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Branding agency loyalkaspar is PromaxBDA’s Global Excellence Agency of the Year.
The Agency of the Year is awarded to a company who has demonstrated outstanding and creatively innovative work, and is ultimately decided by the sheer number of awards won in the 2015 Promotion, Marketing and Design Global Excellence Awards competition.
To celebrate loyalkaspar’s big win at PromaxBDA: The Conference 2015, Brief spoke with the agency about changes in the company and the industry at large and took one more look at some of its biggest work of the past year, which includes multi-platform campaigns for CNN, a sports package, CBS’ tentpole event of last summer and an upfront campaign for TNT.
Loyalkaspar is coming off one of the biggest growth spurts in the company’s history, taking on more work beginning with strategy and continuing with branding and research. The team believes that they are well-equipped to help linear brands understand the non-linear ecosystem (and vice versa) in such a saturated market.
“We’re doubling down on people who understand the shift in content consumption, new business models, and content distribution,” said Robert Blatchford, chief development officer at loyalkaspar. “That means more writers, thinkers, and planners. This convergence is a huge priority in our industry, so we’re making sure we not only understand the landscape, but we can help our clients make a bigger impact by extending their reach.”
What’s next for loyalkaspar? Even more growth.
“Thinking differently,” said Blatchford. “We’ve built teams that are dedicated to research and strategy to bring more front-end rigor to the planning and creative side of the business.”
Recently, loyalkaspar continued its relationship with TNT for its summer drama The Last Ship. This year’s campaign included Selfie With a Sailor, which served to promote the second season while also raising money for the USO during Fleet Week in New York.
Last year’s campaign centered on a Grand Central terminal takeover and the art exhibit “Survival is an Art: The Last Ship Experience,” featuring stylistic gas masks and post-apocalyptic-inspired creations.
“It was a defining project for us because it gave us the opportunity to think outside of the box and develop an audience for the show outside of traditional media,” said loyalkaspar President David Herbruck. “It’s all about smarter creative and curating a more thoughtful message through various platforms and experiences.”
Loyalkaspar, now working with CNN on its docuseries The Seventies, premiering June 11, created a multiplatform campaign for The Sixties last summer that involved all aspects of the decade.
The campaign involved key art, on-air promos, out-of-home pieces and digital spots that ran weeks in advance of the event.
Television, which played a major role in the era, was a big piece of the campaign, which also juxtaposed images of war, political moments and revolution. Not to mention that last year was the 50th anniversary of The Beatles’ performance on The Ed Sullivan Show, so the CNN campaign involved a breakout component for that particular British Invasion.
Loyalkaspar also has worked with CNN’s entertainment properties with its docuseries Inside Man with Morgan Spurlock.
Over in the sports world, loyalksapar was brought on last year to ESPN’s Grantland property, specifically to bring its graphic eye to The Grantland Basketball Hour package.
Using illustration as the basis of the show’s look, loyalkaspar created an entire set of characters to make players that represented both ESPN and the Grantland brands.
“When ESPN brought us Grantland, we knew we had a unique opportunity given the nature of the show,” said Herbruck. “ESPN encouraged us to embrace our own modern aesthetic and not adhere to the motifs of traditional sports packaging with heavy logo-centric 3D production.”
Currently, loyalkaspar is working on ESPN’s college football season package for 2015, a growing and quickly changing brand thanks to last year’s playoffs changes.
Halle Berry’s Extant was a big focus for CBS last summer, and the network trusted loyalkaspar with its tease campaign, which involved the creative challenge of teasing a show with little footage and purposefully ambiguous messaging.
“Because Extant is such a unique word, we wanted to make the wordmark clear, legible and modern,” said loyalkaspar Chief Creative Officer Beat Baudenbacher of the logo design.
The tease campaign explained two worlds coming together because of unanticipated events, only hinting at the outcome in TV spots (“Due this September,” sonogram imaging, etc.).
“The goal was to create mood pieces that would tease the show without giving anything away - nothing narratively specific,” said Baudenbacher. “So it was a tease campaign through and through.”
Loyalkaspar even made its mark on upfronts last spring. TNT wanted to extend and further define its drama branding, so loyalkaspar worked with the cable network to present its upfront campaign, “Boom.”
TNT’s “Boom” messaging was largely presented through talent-based spots like the one above, adding an emotional response to the word that didn’t bring to mind explosives.
“They wanted to make sure it wasn’t an explosive boom – there’s no exclamation point there,” said Blatchford.
Loyalkaspar worked with talent, asking them around 25 questions that would elicit different emotional reactions, all answered with one word: Boom. (How did you feel after your first kiss? What did it feel like to hear your child say ‘I love you’?). This creative solution enabled TNT to have multiple different angles to the word and the branding while allowing the talent to connect to it in more personal ways.
Most recently, loyalkaspar has launched new branding for the Peabody Awards and the summer Becomers branding for ABC Family. But TV is far from the agency’s only expertise. Loyalkaspar also recently launched and branded (even named) a children’s museum.
Named MOXI, the museum is focused on teaching kids skills and lessons in STEAM (science, technology, engineering, the arts and math). Loyalkaspar worked with the museum and partner Dick Wolf on the naming and brand identity of MOXI, set to open in 2016.
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