Consumer Goods

The fine art of advertising meets the science of content management.

When you're working for one of the world's most recognized brand families, and the best-known branding agency on the planet, then you know that the nuances of an advertising design mean a lot.

So, when the creative team of that illustrious agency came to Pica9's Flatiron District offices to review the mechanics of its campaigns for three of the biggest brands in the consumer goods business, you can be sure we had our game face on.

Here was the essence of the design problem they presented: A single template family needed to support an unlimited number of headline and image combinations--yet each creative execution varied in terms of the placement of the headline relative to the key visual. What drove the placement? Aesthetics, of course. And one more thing--each headline needed to be set against a backdrop cast in a very specific CMYK value--matching one of the 25 CMYK swatches in the master brand's logomark.

As the agency creatives rolled out a series of executions, to demonstrate both the theme and its (theoretically limitless) variations, you could see the data model visions dancing in the Pica9 development team's head. By the end of the meeting, the basic approach was in site. By the end of that week, a proof-of-concept was churning out our first, rough ad versions. By the end of the month, the dev team was fine tuning the interface controls, to make it easy for non-technical people to build templates with design tolerances of less than 1 point. And by the end of the quarter, the system was live and ready to roll out to the field.

If that process sounds more scientific than purely creative, it should. Because at Pica9, we see our job as applying scientific precision to achieve the client's desired aesthetic effect. If you'd like to take a look at the principles we applied (as you can probably tell, we're mighty proud of the solution the team built out), just give us a ring (914-908-4540). We'd be happy to show and tell.