Marketing Drive Wins PROMO Redesign Contest

Marketing Drive has lived up to its name with a campaign that treats PROMO like a luxury car.

The shop won the Reenergized Relaunch contest that PROMO ran to celebrate the new magazine design unveiled this week with the May issue.

Marketing Drive’s idea uses the theme Fully Loaded—The New PROMO, and lets readers “test drive” the magazine online through a Flash movie that zooms off-road, then through a supermarket aisle, before bringing viewers to a landing-page showroom where they can roll over a sleek sedan to see highlights of the new features in the magazine. The film can be viewed at PromoMagazine.com/AgencyAdContest.

The campaign won top marks from all our judges, who said it clearly gave the message that PROMO is evolving. Entries were scored on creativity, how well the idea fit the PROMO brand, and the format used.

Marketing Drive tapped staffers in all its offices to come up with its concept. Then a group from its Norwalk, CT headquarters executed the campaign. That team was interactive video expert Joe Re, 3-D designer Nick DiMucci, copywriter Curt Covert, art director john davies, and “showroom model” Erica DiSimone (who works on account services for Novartis in her day job at Marketing Drive).

“We’re always up for a challenge, and this was a way to showcase our capabilities,” said Marketing Drive spokesperson Gretchen Mullin.

Teamwork will also determine how the agency spends its prize of $1,000 that PROMO will donate to the agency’s charity of choice.

“We’ll make it a big group effort to select the charity,” Mullin said.

PROMO’s marketing staff invited agencies to pitch in on the relaunch because “they do the best creative in the world, and this was a built-in opportunity to put something fun together,” said PROMO marketing director Glenn Laudenslager.

Our judges were Tony Chivari, senior vice president of marketing and e-commerce at Spiegel Brands; Kathleen Seguin, director of North America promotions at Hasbro; Rachel Smith-Barrow, marketing director at AXA Equitable; and Sean Perkins, director of advertising and promotions at Pentron Clinical Technologies.

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