VERIZON: Hey, could you pitch us some social ideas for Visible?
MADWELL: Of course! Here you go.
VERIZON: These are cool. Would you be interested in pitching the entire business?
MADWELL: Definitely.
VERIZON: Awesome. You have six days.
MADWELL: *gulp*
Over the next week, I – along with a small but staunch crew – did a year’s worth of work preparing a comprehensive pitch covering brand and comms strategy, voice/tone and design guidelines, spot treatments, experiential, partnerships, OOH, print, and (more) social. Here’s a small sampling of what we produced over the following 18 months.
Experiential / Non-Traditional OOH
404 Store Not Found: To communicate the whole “we don’t have physical stores” thing, we blued out storefronts across the country and brought a digital language into the physical world. People got it. People liked it. Cannes gave it a nice lion-shaped thumbs up.
#InVisibleNY: Without any initial TV investment, our creative strategy centered on building deeper relationships with people IRL — the heartstrings over eyeballs approach. So, with the help of friends like A$AP Ferg and Lizzo, we flipped the phone service world on its head and took Visible directly to the people.
The Visible Music Box: To further embed the brand in the music world, we did the obvious thing: we built a transparent recording studio at SXSW. And believe it or not, the acoustics were pretty damn good in there.
Video
To introduce the future of phone service to the internet™, we produced a series of visually arresting (and pretty f*&$#ng weird) videos telling the Visible story. Since a lot of the language surrounding phone service is… limited, we knew we wanted the conceptual approach to push the envelope well into surreal territory.
Social
The Visible brand was created with a digital and social-first mindset, giving our social content an organic, non-brandy feel. (And plenty of #millennialpink.)
An all-digital brand introducing itself in print? Weird, right? Not when you do it like this.
OOH
Folks were so into the writing we put together for digital ads (yep I’m bragging about banner ads…), we had no choice but to take some of them out into the world. From NYC to LA to Seattle to Denver, we brought the Visible brand to life with our clean aesthetic and not-so-clean words.
