It seems like it has been a long cold winter down here in Visual Jazzland but as spring starts to tease us with weather befitting BBQs and beer gardens, it’s a good chance to look back on one of the highlights of 2011.

The Light Up Winter Living campaign was produced for one of our long term clients – Lend Lease.

In the past we’ve focused solely on digital work for Lend Lease’s community development business as well as their retirement living and aged care villages – perhaps better known by their former sub-brand monikers of Delfin and Primelife.

The campaign was focused on creating hype amongst prospective property buyers of one of Lend Lease’s community developments.

We needed to spark people out of their winter lethargy and get them to visit and experience one of Lend Lease’s great communities. In other words, we were driving leads.

And Lend Lease were also looking for a turbo boost that would start their 2011-2012 financial year off to a great start.

VJ proposed a national creative framework that worked across multiple states and communities, each with their own sub-brand, as well as across multiple mediums, including print, radio, OOH and digital.

The Light Up Winter Living concept was love at first sight for Lend Lease and so we readied the VJ creative and production machine for a major challenge – the first day of winter had already ticked over and we had to get to market in less than five weeks.

We began by cranking out a cracking content strategy – the heart of the campaign – and then got to work on producing the individual community websites and newspapers  (about three quarters of a million printed in total and letterbox-dropped across five states) as well as dealing with scores of individual community briefs and building hundreds of individual campaign assets.

The lead focused campaign microsites were supported by locally relevant banner and radio ads as well as the local newspapers that were full of real, authentic content. Billboards helped people navigate their way to community locations and we even had ‘human billboards’ (see pic below) walking around major shopping centres handing out flyers and newspapers driving foot traffic to the sales centres.

The quality of the work (if we don’t mind saying ourselves!) was fantastic, the effort was nothing short of gargantuan and it was a great example of nearly every discipline in the VJ stable being represented, from strategy, copywriting and project management to print and digital design and dev.

And it would not have been half as successful as it was if not for the strength of the existing relationship between VJ and Lend Lease’s respective marketing and IT departments.

Nice work fellas.