The Headquarters Pt. 3 — Creating our own agency & Promoting our First Client

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AD DISCOVERY — CREATIVITY Stories by ADandPRLAB

6 min readJun 29, 2020

Written by The Headquarter’s team member: Panagiotis Theofanopoulos.

Following our two articles: “What an Advertising and PR Class can teach you” & “Learning Ad & PR through Case Studies”, where we discussed our learning journey, by exploring important notions and tactics about branding and advertising in general, and examining several projects in the form of case studies, we continue with our hands-on projects. Specifically, we were asked to implement our recently-attained knowledge in creating our very own media & advertising startup company and promoting our first client.

Our Startup — The Headquarters

After many hours of discussions and brainstorming, we chose to create a creative advertising agency, called The Headquarters. Right after, and based on guidance provided to us by our professor, mrs. Betty Tsakarestou, we realized it was high time we agreed upon a solid mission statement, our startup’s vision and values, while also assigning specific roles for each member of our team, based on a carefully selected organizational model that meets our needs. You can find our initial startup agency presentation on the link below:

Mission Statement

We mix technology and music in order to promote our artists and their projects, address social issues and provide for science and the world!

Our Values:

Branding: The Headquarters

In the next sessions, we had to decide on our company’s branding, while building our digital presence, that is our official website, newsletter and social media. Following the guidelines provided by HubSpot, we designed our logo, in such a way as to directly communicate our brand’s offering, and we chose a light and bright color palette to go with the sans-serif fonts, that we used evenly across all platforms and content published. Furthermore, we set a specific tone of voice, to address our target audiences in an everyday, yet professional manner, and we also decided on the aesthetics of our content.

Website & Social Media

Moving on to the channels we used to communicate our company’s launch, we created a strategy for each medium. Specifically, we decided that our website should reflect a clear image of our company’s profile, mission statement and values, while also encouraging our visitors to sign-up for our newsletter and following us on our social media.

As for our social media, we came up with a well-thought plan for utilizing them: Facebook would be used to promote our launch and latest projects, while also serving as a bot-messaging platform of communication with potential clients, Instagram would provide as a platform for sharing more aesthetically pleasing and lifestyle content, Twitter would serve as a medium to connect with the business and entrepreneurial world, by sharing our company’s projects, achievements and case studies.

We created short-links for all of our social media platforms, so as to manage and track our traffic and sources.

Our Newsletter

Read our full newsletter here.

Last but not least, we created our first newsletter via MailChimp, to be sent as the first email to our new subscribers, in which we included an introductory message to communicate the logic behind our newsletter, a weekly digest of our latest or more interesting articles, to provide value to the readers, a short description of our services, our social media and all the necessary options and information required to comply with the GDPR rules.

Our First Project: Vocal City

CoVid19 pandemic inspired us to commence our first project, mixing technology with music in order to enhance the urban experience with music.

Big cities were evacuated due to the CoVid19 pandemic. Vocal City is a project that aspires to revive the cities by connecting landmarks and urban hotspots with matching music choices.

How it works — Carefully designed graffitis or posters will be put on specific locations throughout Athens, including provocative messages and a QR code. Passersby get to scan the QR codes with their smartphones, and they land on a platform where they can listen to a selected song or playlist, matching the spot, its culture and history.

In that way, we help the visitors to familiarize with new music and artists, interact and socialize through our platform via a unique offline-to-online experience, that is highly and carefully localized and spread throughout the city of Athens. From our side, we get to promote our artists through an innovative project, establish a strong presence in the advertising landscape and collect valuable user data to be used for targeted campaigns and scientific geo-spatial research.

Potential Clients Research

Next, we had to search and find a list of potential clients, aka artists who meet our values, who we are interested in, and who we could deliver an innovative branding campaign to.

Here you can read our presentation of our Top-3 Potential Clients below, including an overview of their background and projects, and how/why they meet our values.

We reached out to our potential clients through Facebook, expressing our admiration for their work and asking them to give us their email addresses to ensure a more professional communication. The emails we sent to them included a brief presentation of our company’s profile, and our desire to secure a Skype meeting with them (hello, Corona!).

Our First Client: Alkis Dimos

After discussing with each and every one of them, we took on Alkis Dimos, a talented musician who was about to release a new single with socio-political messages, as our first client. Our first idea for his branding strategy was to put our very own “Vocal City” project into play. After quarantine, a big part of citizens’ activity in Athens is related to social and political mobilization, for example protests about the movements of #BlackLivesMatter, #SupportArtWorkers, #Aposyre_To & #PrideMonth.

Our goal was to raise awareness for our artist and his new project, in a relevant context & audience. This strategy would help build and communicate our artist’s branding, by establishing a solid and matching identity, by tying him with the socio-political urban activity.

In this context, we chose specific key-locations, with intense protest activity, such as Syntagma Square, the area surrounding the Greek Parliament, Propylaia, Exarcheia, Panepistimioupoli and more, where we put up posters and graffiti artworks, using provocative messaging & QR Codes linking to Alki’s new song, uploaded on our interactive platform.

Alkis Dimos’ Online Presence & Branding

Apart from the ‘Vocal City’ project which served as part of both the advertising and the branding strategies, we also built our artist’s online identity. For this, we set up specific Branding guidelines that were applied on Alkis’ Website, Social Media, Content and physical materials. The branding referred to the color scheme, fonts, images & content distribution to social media channels and tone of voice. Last but not least, we created mock-up content for his upcoming single “Borders”.