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Warner Bros

Aim High

Barefoot Proximity/May 2012

A character-building experience.

Tom Bolton

Hollywood has worked from the same script for decades – all you ever needed to capture an audience was a great director, a great story, and great characters for people to care about.

But competition from a variety of other media channels – especially social media – has challenged Hollywood to start rewriting the script in order to capture newer, younger, socially-connected audiences. Warner Brothers accepted that challenge and came to Barefoot for help.

The result was Aim High, a killer new series made just for Facebook.

“Aim High combines the best of Hollywood - a great director and an action-packed story - with new opportunities for Facebook audiences to socially connect with their friends and interact with elements of the show in real time,” explains Tom Bolton, Associated Creative Director at Barefoot. “The Aim High experience even pulls Facebook profile information from audience members and integrates it into the series, effectively turning viewers into actual characters.”

“And if social media has taught us anything,” says Tom, “it’s that nothing makes you care about a character more than when that character... is you.”

The adventure continues.

After its first season became one of the most talked-about projects in the entertainment world, Aim High is currently gearing up for Season Two, and even more opportunities for audiences to become part of the story.

Jazz hands and social media.

Chris Gilbert and Kasie Baltes

On July 14, 2012, the world’s largest choral competition was held in North America for the first time ever. Right in Barefoot’s own backyard.

“Despite its global noteriety, the World Choir Games wasn’t well known in its host city of Cincinnati,” notes Barefoot Managing Editor Kasie Baltes. “The WGC approached Barefoot to help promote awareness for an epic opening ceremony performance that would sell local audiences on the value of the games.”

“We created a social media campaign that told the story of how three choirs joined together with Grammy-Award-winning artist Kirk Franklin for one epic performance during the opening ceremony,” explains Barefoot Social Media Expert Chris Gilbert. “We used Kirk’s Facebook audience to engage new fans with our message, and rewarded them with the opportunity to influence a portion of the opening ceremony. Our audience was invested in the story, and became social advocates of the WGC brand.”

A chorus of approval.

In addition to generating huge awareness numbers for WGC, Kasie and Chris were featured speakers at the Cincinnati Digital Non-Conference, where their summary of the campaign drew raves for its unique use of Facebook as a presentation format.

1.2MM

earned media impressions

$49MM

estimated publicity value

145%

increase in page likes

208K

estimated attendance

27K

talking about WCG

13K

tweets during WCG

Seize the day.

Josh Belcher

Impact Autism set out to partner with area businesses to create employment opportunities for individuals who are no longer supported by school-based autism solutions. But before they could do that, Impact Autism needed to modernize antiquated daily time management tools in order to help potential employees with autism to succeed in a business environment. They turned to Barefoot for an idea.

“Barefoot decided to develop an iPad-enabled life management platform for individuals with autism and those supporting them, including parents, teachers, job coaches, and eventually employers,” says Josh Belcher, Project Manager at Barefoot.

“We started by reaching out to the Greater Cincinnati autism community, and together, aligned to a set of features that would allow an individual with autism to access his or her schedule from an iPad app monitored by a parent, teacher, or job coach.”

Great cause, great effect.

The Impact Every Day app launched October 1st, 2012 in local school systems and has seen immediate success within the autism community. Based on ongoing input from the community, Impact Autism will continue to optimize the app and distribute it a wider user base, eventually creating a go-to autism support platform for schools and businesses across the country.

“This app gives people with autism what they need most to succeed: independence.”

Christina Carnahan Ed.D.
Assistant Professor of Special Education
University of Cincinnati

Sorry About the Twigs, Folks

The saying goes that “All press is good press.” That doesn’t necessarily hold true when you find a fly in your soup or a faulty part in your car. People inevitably publicize blunders like these--not the type of coverage that companies want.

However, leveraging this insight, we helped Monteith’s Crushed Cider, the New Zealand cider owned by DB Breweries, court this type of press coverage…on purpose. Monteith led customers to believe that there was a lapse in its quality control by intentionally slipping real tree twigs into its cider boxes which made their way onto store shelves. Concerned customers soon took to Facebook, radio, and a call center in the hopes of finding an explanation. Two weeks later, Monteith’s used PR, press, patched billboards and on-pack stickers to capitalize on the moment. It apologized for the twigs and reminded the public that they were due to the fact that its cider contains only the freshest fruit, not concentrated fruit syrup like the competitors. Talk about turning a potential negative into a purposeful positive.

In the end, not only did Crushed Cider sales increase by 32%, but Monteith’s ran out of its 12 pack cider, twigs and all. At Cannes, the campaign was also awarded a Gold Outdoor Lion, Gold, Silver and Bronze Promo & Activation Lions, and a Bronze Media Lion.

Bradesco Seguros

Getty Images

From Love to Bingo in 873 Images

Our Brazilian agency, Almap BBDO, had a unique assignment from its client Getty Images, the owner of the world’s leading image database for creating and distributing visual content. The challenge? Find a way to communicate that Getty Images has so many images that anybody is capable of telling any story they want by only using the company’s archives.

How did Almap rise to the challenge? They undertook a painstaking effort in research and creativity: Almap’s teams leveraged 873 individual photographic stills from Getty’s archives and unveiled them in sequence to tell the inspiring story of a life in one 60-second film.

The stunning piece, called "Do amor ao Bingo em 873 imagens" [From love to Bingo in 873 images], displays 873 images in 15 images per second, sufficient speed to transform the series of stills into a video that, without any text, conveys a beautiful narrative.

And most importantly, all photos, without any exceptions, are from the Getty Images archives. The pictures – of different people and locations – were culled from more than 5,000 images in Getty’s archive and took six months to research and assemble into a coherent story line.

While one picture is worth a thousand words, this project proved that 873 pictures could potentially leave you speechless.

M&M’s

Ms. Brown Launch

Through research we found was that while M&M’s has always stood for colorful, chocolate fun – in recent years, consumers only thought of the brand as colorful fun with a SIDE of chocolate. When they were craving chocolate, they simply did not think of M&M’s.

We decided to use a perceived shortcoming to our advantage. While not as colorful as the others, the brown lentil evoked the strongest chocolate associations. So we decided to launch brown, the ORIGINAL M&M’s, as the ultimate representation of the brand’s chocolate heritage and superiority.

Great care was given in developing the personality and archetype for the new brown character – Ms. Brown. Highly intelligent, with a dry wit – she had been behind the scenes all these years as the Chief Chocolate Officer – Ms. Brown was the ultimate representation of the brand’s chocolate heritage and superiority.

We put this core product truth about chocolate embodied by Ms. Brown at the center of our story and tapped into the heart of pop culture and advertising’s biggest stage - Super Bowl XLVI – to tell the story. The result? Ms. Brown’s debut spot scored #1 in the YouTube AdBlitz and ranked as a top five ad across all major polls.

Lowe’s

FedEx

General Electric

Living Masterpiece

To demonstrate GE’s commitment to helping reduce the National Gallery’s carbon footprint we created the world’s first "living" masterpiece.

The recreation of Van Gogh’s "A Wheatfield, with Cypresses" is made up of over 8,000 plants and was grown and installed in the proper sequence with the help of a computer system over a four month period. The huge 22-meter site remained in Trafalgar Square until the end of October 2011.

The living wall, a creative manifestation of GE’s commitment to the environment that generated an incredible amount of buzz, also proved emblematic of its brand platform: Imagination at Work.

2011

2010

2009

21% Kiss, 27% Ozzy, 18% The Cure, 34% Cher

Billboard, the music industry’s bible, was entering the Brazilian market for the first time and wanted to strike a chord with the country’s music lovers.

We showed how Billboard understands music not simply on a surface level, but deep down to its core, by revealing the influences of some of the world’s most loved musicians.

We created huge portraits of well known artists like Marilyn Manson, Bono, and Lady Gaga. Upon closer inspection, viewers saw these portraits were actually made up of millions of smaller images of the artists who inspired the featured musician.

Taking the concept one step further, the campaign’s interactive experience let music lovers create and share portraits of themselves, made up of their favorite artists.

By allowing Brazilian music fans to “see what music’s made of,” Billboard garnered an incredible amount of buzz and acclaim, while laying the groundwork for a widely successful market entry.