Ads: Overview

This is one of my favorite ads. I did all the design work on this starting from the tiger photo. I scanned the torn page, faded and added the blue eye tints. The paper tiger represents datacenters that didn’t go through certification and as a result looked more secure and resilient than they actually are.

My good friend Myra Danehy created this ad for me. It’s a simple design but people remembered it when they came for tours of the datacenter. The idea of improving the perceived value of the IT professional by making them heroic for choosing a professional infrastructure was appealing to me.

There’s really no magic in giving away cash for referrals. Everyone likes getting money but telling someone you’re going to give them money doesn’t charge them up. You have to give them some hints about what they can buy with the money to get them excited. My referral campaign talked about the number of referral cabinets required to pay for a trip to Greece.

I designed this cap for Intellithought brand development. I still love the slogan I developed for Intellithought, “Seek Professional Help”. It’s actually a perfect slogan. It has an edgy double meaning that helps people remember it and it gives them a reason to wear the hat themselves as a statement. It is also a strategic and concise marketing/value proposition. Our main competition was from someone providing IT services for their friends or family, or from IT staff trying to cover areas of expertise without adequate training, so I painted these competitors very subtly as “amateurs” by describing our services as “professional”. The slogan is a clear direction to prospective clients to call us.

Even the addition of “Kingsport, TN” was strategic. When you see someone in a branded cap, there’s typically no way to tell if the company is local (and therefore potentially helpful to someone seeking this type of service) or national. If you see a local company name and don’t recognize it, you’re more likely to ask about the company than an unrecognizable brand with no geographic specificity.

I wanted the business representatives from the more technologically sophisticated companies in the region to share best practices with the less advanced companies so they would be ready to take advantage of a professional datacenter. I created a contest with this award for the IT professional who shared the most thorough and complete summary of their organization’s disaster recovery strategy.

I contracted a professional cartoonist, Andy Singer, to develop this illustration of my OnePartner ECO service. I liked the idea of making my point in a way that physicians would be inherently relaxed with since some physicians can be apprehensive about information technology.

In 2005, I sponsored an employee’s rocket in exchange for advertising. Read more and see additional photos and launch video in the Intellithought Rocket article.