Style Birmingham Launch
Posted in Blog, Design, News, Recent Projects by John
Following on from our recent win for the Style Birmingham account we’re pleased to announce the launch of the new campaign and website.
There are quite a few elements to the creative and so we thought it might be interesting for people to show how we’ve tackled the project in the last month, from winning the pitch through to delivering the goods!
Always in Style
When we pitched, our response needed to meet several requirements – these were to come up with a through the line campaign which would include a brand refresh, a series of outdoor adverts and a new website which made more of what was going on in retail in the city. Historically we felt that some of the creative had been a bit apologetic – Birmingham has a lot to shout about and we didn’t want to automatically assume that people needed a ‘value’ led campaign to be enticed in to the city during a recession. Instead, we wanted the new creative to be aspirational and position Birmingham as a retail leader within the UK.
Taking all this in to account we developed ‘Always in Style’ – a confident and factual statement about the city, it’s retailers and the experience visitors should expect when visiting the city to shop. Secondly, we decided to deviate from the previous location based shots on the high street, and opted for a classic white studio look, photographing the ‘Always in Style’ message in situ with the clothes.
We’ll hopefully get some better shots of the billboards when the weather’s nicer!….
Approach
To make sure that the retailers were given a sense of inclusion and ownership over what we were planning (it’s their city after all!) we invited key shops to supply clothing for the summer season. This way the ads would not only represent what’s available in the shops, but also become seasonally responsive. The plan therefore from here on in is to produce an entire new set of visuals for each new fashion season – no more regurgitating the same adverts over and over again, the city changes seasonally and therefore so should the ads.
Next, we selected models for both the website and outdoor ads who would reflect the spread of retailers in the city. As well as being multi-generational the cities shops span high end designer labels, major high street stores and cutting edge independent retailers. As such, we tried to select models who would match these different sectors of the cities retail experience.
On the day we also shot a little time lapse video, plus some other footage…
Style Birmingham Summer Fashion Shoot 2009 from Style Birmingham on Vimeo.
Digital development
In addition to the outdoor media above there are a range of things planned for the coming 12 months on the digital front.
Currently, we’ve built a brand new website to replace what was already there and add a few new features. As well as the expected standard directory, news and other areas we’ve also included a new SMS service, blogs and a community driven Q&A section which we hope will start to involve people more in sharing their shopping experiences and opinions. We’ve also opened up comments on popular shop listings and are encouraging Retail Birmingham where possible to aggregate and link through to news items which may be of interest from the wider web. In the interests of transparency these sources will always be cited and news stories will always contain an excerpt, never copied in full. As with all site launches, these are baby steps towards where we want the site to eventually be, but communities don’t grow overnight and we think we’re at least now pointing in the right direction.
In terms of design we’ve tried to continue the emphasis from the outdoor ads and include the family of models and seasonal clothing wherever possible. As with the billboards, the site will get a facelift with each new fashion season, inheriting new videos, photos and colour schemes to suit wherever the fashion trends are at that stage.
We’re really excited about what’s been a very busy month and have really enjoyed getting stuck in to what we hope will be a successful twelve month campaign. Oh, and don’t forget to take a look around the site!
May 22nd, 2009 at 4:17 pm
Admit it, the huge cutout letters are now dotted around your office aren’t they?
May 22nd, 2009 at 6:26 pm
One month? You have been busy. Nice work guys, great campaign – nice to hear the rationale too.
May 22nd, 2009 at 8:18 pm
@Ed – Yes they are! And yes, we have been playing anagrams with them!
@Jake – Thanks Jake – it’s definitely been one of our more hectic months! Pleased you like it.
May 24th, 2009 at 6:21 pm
nice work guys, why does the magazine look so stretched???
June 1st, 2009 at 9:31 am
@Sarah Well spotted! The magazine has changed format slightly and the PDF viewer had defaulted to A4. Next months will be a different link so there wont be any stretching! Glad you like the site.