Beauty & Brains: The Thinking Behind Worthy-Winning Work

Some marketing competitions are just about looks. Some are about the ideas. And some are about all that and more. The Worthy Awards, an annual competition hosted by the Fort Worth chapter of Public Relations Society of America, scrutinize not only the creative pieces, but also the research, strategy, implementation and results of PR and advertising efforts. We were thrilled this year to be recognized with 10 awards – including one Worthy Award, the highest level of recognition.

Check out some of the work – and the strategy behind it.

Mrs. Renfro’s

A brand-new website for this local, family-owned salsa and condiment company made a real difference in their sales, earning top-level recognition with a Worthy Award. Not only do the look and interactivity now match the award-winning rebrand from 2019, we also made tweaks to the ordering process (such as folding shipping into the price) that decreased cart abandonment by 49% and increased overall sales.

Our work for Mrs. Renfro’s also earned two Awards of Excellence for videos featuring the second-generation Renfro owners, including a touching and amusing series featuring the brothers telling the history of the company.

Dairy MAX

Passion for Pints is an annual campaign encouraging blood donation in exchange for dairy products. A new look – including free souvenir T-shirts – caught eyes and captured hearts, helping blood banks across Colorado, New Mexico and Texas resupply after a significant drop in donations due to lockdowns. The campaign focused on paid social media pointing to a landing page to find participating blood banks. The efforts helped collect over 13,000 pints of blood and earn an Award of Excellence.

We also earned two Awards of Achievement for our documentary video series profiling local farm families, Dairy Up Close, and for the redesign of Dairy MAX’s consumer-facing website, DairyDiscoveryZone.com.

Cavender’s

An already award-winning video, “This Is How We Live,” done for this iconic western retailer earned an Award of Excellence. With a main goal of authenticity, we opted out of actors and scripting, instead bringing in authentic Western and blue-collar people, who already owned most of the clothing we wanted to feature, and documentary filmmakers. We produced a massive library of footage, photography and music Cavender’s has been using to produce refreshed commercials ever since. The campaign has earned more than 4 million views to date, with comments proving it achieved its goal of authenticity.

Fort Worth Food + Wine Festival

Back on the foodie front, a pandemic pivot for the Fort Worth Food + Wine Festival earned an Award of Excellence. Usually an event for 1,500 people, the festival pivoted to a series of small, socially distanced dinners prepared by collaborating chef duos. Tasked with logo design as well as media pitching and social media promotion to detail the changes while enticing attendees, we helped the series sell out within a week.

Presbyterian Night Shelter

This campaign earned an Award of Excellence by showing how Presbyterian Night Shelter focuses on breaking chronic cycles of homelessness. To make the most of this nonprofit’s budget, we combined highly targeted display advertising with the broader tactic of billboards to amplify the message. We also repurposed animated banner ads as video, capitalizing on the conversion power of video without the budget demands of a full-fledged production. The campaign helped increase online giving by 83% in its first month and 42% at the close of 2019.

American Advertising Federation - Fort Worth (AAF - FW)

We earned an Award of Achievement for our work hosting the awards gala for another competition – our local American Advertising Awards. To attract participation in yet another mid-pandemic virtual event, we took an honest yet encouraging look at 2020 with a theme of “Bad year. Great work.” Remo, our chosen virtual event platform, allowed people to mingle in smaller groups before and after the main show, which engaged the audience with chat games, sketches about technical difficulties, and cameo appearances by Carole Baskin of “Tiger King.” Overall, we saw record student entries, a high number of first-time professional entrants and rave reviews.

Want to learn more about how we think? Check out our case studies.