Virtually anything not heard on radio, seen on television or in your daily newspaper qualifies as ‘out of home’ advertising: billboards, bus shelters, shopping cart ads, mall kiosks – even the scoreboard at your hometown hockey arena. Out of home advertising helps reach consumers who are on the move and can be a compelling means of reinforcing a brand or product message.

And these are but a few of the advertising executions Harfield & Associates can put to work for you. What about product placement? Celebrity endorsement? Mobile billboards? Digital signage? We’ll find the media that’s right for you, based on our overriding rule of thumb: the advertising forms we recommend will always be the ones most relevant to your brand, product or service, and your customers.

Rely on Harfield’s long experience in all media – traditional to new age – to help you craft messages that resonate strongly with your target market.

Billboard – Unique Retail Concept

To stimulate community awareness of this unique retail concept – everything from the client under one roof – and initiate momentum, strategically located billboards were created using high impact imagery to communicate the name, “one stop shop” uniqueness, create excitement and visually set it apart from conventional automotive and motorcycle dealerships.

Bus Shelter – Automotive Dealers

These bright, graphically strong outdoor posters communicated the excitement of the client’s vehicles using supplied photography. Situated in downtown backlit transit shelters, the impact of the imagery was powerful, memorable and reinforced the emotional appeal of each model.

Trade show Kiosk – Automotive Dealers

To capitalize on the opportunity to inject the client’s vehicle into a relevant but indirectly related venue, we helped our client situate the motorcycle and ATV-friendly large pickup truck at the Calgary Motorcycle Show. We produced an interactive kiosk complete with a monitor showing the truck’s highlights, and electronic data collection capacities.

Vancouver Giants – Bus Shelter Ad

Transit shelters formed part of our aggressive use of the Giants’ 10th Anniversary logo to underline the team’s success and longevity in a hockey market otherwise dominated by the city’s NHL team.

Vancouver Giants – Billboard

We went onto ‘enemy turf’ with a not so subtle message conveying the extreme affordability of Vancouver Giants’ hockey versus the NHL brand. This billboard is situated about 1½ blocks from the Canucks home arena.

Faith Wilson Group – Bus Shelter

Faith Wilson wished to solidify her position as real estate agent of choice on Vancouver’s West Side. Harfield repositioned Faith’s personal brand as the “Faith Wilson Group”, then rolled out a refreshed identity across numerous communication channels including backlit transit shelters.

Even in today’s digital media age, print ads still have great value for advertisers. Here are some examples of how Harfield & Associates has helped clients to achieve sales and branding goals through the print media.

Sporty Compact Coupe

Ads for a sporty compact coupe repositioned the vehicle for a younger target market by focusing on encapsulating a lifestyle message without foregoing traditional client values – high resale value, fuel efficiency and, most importantly for this market segment, fun to drive.

Automotive Dealers – Posters

Culturally specific markets are a powerful niche segment no one can afford to ignore. Early on in our relationship with our automotive client, Harfield identified the Chinese consumer as critical to the Dealers’ growth in Vancouver. As a result, the client became the first automotive ad association to address this market.

Memorial Cup

The Memorial Cup tournament decides the top Major Junior hockey team in Canada. Our striking creative motif communicated the excitement of the tournament in everything from stationery, washroom posters and transit ads to newspaper, street banners and ticket booklets.

Becker Galleries

Michele Becker approached Harfield & Associates to create and launch a premier brand. Harfield answered the challenge by becoming involved in naming the gallery, creating the logo and stationery, and developing the website design for her new contemporary high-end curatorial art gallery.

Vancouver Giants

Harfield was asked to build the Giants brand from scratch in just 88 days. We created a comprehensive campaign that turned the departure of an under-performing NBA team to our advantage and generated thousands of dollars in free publicity on local TV and radio sports programming.

Live More

Our “Live More” campaign for our automotive client spoke to car buyers both on a ‘more for your money’ value basis, and on an emotional level that justified the wisdom of adding a new vehicle to their lives.

Sports Coupe Street Edition

To increase sales of an existing sports coupe, we repackaged the vehicle, devised a new personality, created a new name, planned a highly strategic radio and print campaign – and moved 300 sports coupes to the client’s younger market target in just six weeks.

Vehicle wraps and car graphics represent a unique form of outdoor media and a novel way to reach new and existing customers. Compared with other media choices, wraps are extremely cost effective and can generate millions of impressions each year.

Vancouver Giants – Minivan Wrap

When the WHL Vancouver Giants needed a ‘get noticed’ design for their community van, Harfield turned a minivan into Transporter with a head-turning hockey helmet motif.

Faith Wilson – Compact SUV Wrap

For the Faith Wilson Group, we created a mobile billboard out of a compact SUV that gave her team added presence, prominence and panache all over her West Side territory.

Hybrid Vehicle Wrap

To increase brand awareness of an all-new hybrid vehicle and draw attention to its low emission technology, we wrapped the vehicle for an extended appearance at the Vancouver International Jazz Festival.

Vancouver Giants – Large SUV wrap

The Vancouver Giants needed VIP transportation for Memorial Cup Tournament officials. Our solution: a fleet of 10 large SUVs wrapped with a distinctive Memorial Cup design that amplified interest in a relatively short term event.

Vancouver bus wrap

Our most spectacular vehicle wrap – a giant race-car graphic mounted on the sides and back of Metro Vancouver buses, creating a 40-foot moving billboard to leverage the client’s racing heritage for even greater brand awareness.

As a marketing ally for over 12 years, Harfield & Associates has strategized, created and executed Faith Wilson’s positioning and tactical initiatives. With her commitment to marketing and dedication to a superior client experience, Faith has risen to be one of the elite 0.1%*of all Vancouver real estate agents.

Having developed a tight-knit team of real estate marketing specialists offering an ever-expanding array of services, Faith Wilson wished to solidify her position as real estate agent of choice on Vancouver’s West Side. Harfield repositioned Faith’s personal brand as the “Faith Wilson Group”. This new team identity delivers a clean, distinctive look that reflects the precision, efficiency and warmth which have become hallmarks of the Faith Wilson Group client experience.

Having concluded the design, Harfield & Associates’ task was to roll out executions in all of Faith’s communication channels – OOH advertising, vehicle wraps, office signage, stationery package, inter-agent electronic forms, weekly listing ads, magazine ads, website updates and social media initiatives.

This brand evolution has resulted in stronger market share, average sale and sales results.

Oscar’s Art Books, locally known for its impressive library of niche books situated just a few blocks from the Harfield offices, wanted to diversify their services and become a player in the growing print-on-demand industry. As a result, Oscar’s purchased the only Espresso Printing Machine in Western Canada. They tasked us with publicizing their print-on-demand service and helping them sell more books in the Vancouver area.

We responded with a web-based plan that would brand Oscar’s service and open it up to a worldwide market. The Harfield plan employed a website with ecommerce capabilities, a targeted paid search campaign, and a funneling strategy:  a number of URLs were created and purchased which identify print-on-demand services searched by people online and automatically directs them to our client’s website: HotOffOscarsPress.com. Thus, the website URL and the name of the service would be seen as a single entity. This focuses the attention on the website where print-on-demand books could be submitted, ordered and paid for in one simple operation.

In conjunction with this project, Harfield has also refreshed and refined the company logo, and offered creative suggestions for merchandising Oscar’s store, particularly the area where the Espresso Printing Machine is situated.

Our work with Oscar’s Art Books is a testament to the importance of self-promotion: this client sought us out after seeing our company vehicle driving around the neighbourhood!

For our automotive association client, strong point of purchase materials play a vital role in the sales process. The design is critical. It must be eye-catching and colourful; able to communicate product information and price points clearly; and it must remain fresh-looking and visually appealing throughout a promotional event that may last from 60 to 90 days.

Beyond the informational aspects, the design must connect with the car-buyer on an emotional level. It must convey an aura of excitement that is in synch with the mood of the customer, someone who may only purchase a new vehicle two or three times in a lifetime.

To achieve these goals, Harfield researched, designed and produced customized curb-to-showroom merchandising packages. A typical package would contain many if not all of these signage elements: pole signs, car toppers, door decals, entrance floor ads, window posters, outdoor banners, windshield eyebrows, desk merchandising, racing flags, car window flags and vehicle license plates.

We’re proud to say that Harfield & Associates has been in the trenches with the Giants since the team’s first face-off ten years ago. Today, the team is highly successful and regarded as the model franchise of the 22-team Western Hockey League. Besides achieving several consecutive winning records, the Giants have also hosted and won the prestigious Memorial Cup Championship tournament; hosted the renowned World Junior Hockey Tournament; and graduated some 17 players to the NHL level – the ultimate in hockey.

But the need to remind the marketplace of the Giants as an exciting, affordable hockey entertainment option remains.

Presented with a supplied tenth anniversary logo, our challenge was to draw attention to the Giants milestone season through the aggressive use of the design.

This was accomplished through a complete stationery package, transit shelters, billboards, bus backs and sides, and a huge centre ice execution for the team’s home venue, the Pacific Coliseum.
As a measure of our expanded role with the Giants, the team also entrusted us with the design of their 10th Anniversary season tickets.

Our client’s biggest sales event of the year is a Racing Checkered Flag Event. Each year at the national level, the client developed a logo to feature in its nation wide Racing Checkered Flag Event TV campaign.

Starting with that one design element, Harfield’s task was to build an entire 60-day campaign around the logo, incorporating it into all media and bringing the Racing Checkered Flag Event to life in 150 dealer showrooms across five provinces.This huge undertaking included point of purchase materials, print and radio advertising, direct mail, eblast messages, consumer contests, sales staff incentive programs, sourcing est drive and purchase premiums, and online messaging…all coordinated to deliver a comprehensive synergistic campaign.

Beyond the multitude of print ads produced, full-colour 12-page broadsheet newspaper inserts were produced. As well as designing, writing and creating final files for the inserts, we functioned as our client’s de facto printing and logistics partner for a total production run of over 2 million pieces.

At the dealership level, an extensive customized curb-to-showroom merchandising package was researched, designed and produced including: pole signs, car toppers, entrance floor ads, window posters, outdoor banners, windshield eyebrows, desk merchandising, racing flags, car window flags and vehicle license plates.

This unique retail store was a completely new concept that needed to be market-defined. This store offers everything with the brand, including cars and trucks at many locations. It’s unlike any other dealership; its unique services, such as overnight parts delivery, highly trained staff, test rides, the client’s hotel and exceptional product range are unmatched by any competitor.

To raise awareness of the concept and exclusive USPs, our initial strategy was to create a commanding 4-page glossy insert to tell the full story in each appropriate market. In conjunction, niche motorcycle print executions carried the concept into the market with frequency.

To further stimulate community awareness of this unique retail concept and initiate momentum, strategically located billboards were created using high impact imagery to communicate the name, create excitement and visually set it apart from conventional automotive and motorcycle dealerships.