Interactive and Entertaining Marketing Products

Developing innovative and highly creative marketing products generates a memorable experience

Half the battle with any marketing project is to create a marketing piece that is memorable. Our world, especially in the United States, is so inundated with marketing in multiple forms constantly being placed in front of our eyes nearly 24/7 (twenty-four hours a day, 7 days a week). How does a company make their product line stand out from the rest? How does a company engage a potential customer in such a way as to strongly motivate he or she into actually making the purchase?

The award-winning multimedia design firm Chase Information Systems, Inc. (CIS) of Jamestown, NY has been assisting their clients with the development of high quality memorable marketing pieces for the past several years. In 2005 CIS won two international awards for marketing products they developed, a Silver Davey Award and an INM Impressario Contest Award – one of only three winners along with Sony Corporation obtaining the Impressario Award. In July of 2006 it was announced that CIS won a Silver Telly Award for a video animation they created for Vesuvius Monofrax. The Telly Award is one of the best-known awards in the media industry.

"These guys literally took our idea and turned it into a creative, incredible piece of work. It's amazing what they did," Daryl Clendenen, Marketing Manager for Vesuvius Monofrax said. "Our goal was to compete in the world of today and to come up with a new product to maintain profitability, which is the lip and spout casing. We wanted to find a way to launch our new product and to make a big impact on our customers."

"What CIS has done alone is really going to make a big impact, and it's going to differentiate us from our competitors," Clendenen said. "I was thrilled to keep our business [within upstate NY]. I had the opportunity to use various companies outside the area, but I couldn't be more pleased with the service we received and the end product."

This year's Telly Award Winners included: AOL/Nuance Creative, Bass Pro Shops Video Productions, BBDO New York, BET Jazz, CNN, Comedy Central, DDB Los Angeles, Devito/Verdi, Disneyland Resort, FX Networks, GEICO, Hallmark Channel, HGTV, Marshall Field's, Microsoft, MSNBC, NBA Entertainment, NBC Universal Global Network, Nickelodeon, Nike, QVC, San Francisco 49ers, Starz Entertainment Group, The Biography Channel, The History Channel, The Outdoor Channel, along with the up and coming interactive marketing firm based in western NY – Chase Information Systems.

Very few entrants garner the highest award of the Silver Telly, as approximately only 5% are chosen to win a Silver Telly. The Bronze Telly is awarded to approximately 15% of the all entrants, and is still a very prestigious award.

Colin Chase, President of Chase Information Systems, expressed to Monofrax the need to "dream a little" as they usually guide their clients to do. "I explained to Daryl [Clendenen, Marketing Manager] to dream a little, to pretend that money was not an issue – to assist us in brainstorming creatively. We aid our clients in helping us to help them by showcasing various past projects, various examples of good marketing – examples of memorable marketing."

After Monofrax provided CIS with some basic direction, then the CIS Creative Team started devising a number of possible concepts for the proposed marketing project. The CIS Creative Team includes Colin Chase and Ben Michelson as well as other developers at times. After the client chooses a specific concept or multiple concepts, then a storyboard is drafted and a lot of details are decided upon.

"Often a client will have some pie-in-the-sky idea, usually an idea that is not too fleshed out," noted Ben Michelson, lead graphic artist and animator for Chase Information Systems. "Colin and I work with the client to refine the concept and embellish it until we arrive at a moment of eureka when the specific path to follow becomes evident."

In the case of the Monofrax animation the idea of showing the inside of the furnace was struck upon, which was then enhanced into much greater detail. The initial concept then became the story of a piece of sand falling into a Monofrax glass refractory furnace, and then following this piece of sand along the inside of the furnace as it is melted into a sheet of glass coming out the end over the lip spout and onto the tin bath where it is stretched and cooled into an actual sheet of glass.

"Good marketing draws an emotional response from the viewer, from the target audience," said Colin Chase of CIS. "However, really good marketing will be of interest even to people outside the target audience, which is what we believe we have created for Monofrax. Even people outside the glass industry will find this animation intriguing. But to people in the industry, they are amazed by the animation because they have never actually seen what we are showing them, even though they work with a glass refractory every day."

"You can't put a video camera inside the furnace, so in order to show this we had to animate the process," commented Ben Michelson. "We've done this for many clients, as video animation is a great method for really showing something in detail. And from an artistic perspective, I can make the animation stylized, adding a dimension of entertainment to the final production.”

The Monofrax video animation took nearly 3 months to complete and included: the initial concepts, the chosen direction, the storyboard, the scene-by-scene animation, the script, the voice-over, the CG video frame rendering – which are the actual 3D composite images, and then the final video production compilation. The CG rendering itself took, on average, one and a half to two hours per frame for a computer to produce (often referred to as "frame rendering"), and it takes 29 of these single frames to make one-second of the actual animation.

"At every stage of the process, they knew exactly what we wanted. We didn't have to spend hours and hours discussing the project. They always had it right. I think anyone who sees this animation is going to enjoy watching it and really appreciate that we put a lot of work into this to show them our product. It's all about quality," Daryl Clendenen of Monofrax concluded.

Chase Information Systems has created a number of marketing pieces for various clients spanning a diverse spectrum, from manufacturers to tourist destinations, from healthcare to cafés. Please contact Colin Chase and Chase Information Systems at (716) 661-3301 or by email at inquiry@chase-it.com . To learn more online, go to www.chase-it.com .

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