaefer with a need to create awareness for its brand and various product lines. Its key objectives included elevating awareness of Argon Custom Product Solutions (CPS), a division that offers private label and third-party manufacturing capabilities to clients.
Goals
Increase awareness of the Argon corporate brand and Argon CPS brand
Educate and engage a global Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) audience
Generate qualified leads at the top of the funnel to handoff to the sales team
Build loyalty and differentiation with precise, customer-centric messaging
Strategy
Argon CPS faced two crucial challenges: First, its awareness in this crowded market was low. Second, in a sector that is heavily driven by price, Argon CPS needed to position itself as a premium brand that brought greater value to customers through an unmatched mix of expertise and capabilities.
Solution
Schaefer developed a strategic campaign that differentiated Argon CPS by promoting its superior level of service, quality, and customization. The new tagline “Build It Better” laddered up to and tied-into the existing Argon corporate brand messaging.
Core messages highlighted attributes such as design and testing capabilities, US-based manufacturing facilities, and Argon’s ability to collaborate with client product development teams. Campaign graphics used upscale visual patterns to underscore the client’s endless customization capabilities and showcase specific product categories.
We then deployed a media strategy for email, social media, digital and online industry publications that carefully homed-in on a global audience of manufacturers and decision makers. Careful audience targeting ensured minimal waste — and maximum results.
Results
Our digital and email tactics carefully targeted recipients by geography and title, allowing us to track campaign results with a high degree of accuracy that:
Generated more than 36K website sessions from 31K+ new users
Achieved 3.3 million targeted impressions in less than one year
Achieved a 6% Paid Search click-through rate, 1.8x the industry benchmark
Launched 463K emails, opened by 20% of recipients
Tracked clicked-through rates of prime prospects, including Marketplace Optimization (MPO) click-through rates of .86%
Summary
Differentiation is always important – especially in categories driven by price or viewed as commodities. By elevating Argon CPS above the industry norm, we strengthened its appeal to higher-end device manufacturers who value quality, service and collaboration.
How Argon Medical Devices merged multiple brands and hundreds of SKUs into a single, cohesive user experience (UX).
Situation
As a global company with multiple sub-brands and literally hundreds of products, Argon Medical Devices faced a major challenge in creating a simple and cohesive online presence. Argon tapped Schaefer to execute a complete overhaul of its website, from site architecture all the way through design and development.
Goals
Enhance and optimize the user experience
Accommodate international customizations and product offerings
Restructure multiple sub-brands and product lines into a single cohesive, centralized site
Modernize the design to align with Argon’s new corporate positioning and graphic standards
Allow room for growth as future products, capabilities and divisions emerge
Strategy
Having recently repositioned the company, Schaefer realized that updating the Argon website would require more than organizing products and accommodating multiple languages. To expedite the process, the creative and digital teams worked in tandem, collaborating closely to ensure that the design and function worked in unison.
While Schaefer’s creative team worked to update design and messaging to align with the new brand trajectory, the digital team examined ways to streamline customer ordering, overcome language barriers, simplify navigation, and create a better user experience across the site’s 70+ pages and thousands of potential product permutations.
Solution
The creative team united all business units under the new Argon brand positioning: The Pursuit of Better. This gave all visitors a consistent view of who Argon was, and the shared mission and values that united its multiple brands.
Meanwhile, the Schaefer development team navigated an ever-changing SKU list as the client consolidated product lines. We then performed a number of user experience exercises to build a more efficient user flow for searching and ordering product samples. The new site was able to leverage geolocation to customize content based on the user’s global region, and allowed text to be dynamically translated into multiple languages.
Results
The Schaefer team replaced complexity with clarity, and delivered a site that accomplished key goals for both new and existing customers. The improvements included:
Successfully consolidating multiple domains and destinations into one organized, easy-to-navigate site
Enabling the client to make revisions and updates easily with minimal training
Reorganizing and narrowing the featured products to allow an easier search and order experience
Automating processes to further improve UX and leveraging geolocation to only showcase products in regions where they are available
Summary
To deliver a site that met the client’s goals with a global audience, the Schaefer team leveraged Argon’s core strengths of effective brand messaging and in-depth knowledge of the healthcare space. The client now has a site that better serves its needs today — and will support the brand as it continues to grow and evolve in the years ahead.
Bringing the conversation to light around depression and suicide so that no one suffers in darkness
In 2014, the Jordan Elizabeth Harris Foundation was created on the principle of bringing the conversation to light around mental health, specifically depression and suicide, after the tragic loss of Jordan Elizabeth Harris. Suicide is the 12th leading cause of death in the United States with approximately 1.2 million suicide attempts every year. Yet the stigma around depression and suicide remains. In order to fight these harrowing statistics, Schaefer had the honor of partnering with the JEHF in 2022 to support and promote their second Light the Trail Ride.
The Ride: A 1,800 mile journey of hope
The Light the Trail Ride is a cross country biking excursion that is supported by riders and donors who wish to pledge their time and support to bring awareness and reduce the stigma of depression and suicide. It is the cornerstone effort of the JEHF and the ride strives to encourage supporters to share their stories and give others all over the country a safe place to speak about their experiences with mental health. Between the two rides in 2017 and 2022, The Jordan Elizabeth Harris Foundation has raised significant funding and awareness around the gravity of this topic and been able to support continued research focused on treating depression, suicide prevention training, creating resources and facilitating education opportunities.
L: Charlie Howlett, Deb Zinderler (Z2 Marketing) and Cory Zimmerman (Z2 Marketing) R: Tom & Ellen Harris, Founders of the Jordan Elizabeth Harris Foundation
Schaefer had the privilege of serving as the marketing partner of LTTR to promote their second ride in 2022. They came to us with a challenge in lack of awareness and support of the their efforts, and we were able to work together through strategic planning, digital asset development and collateral material creation to re-launch the Ride because it aligns with our values as an agency and we were able to share our expertise and skillset. In addition, Schaefer saw the opportunity to bring this crucial event to life in the eyes of more people through a documentary film and trailer. Available budget was an obstacle, however Schaefer was compelled to support this initiative and solicited a like minded partner out of Milwaukee, WI called Z2 Marketing who was willing to provide supporting video production services in exchange for involvement with this powerful initiative. Schaefer was able to donate the remainder of investment to continue bringing the Light the Trail mission to life. What followed was the production of a documentary that captures the riders along their journey in addition to their own personal, compelling stories. This video further advances the mission of Light the Trail and the Jordan Elizabeth Harris Foundation, and Schaefer’s goal through these collective efforts was to walk alongside this inspirational team to make their event a success and champion their cause.
User experience and activation of the #Ride4 effort
Another key motivator around the effort is the promotion and honor of the #Ride4’s of each rider and the community at large. This is a unique way that the riders and the foundation overall can bring the stories forward of loved ones whos lives have been tragically taken as a result of suicide. Schaefer had a unique opportunity to strategize the best way to promote the submission of Ride4’s and prioritize their position on the website to encourage form fills and subsequent promotion of these empowering tributes on the LTT social media pages.
Schaefer implemented numerous functional and user experience updates to create a more seamless tool to promote and accept donations in advance of the ride, as well as encourage Ride4 submission and sponsorship form fill. In addition to these optimizations, Schaefer also streamlined the Foundation’s existing CRM to further encourage passionate individuals to get involved with the next Ride and the Foundation overall.
Elevating the user experience and showcasing excellence
In addition to digital services, it was important to the client that Schaefer provide traditional marketing services that properly married the digital presence with the real life iteration of the brand and its mission. The Schaefer Account Service and Creative team worked closely alongside the Foundation’s team to ensure a delivery of marketing support materials that communicated the very real impact that mental health has on people and manifested this in printed one pager material, bike shop promotional flyers, and a rebuild of the LTT primary logo for 2022 that would support ongoing efforts for the team internally as they navigated the route in real time.
Overall, the sentiment behind this impactful project is the direct alignment with Schaefer’s mission and ultimate goal to Make Life Better. It’s at the core of what we do and a foundational piece of how we interact with and serve our clients, our partners, and our colleagues inside and outside of work. The Jordan Elizabeth Harris Foundation and the Light the Trail initiative are a real life embodiment of this mission and we’re proud to call them partners in work that truly matters, and to have played a small part in making this event a success.
Get involved or share your story
Whether you participate in a future Light the Trail Ride, make a donation, or share a story, you are helping bring the conversation around mental illness and suicide awareness to light and bringing us one step closer to living in a world where suicide is never the choice.
If you or someone you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts or a crisis, help is available. Please dial 988 for support via the suicide prevention hotline.
Crafting a distinctive brand and web presence for Bennett Partners
At Schaefer, we embarked on a meaningful partnership with Bennett Partners, an esteemed architecture, interiors, and planning firm based in Fort Worth, Texas. Guided by their unwavering dedication to responsible preservation and urban design, Bennett Partners strives to create sustainable spaces that enhance and sustain communities. What began as an initiative to enhance their website and showcase their award-winning work evolved into a comprehensive brand refresh, a testament to our shared commitment.
Navigating transitions and embracing a thoughtful ethos
Recognizing Bennett Partners’ esteemed reputation and shared mission to improve lives within the Fort Worth community, we embarked on a collaborative journey with their team of award-winning designers. This partnership provided a unique opportunity to collaborate with like-minded creatives who valued a strategic approach. Following the departure of a former partner, our goal was to develop a new brand identity that authentically reflected Bennett Partners’ thoughtful ethos, starting with a strategic renaming process.
Our recommendation was to preserve the equity of the original name, Bennett Benner Partners, by preserving the namesake Bennett as a prominent element. Thus, the name Bennett Partners was chosen, capturing the essence of a collective of passionate partners united by their mission and dedication to thoughtful design.
From typography to tone: crafting an approachable identity
We meticulously crafted a comprehensive system of logos and a versatile color palette, offering both flexibility and consistency. Our brand design centered around sophistication, simplicity, and purpose, harmonizing seamlessly with Bennett Partners’ core values. The logo showcases a modern, customized typeface that enhances the letterforms, set in lowercase to reflect the brand’s friendly and approachable nature. The secondary logo variation was refined to include “architecture, interiors, planning,” providing clarity about the services offered. Our expanded color palette embraces softer, thoughtful, and intricate color variations, featuring shades of blue and orange that distinguish Bennett Partners within the industry. These colors effortlessly integrate into diverse project plans and graphics. Additionally, we established a comprehensive brand toolkit, empowering Bennett Partners to effectively convey their unique identity.
Elevating the user experience and showcasing excellence
Following the brand refresh, Bennett Partners sought a website redesign that would seamlessly showcase their exceptional work, engage users, and mirror their commitment to responsible architecture and community impact. Frustrated by their previous website’s inability to communicate their core values and meet their business needs, the objective of the new website was clear: effectively communicate their mission, prioritize their team members, and empower them to effortlessly showcase new projects. The final website encompasses key elements such as a visually striking portfolio, improved organization and categorization, seamless content management, responsive design, and personalized employee pages. Our team at Schaefer delivered a fully customized website with a clean and flexible modular system, enhancing navigation and user interaction to improve their online presence and reinforce their position as an industry leader.
Results
The partnership between Schaefer and Bennett Partners led to a successful transformation of their brand and website, capturing their expertise and unwavering commitment to responsible architecture. Through the reimagined brand identity, Bennett Partners’ captivating story resonates, attracting new business opportunities within their region. By collaborating closely with our team, Bennett Partners achieved a brand and website presence that authentically reflects their excellence in architecture and design, solidifying their position as a leading firm within the industry.
