Roberts Brothers Commercial - A Home...

Roberts Brothers...A Home from Roberts Brothers on Vimeo.

Our new Roberts Brothers TV commercial hit the airways this week, and I am beyond excited to share this with y'all! There are very few projects that come around like this in your career. This has been without a doubt, my favorite project I have ever been a part of, and has literally been my (2nd) "baby" these past few months. (My #1 baby is the one walking in the first shot!)

A little background on the project...

My client (Roberts Brothers) and I have talked about doing a commercial like this for years, but we just couldn't figure out where to start. We wanted to come up with something that really captured the emotion and the meaning of a home. I had never produced a commercial before, but was willing to dive-in whenever the inspiration hit.

That inspiration came when I was watching the super bowl, and I was so moved by this JEEP commercial, with Oprah as the narrator.

It was an ah-ha moment for us and we thought: That's it! We need a script and a voice (not just any voice, but "the" voice) and powerful shots to back it up. I sat down at my computer, and in about an hour, wrote this script. I then presented it to Daniel Dennis (RBI President) and he loved it, and so our work began. 

We teamed up with Cari Searcy (owner of All Good Creatives) for the video production. She is amazing and so talented, and we worked tirelessly together to make our vision come true. And also, a huge thank you to Cari's assistant for the day, the talented Devin Ford. We love working with Devin, and she helped Cari capture these shots. The commercial took an entire Saturday to film. We filmed it at my house, my neighbor's house and a RBI agent's house. We were so thankful for all of the people that showed up and acted out the parts. We couldn't have done it without their help!

The next task was to find "the voice". We knew this would make or break the commercial, and we spent months searching for the perfect voice. We looked all the way from Hollywood to Fred Thompson to Condoleezza Rice, and nothing was working out. They were either too expensive or just weren't the perfect fit. On our way home from the video shoot, I told Daniel my father-in-law's voice might be worth listening to. When we pulled up at my house, he just so happened to be there with my husband and daughter. We asked him to read the script, and immediately, we knew he was the one. After all this searching, the voice was right around the corner! Within a week, we met him at the recording studio. To say he was awesome is an understatement. Mack took our direction and nailed it! The fact that his voice is "the voice", makes this project that much more special.

The music is by the talented Sanders Bohlke. I went to Ole Miss with Sanders and have always loved this song, Lovesick Misery. I kept envisioning it as the instrumental. He was nice enough to take time out of his busy touring schedule, and rerecord this 60-second spot just for our commercial.

Whew...sorry for the long recap, and if you can't tell, this project was very close to my heart :)

Happy hump day everyone! May you always live and celebrate life in the home of your dreams...

What I've been working on lately...

The idea of blogging about what I'm working on overwhelms me because I don't know where to start. I currently have 5+ projects going on (some web, some identity branding and some print), with 5+ different clients. But like I've shared before, my largest client is Roberts Brothers, and I'm honored to be the Marketing Director of this fabulous real estate company based in Mobile, Alabama.

We recently finished a Recruiting Guide that I'm very proud of. The client needed a new career development piece, and after we met and discussed the project, we decided to tell the company's story from the agents, staff, and managers perspective. We realized that these testimonies speak much louder than impressive market share reports and high web statistics­. Their words are heart-felt—reflecting what it means to be a part of the Roberts Brothers family.

Check out the interactive guide on the Roberts Brothers' website! We had the guide professionally printed, created a digital version for the web, and we've hired a professional team to film the agents and create a video version of this as well. I'll share that with you when it's completed. 

Thanks to the RBI team who helped make this piece come to life! We couldn't have done it without your help.

Company Brochures & Tutus!

Whew. I've been quite the worker-bee lately. I'm so excited to share this recent design project with you. Countless (and I mean COUNTLESS) hours went into this project, and I can't tell you how proud I am of the final result. We've been working on this since February and we just presented everything to the agents last week.

A little background here...the client is Roberts Brothers, which is the largest Real Estate company in South Alabama. When I first started doing work for them, we sat down and went over all of their needs. They needed everything: a company brochure, a listing presentation, a buyer presentation, a recruiting piece, agent's personalized presentations, and the list goes on. So instead of creating tons of random pieces that basically said the same thing, we decided to do ONE piece, and to do it WELL.

We spent months coming up with the content and thought long and hard about WHAT we wanted to say and HOW we wanted to say it. The piece has 5 layered inserts on the left: The Company, The Realtors, The Marketing, The Website, The Results. We felt like those 5 inserts represented everything from the history of Roberts Brothers to the recent, impressive web stats. Gwins Printing did an amazing job and they were such a joy to work with.

The two inserts on the right include a sheet for buyers and sellers.


We made sure to leave space for the agents—it was important that they could personalize it and make it their own. See Katie Crane's bio below that will fit perfectly as the top insert on the right side.

This hand-painted watercolor (by the very talented Artist/Realtor Lynne Weeks) was printed on the folder's inside flap and illustrates Roberts Brothers five locations beautifully...

We wanted to show and not just tell so we used many graphics and visuals throughout the inserts. Here's a quick glimpse of several of the inserts (to see all inserts, view the digital FlipBook)

This group photo was taken specifically for this marketing piece—and Thigpen photography did a wonderful job making our conceptual idea come to life.

And my favorite part of the brochure is this digital, interactive FlipBook. It's great for presentations or emails and all things web-related. It'll be featured on the RBI website soon, but for now, you can view it here.

And in case that wasn't enough...we designed a PowerPoint version of the brochure so that the agents can customize it themselves and use it during presentations. So watch out, the RBI Realtors are gettin pretty techy these days!

Sorry for such a long post, but this project deserved it's own posting. It's been my baby for the past few months, but NOTHING compares to my favorite baby. We played dress-up the other day and I couldn't stop laughing when we tried on her pink tutu (given to Calder by close family friend Patsi Walker)! She didn't know what to think about it.

Priss-pot or tomboy, who knows?

Happy 4th everyone!

Roberts Brothers

Here's a sneak peek of what I've been working on lately...

My biggest marketing client is Roberts Brothers, Inc, which is the largest Real Estate company in South Alabama. With 250 agents, they keep me very busy to say the least! I've been working on a new marketing piece for the company, and we're in the process of finishing up the last few details. I can't wait to show you the finished product — we're going to have a print and digital version so stay tuned.

Here's a picture from our photo shoot last week. Didn't it turn out great? Love the Mobile city skyline in the background — and you can't find a better group of agents!

And I'll end with this video Google produced for us last year to advertise our Mobile site. Google chose Roberts Brothers as one of the three examples for their "Go Mo - Mobilizing Mobile" Campaign. It was a huge campaign and although Mobile was chosen because of the play on words (Mobilizing Mobile, get it?), they came down from Boston to shoot this and I think they really fell in love with our town. Check out the fabulous video they shot...

 

We were honored to be a part of this! More to come soon...