CreateAthon is “a 24-hour, work-around the clock creative blitz during which local advertising agencies generate advertising services for local nonprofits that have little or no marketing budget.” 2009 is the 1st year (of which I hope they’ll be many) in which Roanoke agencies and design firms from the SouthWest Virginia area collected their gear and made haste to the call. Now, while the Roanoke CreateAthon was adopted and organized by our sister organization, AdFed, several AD2 members were asked to participate. And, brother, they did not disappoint. Here are a few of our stories.

Hear more from Aimee Drysdale, Erica Gliener, myself and others after the jump.

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Aimee Drysdale hunkered down early in the day and had multiple logo projects to develop alongside her team. From her blog:

Our group was designated as the “logo group.” Allan Mower met our group at 2:30pm on Friday September 18th to brief us on the projects we would be working on that night, and here are the results…

The group enjoyed working with this design because the target audience was ages 8-18 and it was something different from the rest of the projects we worked on. The Roanoke Youth Symphony wanted a fresh and youthful look that would separate them from the Roanoke Symphony Orchestra. Our goal was to use musical notes and instruments to form the letters “RYS,” and bright colors to illustrate youthfulness. We created the “r” from the musical notation of a trill, the “y” from a trumpet shape, and the “s” from a violin shape. We also wanted to tie this logo back into the Roanoke Symphony Logo. We did this by using the same “red” color from the logo given to us [...]. This was our solution:

To see more of Aimee and the gang’s work and to read about her night, you can find the rest of her write-up at her blog.

Erica Gleiner put her time in with a heavy crew to build 3 campaigns for 3 organizations. I’ll let her explain:

Despite feeling like Rip Van Winkle for the past couple of days, my CreatAthon experience was a thrilling one. I had the great pleasure of working with Jim Dudley of Dudley Creative, Tony Pearman, Rachel Spencer and Jessica Malave of Access, John Greissmayer from ND&P, Ariel Clark of TBA and Amy Nance-Pearman from Boyd Photography. We were presented with three clients at the beginning of the event, Special Olympics, Apple Ridge Farms, and Children’s Trust. After a vigorous brainstorming session, we had a print campaign for Children’s Trust and Apple Ridge Farms as well as a brochure and a series of posters for The Special Olympics.

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Once concepts and copy were nailed down, we split up the campaigns between the three designers on the team and got to work. Tony was busy art directing The Special Olympics photoshoot that was going on in what is normally the drawing room. Greissmayer was feverishly writing tag lines and body copy in the painting room. Ariel was creating humorous fake statistics for Apple Ridge Farms that would make even Fred from Accounting proud. I was laying out print, transit, and outdoor ads for Children’s Trust, while Amy was hitting the ground running with the meager art direction that we had time to give her.

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All in all, we not only completed everything on time and within the 24 hour period, but we knew we had 3 impressive campaigns to show for it. Our hard work, temporary insanity and sleep depravation all seemed trivial when Janice from Children’s Trust came in the next morning. Being able to provide her and Children’s Trust with the campaign was amazing enough, but we also considered what that would help her do in the future. Best case scenario, maybe someone would see one of our ads and consider how they were treating their kids, or maybe someone would decide that they wanted to help and become an advocate. I know it probably makes me sound naive, but I strongly believe in the power of advertising and hope to never loose that feeling. This weekend, I witnessed 40 of the busiest people in town drop what they are doing, and their competitiveness, to create something that enables these groups to continue provide the services to our community that we so desperately need. I am still in awe.

And still sleepy.

Jessica Malavé worked along side Erica with the Apple Ridge Farms campaign, as well as a few others:

I had a great time at CreateAthon despite the sleep deprivation. Working with the “competition” was a good experience. It was impressive to see all that put aside and work together for the good of the club and the nonprofits. I had the pleasure to work with Tracie Hoprich (Access), Dawn Stein (Access), and Geoffrey Frankel (Modea) on the Greenvale website. I also worked with Tony Pearman (Access), Ariel Clark (tba), John Griessmayer (ND&P), and Greg Vaughn (Greg Vaughn Photography) on the Apple Ridge print ad and poster campaign.

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As for me, I got the opportunity to not only design, but build out a template for CHIP (Child Health Investment Partnership) to use in a Content Management System (CMS) for a future version of their website. Thanks to Brian and Amanda, we got a great design and I had the time write code as they successfully tackled a design for a brand new site for the Greater Blue Ridge Chapter of JDRF (Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation). Since the site isn’t completed, I thought I’d give you a little preview of what the new CHIP website experience will be like hopefully in the future.

Click below to watch the video. It will open a new widow.

As a freelancer, it was great to be able to be in a room with people that were such creative powerhouses; to bounce ideas off and get instant feedback from people who’s opinions I trusted would garner the best results. It was also a great opportunity to meet professionals from the area I’d always heard from but never had an excuse to meet or work with in the past. I even got to teach a little bit, which was surprisingly fun for me.

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For more on the event, see the press coverage links below, this or this Twitter feed of our action through the night, and for a great run-down check out John’s blog over at Access as he spent the entire night documenting in real-time with video.

Create-A-Thon helps local non-profits | WSLS 10

Advertising wizards put heads together – Roanoke.com

Connie Stevens’ report on CreateAthon for WVTF (mp3)
Download audio file (200909211543210.createathon.mp3)

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If you’ve got a story you’d like to share about CreateAthon, drop me a line or leave it below in the comments.