Raising the Big Top with Agency Collaboration - 2019 Baltimore Addys

The ADDY Awards are a night of celebration and revelry around the greater creative community. When it comes to branding and marketing the gala, historically the job goes to one of the big agencies in town. But for the 2019 Baltimore ADDY Awards, this wouldn’t be the case. This year we helped raise the roof and drop the mic with an epic event put on by small agencies and independent creatives.

Ladies & Gentlemen!

Embracing and honoring the “freaks” that make up the amazing Baltimore creative community, the theme for the evening was: Lord Baltimore’s Harbour Bizarre! A sideshow where the creatives are the twist. Jeremy Martin, AAFB ADDY Chair, described it as, “A carnival-themed freak show where the freaks are all us creative folks and the big top is Baltimore.” For the night, the actual big top was the B&O Railroad Museum.

Propr Collaborates

Propr excels at collaboration through working with internal and external teams. We leverage our partners and relationships to build bespoke project teams to deliver high value, custom, holistic creative solutions. It was a natural fit for us to be a part of the 2019 ADDYs team.

We worked with several agencies and a diverse project team to collaborate and deliver unique and fun work that will stand out in Baltimore ADDY Award history. After we developed the concept and produced early creative, we broke down the project into tasks and divided them between small agencies based on their expertise and specialties. The small team approach differed from how big agencies have contributed to the ADDYs in the past. Instead of one agency handling it all, and just checking off boxes, we achieved greater focus and creativity by sharing the work between custom-built teams.

Propr is Organized

We knew the main advantage big agencies had is their familiarity and proximity to the project team; they all work together! So we had to be more organized and more effective at sharing ideas, project managing, and communicating between various team members, stakeholders, and AAFB leadership. We designated primary points of contact on each team to handle the flow of ideas and communication. We limited the flow of ideas to only the chief stakeholders, thus limiting over-thinking and over-analysis. Our approach allowed us to move fast and decisively deliver new work and assets efficiently and timely.

The Value of an MVP

Propr provided branding, digital design, web design and web development of a custom wordpress website for the event. Due to the short time frame, we worked with the AAFB ADDY team to deliver a website quickly that was a minimum viable product (MVP). An agile process of developing an MVP first provides our clients with the new functionality they desire without waiting through a month’s long waterfall process. The new site quickly went live with satisfactory content and features. Additional releases improved on the MVP version of the site with other content and functionality. We were working on a pro bono project with a tight timeline, so we had to use our time wisely while maximizing the site’s impact.  

Life is A Carnival

We had a blast working with talented folks on the 2019 ADDY Awards Gala. The event was terrific, and more importantly, we raised the bar for years to come. This project is another example of how the Propr way reduces overhead while maximizing impact and effort. With your next marketing and design budget, consider Propr for results that move the needle and grow your business.