Consumer Show.
A Delicious Night Out Campaign

Concept | Visual Design | Advertisement Campaign | Copywriting

The Everything To Do With series of consumer trade shows is a series of events on the theme of couple’s love and romance.

As part of a small team we planned and ran many shows across the United States and Canada, with the largest of which held yearly in Toronto and Montreal. I was the creative design lead and was responsible for everything from coming up with marketing ideas, to graphic design and website creation.

My Role & Team

Design Lead collaborating closely with the stakeholders, founders, and Huge Syme.

Target Audience

Directed primarily towards women and couples in a long term relationship, aged 25-55.

How It Was Made

Canon Camera, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop.

The Problems We Want to Solve

I had to come up with a new marketing campaign to solve the problems we have been experience with our previous campaigns, and also to meet the goals listed below.

  • 💃 Female friendly: Our demographics were heavily skewed female (most events were around 70% female).
  • 😱 No complaints: A large part of our advertising budget was on public transit, so we had to ensure we had no risk of our ads being revoked or causing controversy.
  • 📢 Original. We wanted a new idea that would help generate ticket sales and that hadn’t been done before.
  • 🥰 Cute. We wanted something that people would smile at and talk about.
  • 🤑 Inhouse and small budget. The creative vision needed to be something we could stage and design ourselves.

The Idea

We needed something that would appeal to our demographic, wouldn’t offend anyone, and would spark a conversation. The main goal of all this was always that it would lead to ticket sales.

Decorated gingerbread cookies are a pretty common sight during the holiday season and that’s when I initially had the idea to use them as part of our advertising. Who could get offended by a cookie? The idea of mixing cookies with a kink theme turned out to be well received when I floated the idea to our stakeholders and partners. Everyone thought it was a neat idea, but wanted to see a concept. I got approval to go buy or make some cookies.

Creating the Campaign

So it turns out baking production ready decorated cookies is harder than expected. After some trial runs I quickly realized I should leave the baking to the experts. After scouring Kijiji and local businesses for someone to make “custom gingerbread cookies” i finally came across someone on Etsy who was an hour away, had some amazing cookie designs in her portfolio, and was willing to make our custom designs. After chating we settled on ~$54.00 USD for 6 male cookies and 6 females cookies. Amazing.

The Photoshoot

When we received the cookies they looked impressive. As soon as i got to the office and showed everyone I could see them light up and the campaign was basically approved then and there.

Since they were going to be used for many different applications, I knew that we needed a high quality digital version of them (this was 2015, before camera phones were as good as they are now). We worked with a family friend, Darrell, who happened to have a camera worth almost as much as my car at the time. We took the photos in my backyard and made sure to document all of them, even though there were a couple clear front-runners.

The unedited results of the photoshoot are shown below. Which ones are your favourites?

    The Perfect Pair

    We knew the majority of our attendees were couples, so we wanted to showcase a pair of cookies. There was a fierce debate in the office but we eventually settled on the two pairs below. After some creative magic by Hugh Syme (colour corrections, shadow removal, sharpening, etc) we ended up with the below two couples. Next step was to work on the rest of the campaign artwork.

    Working with Hugh Syme

    One of the best parts of this campaign was i got the opportunity to work with Hugh Syme, a Juno Award-winning graphic artist best known for his creative art direction and creating the album covers for metal bands such as Rush. He was an inspiration to work with and is an absolute master at Photoshop, specializing in molding together realistic items with the unreal to create his artwork. His creative direction was invaluable in putting everything together as shown below. He loved the concept saying he liked the “hybrid of confection and real” and that he was “loving this campaign, more and more” as we progressed from concept to production. Hugh Syme was a key part of this campaign and I don’t think the end result would have looked anywhere near as good without his involvement.

    The Font

    We had a rough idea of the style we wanted to convey… Fun, Burlesque, Cute, Romantic, etc. so the next step was picking the font. This actually went pretty quick because i stumbled on a font and fell in love with it, Intro Rust.

    The Tagline

    We went through many different tag line ideas. Most were a play on words about food and dating, with some of the best ones being:

    • The Yummy Date Night
    • Yummy
    • The Delicious Date Night
    • A Delicious Night Out
    • Deliciously Kinky
    • Things Are Heating Up

    After going back and forth we finally settled on “A Delicious Night Out” (with “Yummy” as a close second). Now that we had our “ingredients” it was time to put it all together.

    Final Designs

    After much back and forth we came up with a layout that worked for everyone. The two main use cases for our artwork were for the sides of buses and transit trains, as well as posters for subway platforms, so those are shown before. We also used the cookie creative for many other sizes since it was very adaptable.

    Feedback and Performance

    Overall it was an incredible creative campaign that we put together and I was extremely happy with how it all turned out. The main feedback we received after our first series of ads ran was that the majority of people preferred the couple with the red courset vs the white one, so for future campaigns we mainly used that one. Otherwise it was universal praises and compliments.

    • 📈 Increased Ticket Sales!
      Compared to the previous season of shows we had a 23% increase in ticket sales, which the marketing contributed to.
    • ⚠️ No Complaints.
      Our previous years creative had 2 billboards taken down. This creative had 0 complaints, and a ton of compliments!
    • 🍪 More Inclusive.
      Since the cookies don’t have an apparent ethnithicy it was more inclusive to our diverse group of attendees.
    • 💫 Completely Custom and Original.
      Received compliments from our marketing partners. They were impressed that we were able to build such a compaign on our own without hiring an independent firm.
    • 👏 Team Work.
      By working with Hugh Syme I learned a lot about how to prepare artwork for production, the entire process from concept to printing, and lastly about how the fine details really make a piece come together.
    • 🤩 Personal Favourite!
      I’ve been involved in many advertising campaigns but this one is still my personal favourite.

    Canada-Wide

    The cookies were seen all across Canada in Halifax, Montreal, Quebec City, Niagara Falls, and of course Toronto.

    Don’t be shy,
    say hello.

    © Avery Levitt. All rights reserved.