What weighs 20,769 pounds and could very well be the answer to your marketing problems?

You have to admit that in the continuing battle between “big” and “smart”, the big guy usually wins. If you have an unlimited pile of cash, it makes any job a lot easier. Get Warren Buffett to bankroll your company’s marketing and your margin for error is well, rather wide.

Or to put it another way, what came first, the gecko or 9 billion dollars?

Lacking the billions competitors are pouring into the insurance category, smarter thinking was called for on American Family Insurance. So for the fourth quarter of this year, we made the message the medium.

It begins with a new positioning for the brand. American Family Insurance has decided to focus on two key words, words that resonate with their management, their employees and their customers.

Those two words are “clear” and “fair.”

Clear and fair are values that American Family can rightly stand for in everything they do. It is how they treat each other and how they treat their customers. They are words that separate them from their competition in a very meaningful way.

The folks at Blue Horse took those two words and applied them to the printed page in some very delightful ways. Leading the charge was a freestanding newspaper insert. Printed on clear acetate, the piece literally visualized the “clear” and “fair” promise.

It wasn’t the easiest thing to make happen. We had to interview a lot of people in the newspaper business to see whether this could be done. Indeed, not every publication could handle the job (for those we did a die-cut insert). The shipment to the Las Vegas Review-Journal weighed in at a whopping 20,769 pounds for two drops! It took up 7 skids and 560 cartons.

Then we got some negative feedback from people who thought the acetate wasn’t biodegradable or recyclable. (It is!) We’re also getting a lot of notice from customers, potential customers and stakeholders alike. In other words, all the people who really need to know about the new brand position.

If you’d like to see the range of this work, just check it out on our Web site. Or better yet, contact us and we’ll come and show you the entire effort in person, including a unique four page “spread” ad in magazines that literally displays “both sides” of the clear and fair message to the reader.

In a world of exploding media choices and escalating expense, you have to think smarter if you’re not the biggest spender on the block.

And even if you are.