AT HOLME ROBERTS & OWEN
Legal Marketing Association National Conference Presentation:
Effective Creativity in the Business World
(The link below leads to an abbreviated animation of a PPT I used while speaking on
the topic of how to successfully bring creative ideas into reality in a corporate environment.
In addition to deeply researching the subject, I also pulled extensively from my
own experiences of creating, presenting, rolling out, implementing, and growing
HRO's identity campaign.
Origins and Early Development of HRO Identity Campaign
- Experience listens. Be heard. -
 One of my many white board iterations during the creative process of HRO's identity campaign |  HRO Experience listens. Be heard. The campaign's introductory ad explained the reason for the rebrand and the firm's promise of service. . |  Early in the campaign, we featured clients in ads - asking the question, "Have you been heard?" We then explained in the text how HRO listened to the client and helped solve their issue. |
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 Have You Been Heard? Jill Sisson, Einstein Bros. Bagels |  Have You Been Heard? WellDog has. |  Have You Been Heard? Joey Cheek Right to Play ad. The concept was nimble enough to apply beyond clients. When he won at the Torino Olympic Games, Joey Cheek donated his medals to charity and challenged corporate America to match him. HRO heard the call. |
 Have You Been Heard? Holiday campaign. HRO granted Eric's Make-a-Wish to be a NYPD officer. |  Eventually, the concept became applicable to objects, ideas, and goals rather than just to people. |  Experience listens. Be heard. Holiday version. Reinforcing the message in a variety of ways. |
 A humorous take on the Have You Been Heard? campaign for HRO's Boulder office. |  Have You Been Heard? campaign grows and is able to accommodate many meanings. |
Expanded & Evolving Advertising Campaigns
Based on the Firm's Identity Campaign
 The "Building" ad campaign was developed for HRO's relatively new California offices. These locations were in the process of staffing up and building name recognition and reputations. |  The ad campaign, tied together with the same headline treatment, focused on prominent attorneys and tied their specialties to the firm's practice areas. |  I added relevant imagery into the ads to visually tie the subjects to their areas of expertise. |
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 The concept eventually was expanded to other office locations as they grew. This ad welcomed and entire practice group team to the the firm's Salt Lake City office. |  To capture large teams in single ads, we shot smaller groups and merged them together in a strikingly creative way. |  The design technique created a more interesting and versatile look for group shots - and created a signature "look" for many of the firm's ads. |
 The ad style was so well-received that we started to use it for other types of ads. This ad was a spread that featured the many women in leadership roles at the firm. Each woman shared a childhood story that exemplified characteristics of a future leader. |  When the economic downturn hit hard, HRO did not dodge the subject. The "Frame Your Future" ad campaign acknowledged the worrisome times... |  The series of ads first, acknowledged the economic turmoil, but subsequently began to offer a brighter, more empowering message of perspective and change. |
 The final ad in the series focused on a framed sunrise with a headline that reassured us that opportunities lie ahead. |  When HRO sponsored the Green Energy Summit, I created the "Healthy Business/Healthy Environment" ad series for the programs and various collateral and signage. |  The ad series was tied together with the same headline, "Healthy business built on a healthy environment." and featured images that brought the concepts together. |
 The concept was tied back to the HRO identity with a bottom banner displaying "Greenovation" defined as green + innovation and a reveal to the firm's contact information. |  When the chair of HRO's litigation group left the firm, that seat was filled by two partners in different office locations. The firm wanted to highlight the change in a positive light. |  Unfortunately, the two attorneys were not able to open their schedules at the same time for a photo shoot to feature them together in the ads. |
 Rather than foregoing the ads, I reworked the concept to create a positive spin on the situation, by using humor to create a storyline about them both working so hard that they simply could not break away at the same time for an ad. |
Single Ads, Sponsorships, Invitations & Other Collateral
 A group of HRO attorneys had significant ties to the 2010 Winter Olympics - some represented sports associations and athletes, another had strong ties to the anti-doping agency, and yet another left the firm for the USOC. The firm placed an ad in the sports business journal that would be distributed at the Games. This is the ad we created to "stand out" in the colorful publication. |  When one of HRO's longtime and much-beloved partners left the firm to become a Colorado State Court Judge, we created this ad to honor his achievement and wish him well. |  HRO sponsored Denver's Road Home project to help raise awareness and money for the homeless. The signature event for the year was a gala to which attendees were asked to dress in sleepwear and pajamas to raise money for the organization. This ad was created to raise awareness for the gala and campaign. |
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 This ad was created to celebrate a significant victory for the U.S. and World Anti-Doping Agencies, a client of the firm. |  Two HRO attorneys were named "Top Women Laywers", so we photographed them in the top of the State Capitol Building. |  Composite of HRO Boulder Summer Party invitation spoofing the "going green" movement. Our attorneys have ALWAYS been wind-powered. |
 A humorous take on an invitation for summer associates to attend a wine and food pairing at the home of the firm's managing partner. |  A fun invitation to a fun event. A composite of a multi-paneled print invitation to the firm's annual client clambake. |  Sponsorship ad for a fundraising event for Camp del Corazon, a retreat for children with heart ailments. |
 Sponsorship ad for the Volunteers of America western-themed gala. |  Sponsorship ad for GirlsINC annual gala. |  Sponsorship ad for Women Lawyers of Utah. |
 Sponsorship ad for San Francisco Salvation Army gala. |  three-panel short-fold collateral brochure for a Boulder Venture Capital conference - printed in-house |  Full-page ad for conference program to coordinate with HRO's conference brochure handed out at the event. |
 (Cover only) One of a series of practice group brochures designed to fit into a stepped outer folder - could also be handed out individually. |  (Cover only) Another brochure from practice group series. |  (Cover only) A three-paneled brochure used as a handout at a coal industry conference where one of the firm's attorneys was a featured speaker. |
 (Cover only) Classic linen HRO Holiday card featuring holly berries and metallic silver ink. Holiday card was always a challenge because it had to be festive, but could not directly correlate to a specific holiday. |  For a few years, the firm granted wishes to children through the Make-a-Wish Foundation rather than distributing a traditional holiday card. |
Event Concepting & Support, Presentations, Animations, Video
HRO Boulder Summer Party - Going Green
 Cover of print invitation featuring an attorney making fun of a guy whose image I purchased on a stock imagery site. | The theme of the event was a spoof of the "going green" movement - a very hot topic in 2008. |  The text of the invite was all written tongue-in-cheek style and referenceing buzzwords from the going green phenomenon. |
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 We posed the attorneys to fit into their roles for the invite - then clipped them out in Photoshop and blended them into their new backgrounds. |  An attorney blowing a non-existent pinwheel that would be added later. |  The outer cover of the three-paneled print invitation |
 We created all the collateral and signage for the party to work together with the theme. |  We set up an area in the courtyard of Chautauqua Dining Hall to take "tree hugger" photos of guests that we later sent to attorneys to email to their guests as a follow up thank you for attending the party. |  Photos like this were emailed to guests a few days after the party. |
 A more-detailed description of how we reinvented, repositioned and successfully grew the HRO Boulder Summer Party series into one of the town's anticipated business events over a few-year period may be found here... |
HRO Boulder Summer Party - Bigger. Better. Badder. And Now In 3D!
In 2010, we played off of the success of Avatar and the 3-D craze that followed, with our HRO Boulder Summer Party Blockbuster. We used a green screen and filmed our attorneys interacting with famous movie scenes. We set up a pretend movie theater and had them play it out in that environment too. I directed them to act in certain ways, and then we incorporated them in to the appropriate scenes. We sent out a save the date teaser video via email, and followed that with the full-length invite.
We played the video at the party, which is why there is no audio after the invitation section. We also had behind the scenes photos of the shoots displayed and purchased life-size cutouts of movie characters to display at the event.
HRO Partner Retreat - Frame Our Future
A detailed explanation of the concepting, creation and implementation of this partner retreat event may be found by clicking the link above.
.The video to the left is an abbreviated composite of the entire two-day event, including opening sequences, PPT presentations, live-audience interactive discussions, intermissions, and closing sequences. Our team of three completed the creative for the entire retreat in nine days (and nights). Economically, 2009 was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year. To start the presentation, we took a humorous approach with an animation that beat up the year much as it had beaten up the business world. I used a theme from one of our ad campaigns for the year "Frame Your Future" as a concept to build around, changing it slightly to "Frame Our Future" to speak to our internal audience for the retreat.
HRO Partner Retreat - Crush Old Thinking
Using Pareto's Principle (also known as the 80–20 rule, states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes) as a starting point, the theme of this partner retreat was to make change by crushing old ways of thinking - to stop focusing on the things that matter least and to focus intently on the 20% of actions that matter most.
The video to the right is a composite of the creative presentations for the retreat programming. The opening sequence is an animated Pareto's Principle and a literal crushing of old thinking. This was followed by an animation illustrating the power of working together. The intermission breaks were introduced by a series of animated demotivational posters (representative of old thinking) being crushed by the retreat's logo. The closing sequence, with a journey into space, conveyed that there was no limits on where the firm could go if the attorneys worked together.
