Joe Carr,
Associate Vice President
Department of Marketing & Communications

heavy is a collective group of experienced creative and production veterans that create emotional, gripping and heart-stopping content. Targeted and strategic content. Content powerful enough to move thousands in stadiums every Sunday and students to tears as they select their home for the next four years.

As you know we have developed brands and campaign executions for professional sports teams (e.g. Philadelphia Eagles, Indianapolis Colts, Arizona Coyotes, Baltimore Ravens), consumer brands (e.g. Under Armour, Nike Tennis, Bimbo Bakeries, Gore), and universities of all sizes (e.g. University of Florida, UCLA, University of Virginia, Texas A&M, Notre Dame, University of Oregon, University of Wisconsin). Some that we like better than others, like those for our Dominican Friars. 🙂

As we outlined on the phone, here are a few ways we do things differently:

We don’t bill hourly.
Our fees are based on flat project costs, ensuring that no matter how many hours we spend on making the best possible work, it’s not a penny more than we agreed upon at the outset.

100% Transparent and Accountable.
At the beginning of every engagement, we sign a transparency clause that requires us to share with you any changes to our team, finances, or our business, before those changes could potentially impact yours. We also sign an agreement that prioritizes the metrics you value most, meaning you’re always in control of who is doing the work, and how it’s getting done.

Good. Together.
We believe in doing good within our community as well as within yours. As part of each engagement, we ask our clients to select a non-profit organization within their own community, one that could benefit from our services. We then offer our services to them pro bono. Why? Because it’s our belief that giving back moves us all forward, together.

We pulled together a few case studies that are contextually similar to the work you are doing in Rhode Island.

Like most higher education institutions, the University of Wisconsin-Madison is facing some inevitable challenges as the demographics of students continue to shift away from the traditional 18- to 21-year-old that lives on campus. Declining high school graduation rates coupled with financial pressures and the abundance of flexible learning opportunities means more students than ever are selecting alternate educational pathways. Driven by a charge from the Chancellor to triple the number of nontraditional students in five years, we got to work.

Partnering closely with the Division of Continuing Studies and their communications team, we began to reposition their 11 segmented portfolios into a single cohesive brand supporting a lifelong journey of education, from pre-college, international, and summer term, to professional degrees, certificates, and noncredit courses. The university was also planning to launch its first online undergraduate degree, which folded nicely into this new wholistic educational platform. Through careful coordination with university communications and admissions, we developed a strategy to ladder back to the existing university-wide brand, which we had previously developed. With a team on the ground in Madison and one in Philadelphia, we built, focus group tested, and launched a new brand in less than three months.

UC’s current mission—Next Lives Here—is a call to action for the impact of their institution: to empower students to impact the world in a positive way. UC students aren’t waiting for next to happen; they are working, solving, and breaking through every day to make next happen right now, for the good of all.

Knowing that connecting with millennials demands nearly constant contact, we needed to develop a communication strategy that would extend through the whole year. Previously, UC had only released a single PSA per year on average. With COVID-19 impacting their primary content vehicle of fall football, we knew a different approach was necessary that would require a series of PSAs to be pushed out all year long.

UNLTD’s mission is to help young people get the most out of what they have.We made it our job to give them the most right back.

UNTLD  expanded their efforts to help youth athletes tap into their unlimited potential (beyond their initial tennis-focused mission,) by evolving their campus to include basketball and Cross Fit training areas, as well as dedicated spaces for students to do school work. To showcase this brand expansion, we turned up the dials on content creation, developing everything from a speaker series to social messaging to apparel. But where the brand refresh really came to life was in our physical graphics applications.

We created a wall graphic system to help energize the next generation of athletic phenoms, and empower them to reach their maximum potential for years to come.

As UB headed into the final push of their “Boldy Buffalo” fundraising campaign, they wanted to double down on showcasing the importance of learning both in the classroom and experientially. This commitment to their students was exactly the impact donors needed to understand what differentiates a buffalo education.