a recipe for a

good LAUNCh

Step one: A good campaign launch starts with an idea. Ideas are king, and they keep visual work from turning into something mediocre.

Luckily for us, we had an idea and we had a tagline: There’s Beauty In The Burn. We also had ideas about what aesthetic we wanted to capture in the stills campaign: how we wanted to portray our talent, our apparel, and the level of realism we wanted in the imagery.

Step two is the harder part. Step two is where you make it a reality. So we captured a library of imagery. Not just any images though. You need to come home with iconic images: something so contextual to the category, the brand and the concept that I won’t even bother going into detail. Just know… it matters. As an example, on this shoot, we knew that authentic, real captured authentic athleticism and fitness was going to help the imagery stand out.

Step three entails refining and crafting. This is the fun phase where you make art of what you’ve captured. So you play with cropping. You play with retouching and color correction. The goal of this phase is that the imagery needs to be flawless - whatever flawless means in the context.

Step four - Any good stills campaign needs to support graphic design and typography that you envisioned at the onset of the campaign. What you say over an image changes it. The message changes context, so the messaging matters a great deal. A great copywriter can look at an image and change it completely with one word.

Step five. - It needs to withstand the rigor of every different type of platform that you can imagine. A good image should shine in social, in-store signage print and out of home.

If you’ve done all of the above, you should be left with a solid toolkit of how to launch a brand and how to launch a campaign. Below, you’ll see bits and pieces of the toolkit that I helped create for Calia’s Inspire Line Launch.