Key Details
- INDUSTRY
- Advertising
- SERVICES
- Internal Research
- Customer Research
- Brand Audit
- Brand Strategy
- Brand Identity
- Corporate Stationery
- Marketing Collateral
- Iconography
- Website Design
- Copywriting
- Photography
- Brand Guidelines
- BRAND ROLLOUT
- 2018
The Opportunity
Vector Media is a New York-based agency specializing in out-of-home advertising and other outdoor media. The company had long since outgrown its reputation as “the double decker bus company,” developing an integrated platform featuring everything from digital billboards to experiential marketing. Vector came to Ignyte determined to update its positioning, identity, and website with a brand that boldly embodied the company’s broad scope of offerings, its vision for the future, and the playful, irreverent personality at the heart of its culture.Brand Strategy
Strategy began with a comprehensive brand audit followed by thorough research into internal and external stakeholders. Research revealed Vector’s key strengths to be its market coverage and inventory as well as the relationships between its team and customers. Overall, the brand was perceived as fun and responsive. Leveraging these insights, Ignyte conducted a series of workshops to define positioning and establish alignment among key stakeholders. What resulted was a revitalized and cohesive brand centered on the big idea “Tell Better Stories.” This inspiring directive would come to serve as the new brand’s tagline, anchoring its positioning and informing its narrative.
Stakeholders
8
Customer Interviews
18
Competitive Audits
5
Audience Personas
3
Brand Identity
The Vector identity was methodically designed as a dynamic mark that confidently evokes the brand’s buoyant personality. Fun, innovative and vibrant, the logo breaks the rules with a changing color palette in three different gradients. Its upward movement symbolizes optimism and growth, while its geometric design is inspired by the Vector name. The lively gradients from the logo system are used throughout the brand experience as floods and image treatments.
Corporate Stationery
The Vector stationery system boldly incorporates core elements of the vibrant new identity. Notecards and envelopes feature gradient floods incorporating the brand’s signature color schemes. Business cards were designed to feature a different gradient on each card as they are handed out. Vivid washes of color underlay the debossed tagline “Tell Better Stories.” On the reverse, the new Vector logo occupies an upper corner, commanding attention like a text bubble.
Iconography
After rearchitecting Vector’s offerings into an integrated media platform, we designed an iconographical system to accompany it. Each icon visually conveys its corresponding offering with a vibrant line drawing depicting two complementary facets of the offering. The icons are diagonally bisected with the top facet oriented upward and the bottom facet oriented downward. The system allows for a large amount of information to be conveyed in a small space, with a playful personality that is pure Vector.
Website Design
The Vector website was designed to be bold and engaging, a dynamic embodiment of the brand it was built to showcase. Driven by images, video, and bright colors, the site is highly differentiated and incorporates many special features. Parallax scrolling, dynamic rollovers, and strategically deployed animation bring the site to life with attitude. A complex platform of offerings and extensive network of markets are intuitively presented with an image-driven information architecture.
Responsive Website
Vector’s target audiences include senior level staff at multinational brands and advertising agencies—segments that do a large percentage of their work on the go. To ensure that the Vector brand experience was consistent and compelling regardless of device, we designed the website from a mobile-first perspective. The site’s many dazzling features are fully responsive, providing optimal performance on desktop and mobile alike.
Copywriting
Story is central to the Vector brand and, as such, copywriting is a vital component to the website and marketing collateral. The brand voice was crafted to evoke the unique personality developed in the strategy phase. It is confident, savvy, authentic, and a bit cheeky—fun without sacrificing professionalism, youthful without undermining seriousness. Important themes of story, connection, and meaningful experience are explored throughout.
Tell Better Stories
At Vector Media, we’ve got a bone to pick with the Bard. To us, all the world’s a canvas. A canvas that is integrated, dynamic, and increasingly technological. A canvas on which to tell rich and relevant brand stories. At Vector, we make the most of this canvas, connecting brands to consumers through an innovative media platform that inspires creativity and delivers measurable impact. We help brands create meaningful experiences out in the world that make people stop, look up from their phones, and smile. We’re redefining Outdoor Media with experiences that cut through the clutter and foster true and lasting connections. How? The answer is simple (and one even Shakespeare could get behind). At Vector Media, we help brands Tell Better Stories.Video & Photography
Ignyte provided photography and video editing services throughout Vector’s touchpoints. We set out to curate imagery that vividly conveyed the brand’s bold personality and then apply vibrant treatments inspired by the brand identity’s primary gradients. The result is a bright, fun, and truly dynamic visual experience rich with color and offset by bold, reversed text overlays. Vibrant video content brings the brand experience to life in a way that’s impossible to ignore. The brand also includes a natural photo style that’s high key and contrasty, for a cheery, contemporary look when full color is needed.
Brand Guidelines
For an organization like Vector that has employees in locations across the country, ensuring ongoing brand alignment is critical. To this end, Ignyte developed precise standards and guidelines accessible to all internal and external representatives outlining everything from positioning and identity to voice and imagery. Comprising 50 full-color pages whose design and layout are themselves rich embodiments of the guidelines, the document includes everything anyone would need to know about the execution of the Vector brand.
