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Allen & Gerristen

A&G is an independent advertising agency with offices in the two cities, Boston & Philadelphia. We build your Brand’s Best Self by revealing who your brand is on its very best day and then assisting you to live it across the touchpoints to get the right audience interaction.

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Allen & Gerristen Services

We build meaningful customer experiences by helping brands create digital products and services

Public Relations

We’re obsessed with your best stories. And we wake up on a mission to get everyone else to tell them for you.

Experience & Product Design

We build meaningful customer experiences by helping brands create digital products and services.

Media

We specialize in Humanity Planning. It's a new way of looking at media-based on emotional connection, not just exposure. Building plans that connect audiences to local and national media that deliver valuable impact, not annoyance.

Strategy & Analytics

We're all about figuring people out. Or, figuring out the data that helps figure people out, and introducing those people to our clients. At scale, of course.

Creative

Whether wielding pens, brushes, keypads, or wands, priority number one is making creative that moves us all.

Skills

Brand Marketing . Digital Advertising . Digital Marketing . Digital Marketing Strategy . Social Media

Locations

Headquarter Information

2 Seaport Ln, Boston, MA 02210, USA
(857) 300-2000

All Locations

Boston, MA . Philadelphia, PA

Allen & Gerristen Case Studies

How far can a sponsorship take you

Standing out can be tricky when you’re selling the same thing as your competition. But as the official fuel of NASCAR, Sunoco sported a sponsorship that could leave them all in the dust. They looked to us to turn that sponsorship into a brand – one with personality, imagination, and humor. The result was a relationship that set records, thrilled the crowd, and spanned nearly a decade.

A creative multi-channel marketing campaign that produced engaging content and drove positive business results.

Sunoco asked us to capture the essence of racing with oddball humor and personality. So we did. And then we bottled it. We created a cologne called Burnt Rubbér, with notes of actual burnt rubber (it smelled good - we swear). Then we designed a bottle, upscale packaging, and a campaign that featured NASCAR drivers in all the over-the-top drama of a real fragrance campaign.

Burnt Rubbér appealed to more than just racing fans, and we wanted to keep that going. So we developed something even more interactive. Partnering with Strings and Tins, we created a custom soundboard - scored to the captured clanks, whirrs, ratchets, and roars of a live race. As fans and drivers mixed and shared their own beats, we created custom cardboard boomboxes to act as speakers for their smartphones.

How do you make the most of two minutes

When you’re a salesperson, you’ve got roughly two minutes before a foot in the door becomes a door in the face. So, when Comcast asked us to help modernize their sales tools away from paper brochures and door hangers, we got to thinking about how to give their pitch an upgrade.

As one of the largest internet and digital cable providers in the country, Xfinity’s entire identity revolves around cutting-edge tech for the modern home. So, we made a sales app to reflect their forward-thinking brand. And we did it from scratch.

The A-G team mapped the customer and salesperson journey and reimagined it to be more intuitive and conversational. Then, they torture-tested it. Over and over again until we made, broke, and re-built at least five prototypes. So what started as scribbles on an office whiteboard, in the end, turned into a better way for every Comcast salesperson to engage with potential customers.

How Do You Reignite a Storied Franchise

Those who rep the orange and black are a different breed. Rowdy, passionate and opinionated. But success on the ice is the #1 driver of revenue, and it's been 44 years since the Flyers raised Lord Stanley's Cup. So for the 2019 season, the Flyers brought in a new coach with a core of young talent, alongside a $265M newly renovated Wells Fargo Center experience. The final piece of the puzzle? A marketing platform up to the challenge of reigniting fan passion. A call to arms. An opportunity to #FlyOrDie.

If you're a Flyers fan, you're a fan with all you've got or you don't bother showing up. And it's that kind of passion that extends perfectly to social media. From Gritty tattoos to dogs named Giroux, Flyers fans have never been shy about telling the world their team is the best. Starting this season, whether talking about today's game, or the way that third line is really starting to gel, that fandom is now united under a single banner-#FlyOrDie.

what do you do when nobody’s having any fun

The Central Pennsylvania Convention and Visitors Bureau had a problem: people just don’t take vacations like they used to. More and more Americans feel like we can’t spare the time or the cash to take a trip these days. (And when travel ads always promise the same bland, boring thing… can you really blame them?) If you want to get away from the same old getaway, you have to be bold. Different. Unique. So we developed a new identity that would really put Centre County, PA on the map, and a campaign that was funny and unexpected enough to entice everybody to hit the road.

The CPCVB needed a name to do them justice - something to stand out from everybody else. Because there's nothing fun about sounding like everybody else. And the folks in Happy Valley are dead serious about fun. So that’s where we started. We played up that juxtaposition, of being fun and serious, wild and bureaucratic all at once. And the result was an identity that felt less like a CVB, and more like Candyland during the Eisenhower Administration. And with that, the Happy Valley Adventure Bureau was born.

Ever notice that travel ads all tend to look alike? Warm colors. Pretty photos of smiling families and rolling horizons. Everybody’s grinning at each other while they eat but never actually, ya know, eating anything? It’s all pretty dull. So we pulled our inspiration from somewhere a little more adventurous: Silver Age comic book covers. We developed a wild and colorful illustration campaign – depicting not just the places you can visit… but the adventures you experience while you’re there. The result is a look and feels entirely its own.

How Do You Stop Thinking Inside the Box

Allegheny College isn’t like many other schools. For over 100 years their model of education has prepared students for more than just jobs. It emphasizes worldliness, and intelligence – the ability to think creatively and critically, instead of just memorizing the right answers. Strange as it sounds, this is pretty unique in higher ed. The trouble is, higher ed marketing isn’t known for its uniqueness. Allegheny needed a brand that could live up to its own example – something brainy and clever and well outside the expected. Challenge: accepted.

Most of the time, higher ed branding is a thousand shades of beige – kids smiling in an oak-lined quadrangle under blandly aspirational headlines about the future. Sound familiar? We didn’t want to do that. So we started with a voice for Allegheny to cut through the nonsense and capture who they are: Smart. Challenging. Not afraid to demand more from a student, and to expect a student to demand more from them.

When it comes to branding a college, nothing’s more important than the Viewbook. Not only is it the main source of information for an incoming student – it’s also the wellspring for all the work that flows from it. To make it, we spent a year immersing ourselves in all things Allegheny. The team went to class, met with staff and faculty, and interviewed dozens of current and former students to uncover everything we could about life on campus and in class.

COVID made shooting a traditional video campaign impossible. Fortunately for the team, traditional wasn’t what we were aiming for anyway. We wanted our spots to look, sound, and feel like a mind at action – buzzing with inspiration and ideas. So we pulled in an international team of animators to help bring it all to life. Check them out. No smiling kids sitting under trees. No bland aphorisms or anthems. Just clever metaphors, beautiful art, and smart copy.

How do you stand for real change in healthcare

Healthcare as a category needs to be more compassionate and with 3 million members, we know it’s not one size fits all. So we crafted the “B is for” platform to communicate explicitly the actions BCBS will take on behalf of their members as their advocate and ally in an overwhelming system. Because B is for every individual and every individual need.

B is more than the first letter of Blue Cross. The team made it a modern, graphic shorthand that, like the brand, places human beings at the center of our mission. The transparency and openness reflect the clarity Blue Cross stands for while also conveying energy, action, and vitality in all forms of communication.

Marketing Agency's Mission

Allen & Gerristen Mission

To be the most influential business performance agency and a true partner to our clients, helping them reshape their businesses to meet the demands of this convergent world.

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