Building the Freeman Brand

An industry leader in face-to-face marketing, Freeman is focused on evolving into a global brand experience company. My work as the brand creative director involves collaborating with our leadership on strategizing and designing internal and external brand touch points – everything from brand positioning and message mapping to graphic guidelines, case studies, videos, external and internal corporate communication. 

Team: Jim Bernard, Kristen Wynn, Käthe Meyers, Diane Testa, Mack Haning, Marc Vonderhorst, Pablo Ampuero, Matt Smith

Brand Identity Design

Over the past few years, I’ve been leading the identity update to our 90+ year old Freeman brand with a newly articulated, exciting narrative as well as a refresh to our identity design. In our design approach, we look at more than just the “engineering” of our brand through design, art and copy, we look at updating the tone of our work to reflect more accurately who we are as a people and a community.

Samples of work shown (details available upon request):

Brand Narrative

Branding guidelines: art, copy, photography, video, infographics, illustration, etc.

Brand Architecture Work

Office Brand Identity Design (early stages)

Samsung BioEpis: The Perfect (drug) Copy

In 2016, Samsung was breaking into the biosimilars world of pharmaceuticals. Basically, once patents expire, companies who have the capability to produce replicas of these drugs (biosimilars) stand to profit. Samsung invested heavily into this new industry. Our assignment from them was to create an exhibit at a medical event that declared their entry into the pharma world. The strategic objective was two-fold: The first task was to announce the Samsung BioEpis disruption to big pharma. The second task was to show that Samsung BioEpis has the capability to reliably produce perfect copies of popular drugs on a massive scale.

Team: Steve Coldiron, Phil Schlitz, Edwin Santiago, Eric Bettis, Adrian Sanchez, Wilson Tang

The 21st Century Girl: USA National Council Session & Convention

Girl Scouts of America is evolving thoughtfully into its second century, maintaining and expanding their valuable role in the lives of millions of girls around the world. The opportunity we had in 2011 was to announce their upcoming 100th anniversary.

2012 IAEE ART OF THE SHOW AWARD WINNER. Team: Troy Halsey, Spencer Mitchell, Alfred Tinao, Marci Hensley, Red Car Dallas (now Republic Editorial)

Defending and celebrating Food Science at the Institute of Food Technology (IFT) conference

There are over 7.5 billion people in the world today. Feeding this growing population necessitates solutions that can't entirely rely on organic farming. In creating a higher purpose message for IFT, we focused on the insight that food scientists are the heroes of tomorrow. As an institute that supports research, gathers and distributes valuable information,  IFT feeds the minds that feed the world. 

Strategy and theme development, graphics, experiential marketing, exhibit design, promotional ideas for sponsorship

Team: Pam Wong, Michael Boschmann, Ashley Vonderhorst, Cathy Dulos

LinkedIn Talent Connect - Find Your Squirrel

These concept elements are from a new business pitch campaign I created for LinkedIn Talent Connect Recruiters Event. The insight we based this concept on was that in the world of recruiting, the "purple squirrel" is that rare, perfect candidate who recruiters aspire to find and place. A perfect theme for a recruiters conference. We conceptualized everything from the design of the event experience space to a dinner engagement to entertaining promotional marketing and of course experiential ideas.

Team: Greg Brown, Courtney Case, Sarah Aivez, Kevin Staples, Mike Wohlitz, Todd Eldridge

SEMA: The Custom Auto Parts and Design Trade Show

The SEMA auto show is one of the most beautiful and exciting trade shows in the world. Exhibitors and attendees are very entrepreneurial and creative, so not surprisingly, companies from around the world visit this show to keep up with trends and ideas.

My creative work on SEMA was focused on helping Freeman re-negotiate their tenure by delivering a strategic creative proposal showing how SEMA could grow and create sponsorship opportunities. Pitch ideas involved theme development, floor plan design, experience design, graphics and experiential marketing ideas. 

The pitch was successful. Freeman continues to be the partner of choice for the SEMA show.

Team: Jim Cullen, Dewey Mosscrop, Ashley Vonderhorst, Pam Wong

TXU Brand Development

TXU Energy is one of the largest energy service companies in the world. My work as the creative director on this business involved brand to retail marketing. I managed a creative team that delivered brand and retail broadcast, outdoor, web, direct mail, and experiential marketing. One of our seasonal acquisition campaigns directly resulted in the highest revenue increase TXU had seen in 2 years. 

Our team also delivered a new brand graphics identity package and rebuilt their brand guidelines - soup to nuts branding.

Team: Kim Elenez, Blair Torres, Lou Allison, Vincent Walker, Kelly Welch, Scott Youngblood, Greg Chapman

One Generous Turkey

The year was 2009. The economy had tanked. Over 20 million Americans were turning towards aid organizations for food. To do something meaningful as a brand, Cargill partnered with Feeding America. All we had to do was create the right campaign to promote their top holiday product, HoneySuckle White Turkey.

Our campaign involved a multi-pronged media strategy to make the HoneySuckle White Turkey brand synonymous with giving. For every HoneySuckle White Turkey product purchased, money was donated to Feeding America. Our message: HoneySuckle White Turkey is the only turkey that can feed a million people. To spread the word, we used rich media as well as in-store promotion such as posters and product stickers carrying the hopeful message. That year, sales went through the roof and consequently, Feeding America helped thousands of people.

The World's Largest Thanksgiving Event Concept

We proposed an event concept that on Thanksgiving day, Cargill would launch the world's largest Thanksgiving feast for the needy in a select number of convention halls across America. Our vision was to create a Guinness World Record for feeding the greatest amount of people in one day. Various food network sponsors and other local and national companies expressed a great deal of interest in sponsoring this event, but due to timing, it never saw the light of day. Had it been done, It would no doubt have made the HoneySuckle White Turkey a historically significant brand.

Team: Lou Allison, Kelly Welch, Scott Youngblood.

HEADLINE: One bullet can destroy two lives. Stop the Shoot First Bill.

The Shoot First Bill was being pushed by the NRA. This law makes it acceptable to defend yourself with a gun against anyone you feel threatened by. We had an opportunity to create a warning against the passage of this law in the state of Minnesota. The trick was to point out the dangers of Shoot First without alienating the right-to-bear-arms crowd. To do this, we came up with a simple insight: you can't take it back once you shoot. 

Silver ADDY award winner.

Team: Craig Cooper, Writer, Lincoln Durham, Digital Illustrator

It's a spreadsheet...

This video launched the Freeman Events Calendar internally for 7,000 employees. The calendar is an effective planning tool, but at the end of the day, it's just a highly functional spreadsheet. Getting everyone to use it was done by telling the story through employees.

Team: The talented Freeman Dallas employees. Pam Wong (Project Manager), Mike Swenson (DP/Cameraman), Wes Meyers (Editor), Director/writer - me. 

PennWell is a B2B publishing and events company. The largest events and trade shows they own and operate are in public safety, fire and power industries. To help renegotiate Freeman's contract as a logistics provider, we created a microsite showing how live engagement relevant to their audience could be delivered on top of our flawless logistics delivery. In doing so, we proposed digital installations and experiential concepts that helped start the conversation about our strategy and creative capability offerings. Contract was successfully renegotiated.

Team: John Jaeger (writer), Pam Wong (project manager/producer), Rachel Kutos (designer), Caliber Creative (programming and production)

A simple idea

Of the many strategies on how to win new business, one of the most obvious and compelling is identifying important clients who willingly gush about your work. In helping Freeman renegotiate their contract with the Light Fair International (LFI) trade show and conference, I found those clients and captured their stories.

Printed booklets featuring happy exhibitors were created as gifts to LFI. Following the pitch, LFI asked to reprint more booklets as gifts to exhibitors. The happy client stories provided an unexpected and authentic way to reconnect LFI with their customers, and hence, LFI with Freeman.

CREDITS: Dan Steenstrup (VP, Sales), Pam Wong (Project Manager), Wes Meyers (Editor/VFX)

The Comeback (a lotto game)

The Texas State Lottery Commission decided to bring back a once popular lotto game, but one that wasn't top of mind. What we needed to do was to make the idea of a comeback exciting. To do that, we asked Cowboys legends Troy Aikman and Emmitt Smith if they would consider toying with the idea of "getting back in the game". This campaign unfolded over the course of several weeks first as outdoor, then as teaser spots. The final reveal was that despite all the buzz and excitement, Troy and Emmitt weren't coming back to play with the Cowboys, but they would be playing Texas Lotto again. 

This campaign received a recognition from the NY Film Festival for concept and production quality. 

Credits: Craig Cooper, Diana Payer, Lou Allison

SHELL ENERGY 360 INTEGRATION

This is a campaign we did for Shell Energy to announce the fact that in choice markets, they were offering natural gas and electricity plans directly to consumers. The campaign had a 360 strategy: we did promotional TV advertising, direct mail, outdoor, online and promotional print.

Bronze DMA Echo Award for highly successful acquisition results. 

Team: Molly McLaren, writer. Nancy Moore, account service.

National Association of Broadcasters: OMVC signage

Mobile Digital TV technology exists where anyone can tap into broadcast TV free of charge via their mobile devices - but there's a lot of skepticism about whether it will become a real offering. Some broadcasters simply don't think about it while others believe it should be regulated. The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) asked us to come up with a campaign that would drive attendee traffic to the Mobile Digital TV exhibit at the NAB show. This onsite poster concept uses humor to help start the discussion.