The brand we’ve built for Hub Group emphasizes these outcomes and this over-sized sales piece is an example of how that idea has been brought to life. The first several spreads, which are intended to be ice breakers and conversation starters for the Hub sales team emphasize those intangible benefits. These benefits are then backed up in the piece by focusing on Hub’s approach, vast network, services and stability.

Team:

Creative Director: Stephen Penning
Designer: Bobby McKenna

Copywriter: Jill Spradely

Production: Christopher van Auken
Account: Lindsay White

They win Nobel prizes, Fields medals, and the National Medal of Science.

They are behind 17,000 active patents – more than Apple and Google.

They generate nearly $9 billion in economic activity in California.

They have won 230 Olympic medals, more than Mexico, Ukraine, and South Korea.

They walk the grounds that gave birth to the Internet.

They are UCLA Bruins.

As part of a full rebranding initiative for UCLA to ensure it is giving itself the credit it deserves, 160over90 recently took on the challenge of giving this prestigious university, the most applied-to in the nation, a new website, focusing not only on providing a new look and feel, but also a better user experience for all audiences. And unlike many university sites, the UCLA site had to appeal to not only prospective and current students, but to prospective and current faculty, peer academic institutions, the media, community members, feeder schools, fans of Bruin athletics, alumni, donors, and partners at corporations and foundations.

Focusing on the sense of no-challenge-too-big optimism that pervades the sunny Southern California campus, our team designed a site that’s bright and airy, letting the photos of the campus, students and faculty do the talking. At the same time, bold headlines and inspiring copy help prospective students envision themselves proudly wearing blue and gold. Added real estate for video content captures the vibrancy and spirit of the UCLA community. Better integration with social media allows Bruins to share content and stay in touch with university news and events. And the clean navigation makes it easy for anyone to find what they’re looking for.

It’s a work in progress, so you’ll see new content added over the next few months, but take a look and let us know what you think.

www.ucla.edu

And how would this all come together, you may ask? We wondered the same thing ourselves after initially proposing this ambitious idea. In order to showcase the “magic” moments that happen during a typical day as a CHC student, we settled on using the stop motion technique so we could easily manipulate the frames and only keep in ones that created those surreal moments (flying Quidditch players, books rearranging themselves, etc.) Without a clear roadmap of how to achieve our stop motion dreams, our photographer Tom set out to test the tricky animation scenarios and transitions prior to our shoot days:

We then brought all our tricks & tips to campus for the scouting days & filming days:

Many thanks to our terrific clients at Chestnut Hill College for running with the idea, Tom for taking thousands of photographs, J. Zachary Keenan for the music, and the rest of the stop motion team for their hours of casting/planning/editing!

Thanks to 160over90 for the great opportunity and good times.

-Russell & Ray

Russell Trump graduated from Ohio University in 2011 with a BFA in graphic design. Originally from Cleveland, OH, he now resides in Philadelphia were he spends most of his time being tall, wishing he had Ray’s beard, and designing stuff. Check out more of Russell’s work on his website.

Ray Ureña is an illustration major at Rowan University, currently finishing up his junior year. When not designing, his likely to be rock climbing, growing a sweet Dominican beard, wishing he was a lumberjack, or spending time with family and friends. Check out more of Ray’s work on Dribbble.

What a difference two hours can make when it is SPRING!

Philadelphia is known for many things: the cheesesteak, the Liberty Bell, Tastykakes, and the Broad Street Bullies, but what many people don’t know is that Philadelphia is home to some of the trendiest brands in the fashion industry. That’s right, URBN, the parent company of Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, and Free People is headquartered in Philly. And from their stake on hipster style, to their enchanting campus in the Naval Yard, URBN is hands-down the coolest company in Philadelphia. In fact we’d go as far as to say one of the coolest in the country.

So when BHLDN, URBN’s new wedding brand, asked us to develop an online campaign for their New York Times media buy, we could hardly contain ourselves.

BHLDN…say it out loud with us…beholden, is a niche wedding brand that offers individual styles for individual brides. In a market that ranges from David’s Bridal to Vera Wang, BHLDN creates unique gowns and accessories that break the typical cookie-cutter, princess bride mold and offer women a chance to reflect their own distinct style. Their heirloom quality gowns include long and short lengths and prints and patterns, turning the typical wedding gown design on its ear. An online boutique with one store in Houston and another one opening in Chicago on 2/14, BHLDN is in its second year of business and seeking to raise general awareness of the brand. So together with a nytimes.com media buy, one of the coolest brands in Philly, and our blood, sweat and tears, we set out to make brides across the country, for lack of a better word, beholden to BHLDN.

Using elegant slow-motion footage that shows a BHLDN bride walking in the Lita gown, we give nytimes.com viewers the opportunity to see how the dress moves, as well as a close-up view of the headpiece, lace bodice, and train.

Try it for yourself and experience our banner less ordinary, for a brand most extraordinary…

April 19, 1955

Dear Mr. Calt:

On March 22nd you wrote to me asking for some notes on my work habits as a copywriter. They are appalling, as you are about to see:

1. I have never written an advertisement in the office. Too many interruptions. I do all my writing at home.

2. I spend a long time studying the precedents. I look at every advertisement which has appeared for competing products during the past 20 years.

3. I am helpless without research material—and the more “motivational” the better.

4. I write out a definition of the problem and a statement of the purpose which I wish the campaign to achieve. Then I go no further until the statement and its principles have been accepted by the client.

5. Before actually writing the copy, I write down every concievable fact and selling idea. Then I get them organized and relate them to research and the copy platform.

6. Then I write the headline. As a matter of fact I try to write 20 alternative headlines for every advertisement. And I never select the final headline without asking the opinion of other people in the agency. In some cases I seek the help of the research department and get them to do a split-run on a battery of headlines.

7. At this point I can no longer postpone the actual copy. So I go home and sit down at my desk. I find myself entirely without ideas. I get bad-tempered. If my wife comes into the room I growl at her. (This has gotten worse since I gave up smoking.)

8. I am terrified of producing a lousy advertisement. This causes me to throw away the first 20 attempts.

9. If all else fails, I drink half a bottle of rum and play a Handel oratorio on the gramophone. This generally produces an uncontrollable gush of copy.

10. The next morning I get up early and edit the gush.

11. Then I take the train to New York and my secretary types a draft. (I cannot type, which is very inconvenient.)

12. I am a lousy copywriter, but I am a good editor. So I go to work editing my own draft. After four or five editings, it looks good enough to show to the client. If the client changes the copy, I get angry—because I took a lot of trouble writing it, and what I wrote I wrote on purpose.

Altogether it is a slow and laborious business. I understand that some copywriters have much greater facility.

Yours sincerely,

D.O.

When you can’t support your favorite team in the Super Bowl, one thing you can do is tune in to see if the commercials live up to expectation (a nearly impossible feat). With the amount of money spent each year on these spots (about $3.5M per 30 sec for media alone in 2012), needless to say the bar is extremely high. It is also telling of possible trends we can expect in advertising over the course of the year.

In a word: Dogs.

While cat people enjoyed a recent surge in all things kitten and cute over the past year, the dogs clearly had a leg up in the competition this year.

Case in point. Kim Kardashian’s contract was up with Sketcher’s and they replaced her with, yup you guessed it – a dog, or more accurately “Mr. Quiggly.”

…and though I enjoy the little old school snippet of Tone Loc thrown in at the end for good measure, I think Mr. Quiggly was slightly upstaged by Bud Light’s “Here we go” dog who fetches his owners…what else? Bud Light.

This was followed by sled dogs for the Suzuki spot, which demonstrates that even in Alaska, wives are always nagging their husbands about something and the husbands are always trying to pull something over on their wives.

But by far, my favorite spot of the day which also featured a dog, was Volkswagon’s newest spot entitled “The Dog Strikes Back” which followed up the very popular Star Wars spot.

I mean, that dog can act!

Not to mention ALL the doggy Doritos commercials! In the next one you will see people acting as dumb as dogs, as opposed to the other way around. Nice spin.

And when you run out of cute dogs, don’t worry, there are always babies, polar bears and other cute characters to expect in your commercials.

For close to a decade we have had the distinct pleasure of working with one of the most strategic and innovative marketers in the world of higher education. His name, like his risk tolerance is uncommon: Sundar Kumarasamy. He is the Vice President for Enrollment Management and Marketing at the University of Dayton, and in addition to being a long-time friend and client of 160over90, he is constantly going against the grain in an industry often riddled with clichés.

But don’t take our word for it.

In addition to being featured in a Forbes article alongside Steve Cannon, vice president of marketing for Mercedes-Benz USA, Sundar, in collaboration with the agency, was also featured by Adobe, discussing our development of the first fully interactive university viewbook iPad application, which utilized Adobe’s digital publishing suite software. And now, The Chronicle of Higher Education has written a feature article documenting his unique and sometimes controversial approach to higher education marketing.

Published on New Year’s Day, highlights from the article include:

The mesmerizing “mission wall” sprang from Mr. Kumarasamy’s head, which may or may not contain humming wires and hot circuits. He’s a fast-thinking marketer who seeks a precious share of teenagers’ attention even as he tries to distinguish his university’s mission, its intangible heart, in a world immersed in shallow slogans.

Case Study UD from Flightphase on Vimeo.

“This could have been a six-figure mistake,” says Sundar Kumarasamy of the custom-built “mission wall” he designed for the U. of Dayton’s welcome center. The wall is meant to convey the importance of community—and to grab teenagers’ famously fleeting attention.

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Imagining a New Brand

Early on, Mr. Kumarasamy hired a Philadelphia-based marketing firm, called 160over90, to help redesign the university’s viewbook, in which photographs of the campus chapel’s ivy-covered walls had long figured prominently. The new version, unveiled in the fall of 2007, was fresh and edgy, full of questions (“Where do you find faith?”), and images striking and strange. Perhaps none was as memorable as the photograph of two bare-shouldered blonde women emblazoned with the question: “Do you know more about Lindsay Lohan than Darfur?”

To say the least, some faculty members and students hated each of the viewbook’s 84 pages. The campus newspaper, the Flyer News, dubbed the publication a “glossy orgy” that reflected poorly on Dayton.

Although the viewbook marked a break with tradition, Mr. Kumarasamy believed that it also expressed—in fresh, bright colors—the university’s Marianist values, which he had studied carefully. A Marianist maxim says “New times call for new methods,” and that has become his own mantra.

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A Changing Campus

As another week begins at Dayton, the fall recruitment cycle is in full swing. On this Monday morning, applications are up by 1,000 over the same date last year.

Since 2002, applications have increased to 11,567 from 7,496. Enrollment of out-of-state students has increased to 48 percent from 35 percent. Average ACT scores are up, and so are retention rates.

All those numbers, Mr. Curran believes, reflect Dayton’s inherent strengths, but he credits Mr. Kumarasamy with finding clever answers to a million-dollar question: “How do you get people to look at you?”

‘We Compete for Memory’

Enrollment management is often described as the balance between marketing and mission. At religious institutions, where morality and social justice are typically everyday concerns, that tension is especially pronounced. Mr. Kumarasamy takes seriously the framed copy of the pledge on his bookshelf; in it, he vowed to remain “spiritually present, alive and open to the call [of] the Marianist charism and mission.”

Still, he is blunt about the necessity of market¬ing muscle. “If you have 10 shops on the same street selling Chinese food,” he says, “how do you think each shop should behave? Unfortunately, it’s an over¬crowded marketplace in this noble industry. If we shouldn’t compete, we should be prepared to go out of business one day.”

Dayton, he believes, owes visitors a unique experience, a feeling they can take with them. “We are living in a time when we compete for memory,” he says of colleges. “If their journey doesn’t begin the moment they first arrive on the campus, when does it begin?”

In Mr. Kumarasamy’s own story lies the enigma of the right fit. He says: “It’s more of a feeling, a silent voice that says, ‘This is where I belong.’ It’s not easily quantifiable. How do you give evidence about falling in love?”

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