CHALLENGE
With the COVID-19 emergency declaration and stay at home orders in effect, Portland officials noted a 27% rise in domestic violence calls in March 2020 compared to March 2019.
Formerly the Portland Women’s Crisis Line, Call to Safety is a social service agency and social change organization dedicated to supporting individuals of all genders who experience domestic and sexual violence. They serve Portland and beyond, supporting callers across Oregon and Washington with a 24/7 crisis line, sexual assault services, follow-up advocacy, and community outreach and education.
Results
We worked closely with Call to Safety’s team to ensure our campaign creative was impactful and informative, without being triggering, and produced radio, TV, digital, social and print ads.
Additionally, we worked with El Programa’s UNICA program to produce Spanish-language versions of our radio and TV ads, directing to their bilingual crisis line.
Meanwhile our media team worked to secure donated inventory from Willamette Week, Portland Monthly, The Oregonian and local TV and radio stations, to ensure we’d reach as many community members as possible.
As a result of this campaign running in the summer of 2020, Call to Safety reported experiencing a spike in calls, indicating we achieved our mutual goal of letting survivors know that Call to Safety is here to believe, listen and support them.
Oregon Lottery | Seasonal Campaign
‘Tis the season
for Scratch-its
Creative
Dev
Video
Media
Branding
Scratch-it tickets are Oregon Lottery’s holiday hit—so we created a product campaign as familiar, exciting, and fun as opening a gift on Christmas morning. We focused on the folks who are a big question mark on your holiday gift list. The answer? Everybody loves a Scratch-it, even your weird neighbor!
Our wordmark needed to give warm and fuzzy feelings, without immediately invoking a specific holiday. So we focused on a joyful font and rich, bright tones that eventually ended up influencing the sets in our commercials.
Art Direction
We had a lot of characters to introduce in a short amount of time. Each imagined Scratch-it recipient was paired with a color-coordinated set rich in textures, populated by holiday items specific to their personality. Peep the cat portrait produced by our very own art department.
Big holiday spending means a big holiday media campaign. Across a strategic mix of traditional and digital media channels, we served 42+ million impressions and YOY helped increase Scratch-its interest with younger consumers.
A refreshed digital presence
Dev
Creative
UX
Branding
The Oregon Lottery has grown to be a significant part of the economy in Oregon, funneling billions of dollars into programs that Oregonians care about. When the gaming brand came to Pollinate, they were ready to tackle a huge job: create order, consistency and accessibility for their online presence, bringing forward a cohesive, mobile-first digital brand.
The result was a true agency-wide collaboration, with our Dev, UX, UI and Creative teams working together towards a common goal: Oregon Lottery’s first mobile app, and a brand new OregonLottery.org.
To help wrangle all the pieces, we created a vast library of flexible, easy-to-manage design elements to help keep the site fresh. Each jackpot game was assigned a flexible pattern assembled from spot illustrations by Drew Bardana, and the content library was further fleshed out with iconography and photography.
Inspired by the brightness of lottery games, color was carefully considered, with the goal to have enough contrast to pass AA-level WCAG guidelines.
Phase one for Oregon Lottery’s mobile first approach was to build an on-the-go scanning app available on both iOS and Android. We delivered, thoughtfully balancing the lightheartedness of gaming with the gravity of Lottery’s significant and tangible impact on their community partners.
In 2020, Pollinate launched the new Oregon Lottery WordPress website. We were challenged to build a secure headless static site that used WordPress as the admin, and Azure as the front-end host. Always up for a challenge, we built — and now manage — this headless website, including a custom plugin for static deployments.
With a small digital marketing team at Lottery, efficiencies and cutting back duplicate content entry was a large goal for their team. We were able to deliver on this request by creating a single admin in WordPress that was used by not just the website, but the mobile app as well. This allowed content to be entered in one place, but shared across both platforms — all controlled by APIs created in-house at Pollinate. We are always up for a challenge, and loved bringing our mobile and web development teams together to solve this one.
Launched but Always Optimizing
With a content and player approach first, the website and mobile app have never been “set-it-and-forget-it” tools for Lottery. Pollinate schedules quarterly analytics reviews of both tools, where we do a deep dive into all analytics data available from GA GTM, media campaigns, Microsoft, app stores and in-house Lottery data. This helps us steer larger conversations around optimizations, and helps us determine future road maps. These deep dives have allowed us to continue to launch new features such as single login across platforms and the Second Chance program — and helped Lottery determine more successful marketing and content driven campaigns. That’s a win for everyone!
Wisdom Panel | Soul Mutt Campaign
Why do we love dogs?
Creative
Media
Video
Ever wonder about your dog’s specific personality quirks? For example…why is my labrador retriever terrified of getting in the water? Great question. Wisdom Panel exists to answer these kinds of quandaries, with at-home DNA kits that reveal your dog’s genetic makeup, and help you better understand your dog. We were approached to raise awareness about the benefits of Dog DNA testing, along with push conversion with a fresh digital and social campaign that celebrates Wisdom Panel’s updated branding and messaging.
First priorities were a fresh brand awareness spot, and an engaging how-to. Taking note of their logo styling, we knew we had to make this tactile. So we partnered with David Emmitt to transform these spots into paper-folding stop motion animations.
The best way to capture the authentic connection was with User generated Content. Pollinate worked with Wisdom Panel to email their CRM database, asking for users to submit photos on Instagram with the hashtag #MySoulMutt. The result? An asset library grounded in authenticity.
Uncle Nearest | launch campaign
A legacy, served neat.
Creative
Dev
Digital
Media
Video
Hidden deep within the hills above Lynchburg, Tennessee, was a story waiting to be told — and a whiskey to be discovered.
When Uncle Nearest premium whiskey approached Pollinate, asking if we could deliver a launch campaign defining its unique position in the land of distinctive high-end whiskeys … well, there was no way we could say no. The story was and is riveting, and with one taste, you knew: the whiskey had legs. Award-winning legs.
In a category where drinkers value authenticity, we launched this ultra-premium brand in a way that was true to the man, his incredible story — and his legendary whiskey-making skills.
After more than 150 years, it came to light that a formerly enslaved man named Nathan “Nearest” Green was the first master distiller for a certain local whiskey salesman whose name we can’t use. (Hint: It rhymes with Zack Janiel’s.) Uncle Nearest, as he was known, is believed to have perfected the charcoal-filtering process and many of the techniques still followed today.
One for the books
Step one: a launch strategy. And that was simple: With an irreplaceable spot in history, Uncle Nearest’s story needed to be told. So, we wrote a limited-edition book, which then became the thread tying all of the deliverables together, with the first edition ending up where it belongs: in the Smithsonian.
For our media approach, we focused on raising awareness in key markets (Louisville, Chattanooga, Memphis, Knoxville, Portland, and Nashville) to drive product demand with our core audience and spur sales at liquor stores, bars, and restaurants.
38.4m
impressions
177.5k
site visitors across all markets
34%
increase in site visitors
A fresh look at student debt.
Creative
Video
Media
We get why student loans aren’t fun to think about—the phrase ‘repayment’ sends a shiver down the spine of anyone who has them. So it makes sense that most people don’t want to think about refinancing those loans, even if it’ll save them money in the long run. When First Tech Federal Credit Union tasked Pollinate with creating an engaging campaign for their student loan refinancing, we met the challenge by focusing on the expert help and repayment flexibility First Tech offers and, with our in-house production team, created two highly memorable (and humorous) spots.
Trust the experts.
Refinancing is a major decision that benefits greatly from professional advice. For this year’s campaign, we drew memorable comparisons to other decisions that are best left to the experts.
Some things are better left in the past.
All borrowers can relate with outgrowing who they were in college–cringing at what we wore, the music we liked, and the hairstyles we had. For this year’s concept, we highlighted another thing to cringe at: the rates you were given then, versus the rates you could have now.
FEAST | launch campaign
Peak foodie content
Creative
Media
Branding
Dev
What do you do when you’re in the seventh year of being the agency of record for the country’s biggest foodie event? You bring in a fresh viewpoint — especially since this was the festival’s largest and most ambitious to date. Feast’s popularity and differentiation was grounded in its iconic locale – incredibly fresh and innovative fine dining paired with Portland’s vibrant eccentricity.
With “Feast your Face,” Pollinate brought in a warm color palette and understated typography juxtaposed with layered food illustration and quirky collage elements. This became a creative toolkit that drove visual identity across placements.
With social activation at top of mind, we developed a system of vibrant, playful illustrations and collage elements that serve as the visual anchor of this year’s look and feel across all touchpoints, but most notably: Giphy stickers for Instagram stories (search feast2019 under stickers to use them yourself).
Unique to the Feast brand identity is a series of events that are rebranded and updated yearly. Pollinate has always been at the center of creating these identities — applying color treatments, font selections and a set of original icons for each event, along with a brand guide for each event.
“If your site goes down on ticket launch day, you can punch me in the face.”
Ben Waldron
Our dev team created a proprietary plug-in that decoupled the front-end from WordPress, so that the site could be hosted in the cloud to handle large amounts of traffic – like the kind that happens when tickets go on sale for an internationally beloved food event. The site experienced its highest volume of visitors in the first 5 minutes, and sold out in a record 1.5 hours. The site did not go down. And Ben’s face remains as beautiful as ever.
Paid media placements contributed to a +424% campaign ROI. During the campaign flight, on-site metrics increased YOY, including an increase in users, time on site and pages per session. 1.52% overall campaign CTR 9-3x above the industry benchmark).
+424%
campaign ROI
1.52%
overall campaign CTR
3x
above industry standard
Endless Summer
Creative
Media
Portland’s cult-favorite grocery store, New Seasons Market, asked us to tackle their summer campaign, welcoming back the colorful bounty of deliciousness arriving alongside the warmer months. We developed a bright, attention-grabbing campaign across a host of print and digital media, highlighting the sheer joy of summer food.
If you live in the Pacific Northwest, you know: when the summer sun comes back, it feels like being reunited with a long lost friend. The central idea for this concept leaned into that welcoming feel with a warm, cheeky greeting set in a soft, sunshiney wordmark.
A moveable feast
Come late May, the Pacific Northwest is heavy with anticipation for the bright, distinctive flavor of summer cuisine. To capture the imagination, our creative let the food shine, using a library of high quality photography paired with vibrant colors and textures.
We focused our efforts on a cost-effective solution that effectively engaged targets, with ongoing optimization throughout the flight. The bright, attention-grabbing creative paired with out-of-home locations within spitting distance of a store made for a significant increase in foot traffic and sales.
