John Deere

I'd never worked in ag before I started working on John Deere's Frontier Equipment in 2013. Frontier is a brand of more than 600 implements and attachments designed and built by outside manufacturers to fit into the mid-range price point in each category the brand serves. All Frontier products are available exclusively from John Deere dealers. All print work here was art directed by Johnna Hogenkamp.

Without the right implement, your tractor is just an expensive ride to the mailbox.

Frontier products stand up to the pounding you’d expect a tractor implement to handle. You expect any implement to be tough, yet easy to use. You expect them to help make the work go faster and easier. You expect them to not get in the way of success. In general, you expect them to be an extension of you and your tractor, giving you a lot of affordable flexibility to do a lot of jobs. This is true whether you farm for a living, or just have a whole bunch of land you need to maintain.

But with 600 implements, which one is right for you/him/her?

The answer is we don't know. So here are the :30 and :60 versions of a television commercial that solve the problem. Art direction assistance from Carole Jahn and Johnna Hogenkamp. Shot by Scott Jolley. Edited by Glass Eye Productions.

The incredible value in offering free information that helps your prospects and customers get the job done.

So what do you do with a relatively small budget, more than 600 products, and a large block of customers who need your product, but don’t really know how to use it? You show them how.

 

I conceived TipsNotebook.com as a highly functional, visually non-promotional website devoted to tips and videos about how to do all kinds of projects around your place the right way. The safe way. A perfect example of content marketing. A small, tightly knit team has consistently worked together to conceive and produce all the content. My contribution has been strategy, writing all video scripts, as well as supervising audio and video production.

And how on earth do they find 

Tips Notebook?

Through social media, of course. Like this 30-second pre-roll video on your favorite and mine -- the Frontier Root Grapple sized for your compact utility tractor. 

Grundfos

Grundfos is the world's largest manufacturer of water pumps. Headquartered in Denmark, it is an incredible company with a tradition of marking the 40th anniversary of any subsidiary by producing a commemorative book of some sort. In 2013, Grundfos USA celebrated theirs. Produced for internal consumption only, the introduction below probably does the best job of describing our idea for this 100-page, hard cover, 10" x 15" book.

 

"This book is inspired by the people who work for Grundfos USA. Between April 1 and June 17, 2013, 54 of them were interviewed about what the company is like, what it’s like to work here and how they feel about that. The content found here is an interpretation of what the writer heard them say, the patterns of insight that revealed themselves as they talked, along with portraits of those who represent the broad spectrum of people who work for Grundfos. The net of it all is pretty simple, which is as it should be. No secrets to success were revealed. No magic formula. There were only the rewards always found in the application of common sense, hard work and belief in opportunity. That’s the essence of what American Spirit − Grundfos Soul means. That’s what this book is about."

 

Designed by Jim Robinson. Photography by Marc Hauser.