Case Study

American Marketing Association

The American Marketing Association, the nation’s largest non-profit association for marketing professionals, represents a network of more than 30,000 members who work, teach and study in the field. With more than 70 chapters spanning the United States, Mexico, and Canada, the AMA prioritizes exceptional membership experience for its diverse audience.

In early 2016, the AMA unveiled a rebrand that aimed to envelop its dynamic membership with a fresh brand system. The logo became simplified with a san serif type of the organization’s AMA acronym, with the last “A” becoming replaced with a greater than symbol. While the AMA was pleased with the rebrand, the organization lacked a solid marketing rollout plan for its official launch. Additionally, it sought an agency partner to help develop its brand voice and messaging strategy to bring the new brand identity full circle.

The AMA tapped Bates Creative to lead its creative marketing campaign efforts for the launch of its rebrand as well as defining the visual assets for its upcoming national conferences. Bates Creative brought in its trusted agency partner, The Gigawatt Group, to deliver a comprehensive brand experience with compelling digital marketing campaigns and core messaging for future initiatives.

Expertise

  • Brand Strategy
  • Brand Messaging
  • Brand Campaign
  • Social Media
  • Digital Advertising
“”

We had completed a massive amount of customer work that led us to a clarified understanding of what the AMA means to our customers. We felt we had distilled our essence to its most essential form. Bates Creative came aboard and proved that our insight could be simplified yet more and unlocked our ability to communicate a complex set of offerings in a clear, single-minded campaign that will serve the AMA for years to come.

Russ Klein, CEO
American Marketing Association

DEVELOPING A BRAND STRATEGY FOR SUCCESS

Bates Creative and The Gigawatt Group kicked-off its relationship with the AMA by analyzing the research and brand positioning that the AMA had previously conducted for its rebrand. Armed with this cultivated research as a solid baseline, Bates Creative and The Gigawatt Group crafted a new, full-scale messaging architecture that would drive the tone for the AMA’s communications efforts.

The AMA’s new marketing roadmap developed by Bates Creative and The Gigawatt Group provided a path forward for the AMA’s nation-wide brand awareness and member acquisition campaign. Together, Bates Creative and The Gigawatt Group launched the AMA “Go Beyond” digital marketing campaign targeted to marketers spanning all industries. The main principle of this campaign was to inspire marketers to go beyond what they thought they were capable of. Real AMA members were selected to be the faces of the campaign to emphasize how an AMA membership can help members express untapped potential.

Bates Creative organized and art directed an off-site photoshoot with the AMA members to create a gallery of images for the creative, including: social media assets, digital advertisements and a campaign landing page. Leveraging the AMA’s greater than symbol in its logo, Bates Creative designed a texture overlay created with overlapping greater than symbols that pulled colors from the AMA members’ clothes. Gradually, the symbols blended with the model to demonstrate the impact an AMA membership can have on a person’s professional confidence.

ROLLING OUT A DIGITAL MARKETING CAMPAIGN

In 2017, the agency teams launched a U.S. geo-targeted social media campaign for the AMA with the visual assets Bates Creative designed to communicate The Gigawatt Group’s new messaging architecture. Marketing professionals were reached through the campaign’s powerful call to action, which was strategically injected into various social platforms including Facebook and Twitter. The digital advertisements were also displayed natively across industry digital publications.

Over a four-week period, the campaign drew over six million total brand views and resulted in 70,000 click-throughs from marketing professionals to the campaign landing page as well as 400 new Twitter followers. The best performing Facebook advertisement generated nearly 47,000 impressions at a 3.20% CTR, 32x the industry standard CTR of 0.10%.

EVENT BRANDING AND COLLATERAL DEVELOPMENT

In addition to the messaging strategy and brand awareness campaign, Bates Creative continues to work with the AMA on developing creative concepts and designing supporting collateral for the organization’s national conferences. Since beginning work with the AMA in 2016, Bates Creative has delivered comprehensive event brand solutions for AMA’s Annual International Collegiate Conference and the Nonprofit Marketing Conference.

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