November 8, 2024
From Chaos to Creativity: How Storms Sparked Our Latest Campaign
Inspiration can strike anytime and anywhere — sometimes even in the most unexpected places. Our most recent campaign was born out of the literal destruction created by back-to-back hurricanes.
Driving on Florida roads this past month has felt different–downed trees, debris piled up and even ripped-up billboards flapping in the wind. But as our own team and communities were reeling from the storm, we saw an opportunity to offer messages of hope.
The shredded billboard vinyl and glitching digital billboards along our roads became our inspiration. Like those of us still feeling overwhelmed by the loss and destruction, the visible areas in the damaged digital billboards showed glimmers of what should be there.
Those glimmers inspired an idea for our client, The Crisis Center of Tampa Bay. What if we could design a billboard to fit the unbroken areas of these digital billboards, to highlight the Crisis Center as a beacon of hope, help, and healing?
The Crisis Center of Tampa Bay connects anyone who calls for resources of support. Whether it’s help with necessities, mental health, trauma, or other problems, the Crisis Center is a gateway to help.
Our team quickly seized the opportunity to create a message and work with our partners at OUTFRONT Media to execute the idea. Our senior copywriter connected the feeling of post-hurricane recovery and the broken billboard medium with a message that reads, “When everything feels broken, call 2-1-1 for help.”
As we worked with our OUTFRONT partners, we learned together that the boards were glitching rather than having definitive LED panel outages. This meant the outages on the boards were not 100% reliable for design purposes. But, we didn’t abandon the idea — instead, we designed the board to look like the broken boards to ensure this relevant and timely message reaches the community and leverages the donated space.
This creative solution represents the optimism we feel for the Tampa Bay community — even in the hurt of brokenness after such devastation, coming together with creative solutions enabled an outlet for support.
