CREATIVE DIRECTION : Go There
CLIENT : Danner
MY ROLE : Brand Creative Director
Brand Guide Update
A brand guide should serve the brand as a reference tool for every move made. When I began at Danner the brand guide that was in use came from a smart agency that baked a campaign concept into the brand guide. That campaign ran for 7 years and didn’t help Danner reach it’s business goals of selling boots. It was time to rethink and redesign. For a heritage brand that began in 1932, evolution can be a difficult thing, but there must be room for it. As the Creative Director for the brand I brought all the departments to the same table to uncover their problems and we found solutions together. Now Danner has a more strategy-minded and detailed brand guide that is easy to update as new problems arise.
Here are some sample pages from the guide and a brand intro that for the International audience.
Go There Brand Campaign
Danner’s Brand Awareness Campaign “Go There” was intended to connect with people who’s values align with the brand. This took the form of a short documentary series that lived on social media and on danner.com. I was lucky to work with the crew that brought this to life. Truly experienced professions who put the quality of the work above all else.
VP of Marketing Laurie Dunn Thomas
Brand Manager WIll Pennartz
External Creative Partners:
Writer Charlotte Austin
Voice Talent Jed Alger
Video Aly Arnold Nicklas
Photography Cory Arnold
Music Laura Gibson
This ad campaign had a full ecosystem that reached people from ads in airports to social media performance ads. I’m only posting the video because it beautiful.
It took about a whole year of meetings, mock ups, vulnerable collaboration between departments, letting an agency relationship go, updating the brand guide, trusting new creative partners, bringing back legendary creative partners and faithfully strengthening Danner Boots internal marketing team, but it happened. We presented a marketing campaign to ourselves and we felt calmly astonished that it did everything we wanted Danner's big brand campaign, Go There, to do:
-Make boots the hero.
-Uplift the brand heritage.
-Highlight recrafting.
-Utilize old and new content.
-Shift from documentary to narrative storytelling.
-Do it all with a more nimble budget than ever before.
The effect has been profound on all the work Danner's internal marketing team has done with our external creative partners since. I'm not just posting (bragging) about this year's Go There campaign, but how it came about by empowering the internal team's trust of itself. Stoked on my teammates willingness to try new things!
VP of Marketing Laurie Dunn Thomas
Brand Manager Kate Skelton
Art Director Erin Althoff
Producer Nicholas Caron
External Creative Partners:
Writer Andrew Dickson
Voice Talent Jed Alger
Production & Video Brother Films
Photography Zach Doleac & Zach Lewis
This ad campaign had a full ecosystem that reached people from ads in airports to social media performance ads. I’m only posting the video because it beautiful.
There is no better feeling than supporting great work done by great people. As the creative director on this project I got to support the crew in a variety of ways: concepting, dream team assembling, script editing, carrying battery packs, helping people feel welcomed in zoom meetings, carrying granite rocks down the mountain for the studio photographer, and dumping gasoline on everyone's creative fires.
VP of Marketing Laurie Dunn Thomas
Brand Manager Kate Skelton
Art Director Erin Althoff
Producer Nicholas Caron
External Creative Partners:
Production & Video Brother Films
Photography Zach Lewis
This ad campaign had a full ecosystem that reached people from ads in magazines to social media performance ads. I’m only posting the video because it beautiful.