Iron Creative Blog » Online Advertising

Iron Wins Award for San Francisco City Campaign

Matt Cooke — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 22:56:53 +0000

This week, while at the San Francisco Convention & Visitors Bureau 99th annual luncheon, we found out that our Art SF 08 campaign won the CTTC’s Tourism Marketing Excellence Award.

The campaign, which showcased the city’s incredible summer of art, featured national print ads, online banner ads, a microsite (above), rack cards and posters throughout SFO. We’re always thrilled when industry insiders recognize and reward great work. A huge thanks to Lynn Bruni and the rest of the marketing team at the SFCVB for bringing us on and making this happen!

Find out more about our advertising work.

San Francisco Agency, San Francisco Advertising

John Walsh — Tue, 20 May 2008 17:22:38 +0000

It makes sense that a San Francisco Advertising agency would have San Francisco Advertising clients. And while this circumstantial factor was responsible for many of our early local projects, Iron has turned its focus to this audience, winning work from the de Young Museum, the Legion of Honor, the San Francisco Convention & Visitors Bureau, Bay Area Jobs and more.

We saw early on that our work for San Francisco institutions was getting remarkable results, so it made sense to make the area a specialty. But why did we have that success? Well, I could say it’s because I’m a San Francisco native and I have my ear to the city’s volksgeist. But I won’t, because the word “volksgeist” is really, really pretentious.

And more to the point, regardless of my intimate knowledge of the San Francisco demographic, I am the only native San Franciscan in the agency. Instead, we believe that the secret of our success in the San Francisco market is more a product of our agency’s philosophy – that advertising should be VERY smart.

We just don’t believe people will take an interest in an advertising message unless there’s an element of discovery – what lots of folks call an “aha” moment. And in a city like San Francisco, where just about every heartbeat has a college degree or better to go with it, this approach to advertising tends to resonate. So if you’re advertising here, you’d better be doing it with that in mind.

Iron Produces New Chihuly at the de Young Campaign

Oletta — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 17:18:21 +0000

When the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco invited us to work on an integrated marketing campaign for a new Chihuly exhibit we were excited for two reasons: Dale Chihuly is one of the most world renowned living artists we’ve had the opportunity to promote, and this would be his first museum exhibition in San Francisco.

This dream pairing of a ground breaking contemporary artist with one of the most forward thinking museums in the world provided us with an envious opportunity: to produce a cutting edge, effective campaign with local and national reach.

Beginning in June, the campaign print ads will run in such high profile magazines as Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Architectural Digest and Sunset Magazine. Online we are hoping to reach the younger art enthusiast with banner placements (check out the chosen design) on Yahoo! and SFGate.com. To reach the core local audience we also developed newspaper ads, rack cards, street banners and cable cars ads.