Two new spots dropped this week for Slay & Reed. The Slay spot marks the first entrance into video territory for their campaign this year while the Reed spot is the third in a series of fairly decent and different approaches at political commercials.

The debut for Francis Slay is quite a departure from Reed's spots in that it takes a much more positive and slightly saccharine view to what's going on in St. Louis. It features a few local notables stating what St. Louis means to them with a final agreement that St. Louis is called Home. While it is thankfully still atypical of political commercials, it's not as (locally) groundbreaking as Reed's first spot in which he literally comes out of the gate running.

The music is really the death knell for an otherwise pleasant, yet ultimately forgettable spot. It's like a Rusted Root Instrumental B-Side for Ice Age 5.

In stark contrast to Slay's über positivity and big smiles is Lewis Reed's 30-second soliloquy on crime and murder in St. Louis. It works, despite having to play it twice to discern what he's saying in his rough monotone... and despite that turd of a logo that follows.

To all the undecided voters out there, who's your ballot leaning towards after seeing these commercials?

We saw this campaign for KDHX start to gain some local press traction over the past two weeks and wanted to get the inside scoop on how everything came together for Almanac and Jay Fram.

When our friends at 88.1 KDHX embarked on their first-ever capital campaign back in 2010, they came to Almanac for help in telling the story of their move to a new space in Grand Center. We’ve seen capital campaigns become quite serious, formal processes, but that approach was easy to ignore for an organization who is known as “aggressively insubordinate”. Together, we created a campaign brand built on their foundation of 25 years of supporting independent music, film and arts in St. Louis. We worked with them to refine their unique voice and then translated that to traditional campaign materials, always with a KDHX twist. The overall campaign brochure we developed tells stories of all of the “tribes” who are connected to and rely on KDHX to support, promote and keep independent media and arts alive in St. Louis.

After a successful year of “quiet phase” fundraising, KDHX now takes their campaign to the public, to ask for support from an expanded audience. Based on the original campaign brand, we’ve evolved the message, so that everyone can say “I’m for KDHX!”. Through direct mail, e-mail, party promotions, a dedicated on-line presence (www.forKDHX.org), billboards and a social media strategy that encourages sharing the story and promoting the cause, we’ve helped KDHX tap into one of its most important assets: the deeply creative community in St. Louis.

Along with Almanac's strong concept & execution, Jay Fram provided some nice, high contrast b&w photography for the billboards that are starting to pop up around the area.

What can I say about making these photographs, other than that these are some of the most fun subjects you could hope to have in front of a lens? How about this: The original concept didn’t necessarily involve black + white imagery, but it did have to take place in the studio, and still have impact when clipped out onto a white background. I said, “Oo oo! (jumping, hand in air) How about punchy black + white portraits, where the shadows and edges go black against the white backdrop, which is difficult because usually all that white fills in and flattens everything out?” And Nate (designer, Almanac) said “Ooo, that could be interesting…” And that, friends, is how creative work should work.

The only thing that leaves us somewhat head-scratchy (in an otherwise solid campaign) are some of the titles and subject choices for the billboards. In a unique local campaign for a unique local client, we feel the copy could have been more playfully descriptive and exact; "Roller Girls" and "Amateur Wrestlers" instead of "Athletes", "Rappers", "Lyricists" or "Bands" instead of "Composers", and so on. The double acknowledgement of "Beer Barons" and "Brewmeisters", none of which are widely-known local figures is also somewhat odd.

Otherwise, great work from both Almanac & Jay Fram.

View more samples from the campaign on Almanac's blog.
Check out more photos from Jay Fram's KDHX session here.

Here's an amazing & equally entertaining behind the scenes video for Bruton Stroube's "christmas card" video that rightfully blew us away this past holiday season. The best part (aside from the before and after sweeps showing coloring and CGI) - they all appear to be having the time of their lives.

It’s 2013! We’re back at work and before we get too far into the new year, we want to share a little behind-the-scenes from our holiday card production. Many of you have had the opportunity to work with our fearless President, Mr. Tom Stringer, and after 30 years in the biz, he’s hanging up his purple velvet jacket and heading for the (ski) hills he refers to as “retirement.” We just couldn’t let him leave without a proper send off.

Andy cut together a new BTS video showing some of the nifty products we received from LensRentals.com as well as all the personalities that make up the Bruton Stroube family. There are some new faces this year including our resident magician illusionist, Casey, who was responsible for the motion graphics and 3D elements. We also have to extend our gratitude to Zymo Sculpture Studio for allowing us to shoot in their magical workshop. A final shoutout to The Nadas for supplying the apt soundtrack to the BTS video.

View "The Perfect Gift"

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