Schaefer Advertising Co.

Work

When the Fort Worth Opera asked Schaefer to help them create fundraising collateral for a new opera they were commissioning based on the life of JFK, we were interested. When they needed it in a week, we started sweating. But c’est la vie in the ad world.
Fortuitously, the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth was running an exhibit of the artwork that had been put in his hotel room the night before he died. The new opera was to be set during the course of that one day in Fort Worth in 1963, so it proved an invaluable field trip for the creative team.
One of the pieces in the exhibit that caught our attention wasn’t a piece of fine art, per se, but a paper sign with welcoming the president and first lady in red letters and red glitter. This ultimately became the front cover of our collateral piece.
Not only did it harken back to that period of time, it was the perfect symbol of what the Fort Worth Opera’s new production—and those donating to it—were doing: welcoming Jack and Jackie back to Fort Worth.
We were able to produce the materials in time for a kickoff event held on the anniversary of his death. Previously named the Hotel Texas, what’s now the Fort Worth Hilton is where JFK spent his last night. It was the perfect time and place to announce the new opera, which is set to open in the 2016 opera season.

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.

October 29, 2013

Cover Your Sneeze

Flu season is once again upon us. And without knowing it, a lot of extra germs could be as well.
The CDC requires healthcare providers to post visual alerts instructing patients to practice respiratory hygiene or cough etiquette. Most of the time, this manifests itself as cheesy cartoon illustrations, which are printed and laminated in-house. In other words, another flyer in a hospital or clinic that you don’t care to read. When JPS brought this challenge to Schaefer, we found a way to get the message noticed.

Photography by Robie Capps
 

Schaefer Advertising recently rebranded Tallulah & Company, a Fort Worth interior design company led by Ally Arlington. She’s the very talented designer who is responsible for the beautiful environment we work in every day. She tasked our team with developing an identity that could exude a timeless style with a flair for the unexpected. It needed to be strong yet comfortable. Beautiful yet functional. Just like her work.
We enlisted the help of calligrapher Lauren Essl, of Blue Eye Brown Eye, to craft the handwritten logo treatment.
 

Schaefer Advertising recently rebranded Tallulah & Company, a Fort Worth interior design company led by Ally Arlington. She’s the very talented designer who is responsible for the beautiful environment we work in every day. She tasked our team with developing an identity that could exude a timeless style with a flair for the unexpected. It needed to be strong yet comfortable. Beautiful yet functional. Just like her work.

We enlisted the help of calligrapher Lauren Essl, of Blue Eye Brown Eye, to craft the handwritten logo treatment.

 

September 13, 2013

Zoo Ball 2013

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.

August 22, 2013

Ryan Family Showdown

It’s not every day you get to work with the presidents of TWO different Major League Baseball teams, but on this special day our agency had the great opportunity to hang out with the entire Ryan family at their ranch to shoot this TV spot for Nolan Ryan Beef. We can’t say enough about the hospitality and kindness of the entire Ryan family, it was truly a project I will never forget working on.
An overview of the spot:
Texas Rangers president and Hall of Famer Nolan Ryan faces off with his son, Reid Ryan, president of the Houston Astros, to see who is the master of the grill. In the end, Dad knows best, but the entire Ryan family wins and enjoys a family picnic featuring Nolan Ryan Beef.
-Nick

August 20, 2013

The Story of Schaefermade

By now, any of you who were curious about all of our Schaefermade Facebook posts from a couple months ago (not to mention the bright yellow building next to our office) might have thought we would never tell the story of Schaefermade. Sorry about that. We got busy, and, well, you know how it is.

So what was the deal with all that? Well, twice a year, Fort Worth holds an event called Arts Goggle during which artists display their work in local businesses. It’s a city-wide event, but most of the fun goes on near our office on Magnolia.

Each year for the Spring Arts Goggle, we try to think of a way to participate and engage the crowds who flock to our neighborhood. Our goal is to find a way to differentiate our booth from the businesses, artists and vendors at the Near Southside Arts Goggle event while building awareness for Schaefer Advertising Co. in the community.

This year, we decided (with the help of former interns Darcie Nicholson and Elizabeth Kahn) to do an over-the-top version of the classic summertime lemonade stand. We’d create a pop-up lemonade stand for the day of the event, then use our advertising and PR skillz to get the word out. The lemonade would be free, and all donations would go to Fort Worth Southside’s tree planting initiative.

With this theme in mind, we kind of went nuts. Donkeys have their carrot. Schaeferites have their lemon.

– Art director Charlie Howlett put a lemon on a skewer so he could hold it over people’s faces and take LemonHead portraits of everyone in the office, which he then posted to the Schaefermade Instagram page.

– The lemon on the skewer led to some impromptu side yard antics, which we filmed and posted on Facebook.

– Obviously, our lemonade stand needed a mascot. Just as obvious to us, that mascot was going to be Account Supervisor Nick Bendian. We ordered the costume, then filmed Nick dancing around and in the middle of Magnolia to make another teaser video, which we also posted on Facebook.

– The Schaefer team hung lemons from trees up and down Magnolia Street. A tag on these lemons teased our upcoming lemonade stand and directed people to tag a photo of the lemon on Instagram. For every photo tagged, Schaefer donated $1 to the tree-planting initiative.

– We created window displays the week before the event to tease the lemonade stand.

– And last but not least, we had the building painted bright yellow the day before the event. People couldn’t believe we went to all that trouble for a one-day event, and we took it as a compliment. To us, doing things the right way is always worth the effort.

Our lemonade stand was a big success. In fact, we ran out of cups long before the event shut down. (Sorry if you didn’t get any lemonade!) Nick danced his heart out for about four hours, losing several pounds of water weight, getting lots of smiles and even posing for a few photos. A good time was had by all.

Here’s the breakdown:

– Distributed 1,250 Schaefermade-branded cups of lemonade
– Increased our social community of followers that engaged with the brand
– Had almost 750 views of two short videos created prior to the event
– Gained 30 new likes to the Schaefer Facebook page in less than two weeks
– Increased our followers on Instagram by over 30 people in 10 day period
– Raised $529.33 for the Fort Worth South Inc. Tree Planting Initiative
– Gained visibility and goodwill in the community
– Built teamwork and camaraderie among Schaefer employees

August 19, 2013

Croppin’ Up

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.

 

August 13, 2013

Predict. Prevent. Extend.

For over 40 years, Win-Sam has been making energy production plants run better and last longer. Their motto is simple: Predict, Prevent, Extend. Through extensive predictive and preventive maintenance strategies, they can increase operational efficiency and extend the life of your equipment.
Since a lot of Win-Sam employees are former Navy men, we went with a military style logo for their rebrand. This insight, combined with the industrial look of their everyday work environment, helped establish a look that we carried out through several pieces. Each of these pieces conveys the strong, roll-up-their-sleeves kind of work ethic that makes Win-Sam so valuable to their clients.