Creative – Clean Advertising and Design

February 5, 2024 — No Comments

Stop Gambling with Creative

In the era of “need-results-yesterday” agency life, we often extoll the virtues of placing small bets as a way of convincing a client to take a chance on a challenging creative idea. I’ve used this terminology myself. The problem with a gambling reference is at least two-fold. One, is the obvious implication that we could lose. Two, is that very few gamblers learn from – losing or winning, for that matter.

Recently, I came across an interview with IDEO’s Tom Kelley that gave me a new way to advocate for challenging creative ideas. I’m a bit of an IDEO fanboy so I watched the entire hour-long interview with a notepad and pen in hand. There were a lot of gems, but the one that stood out was the notion of presenting ideas as experiments. By their very nature, experiments seem less risky because there is learning to be had whether they succeed or fail. Conversely, a bet is all risk or reward, not both.

This got me wondering, “What if we approached creativity as a science?”

So, I compared the steps of the scientific method to the creative process and they’re nearly identical. The beauty of presenting creativity as a science is that (almost) everyone places a lot of faith in science. Which means clients might have more confidence in trying an idea that has been put through the scientific, or creative, method. Now creative ideas become scientific theories that simply need experimentation. Now instead of convincing a client to take a chance, we propose an experiment. Seems it would make putting a challenging idea in market seem a lot less of a gamble.

Attached is my version of the Creative Method.

February 5, 2024 — No Comments

Looking Back at 2023

Reflecting on an incredible year of hustle and creativity! Check out our 2023 work recap reel for a glimpse into the passion, design, and dedication that fueled our success. Our team is ready and excited to build on this momentum in 2024.

February 1, 2024 — No Comments

Clean Wins Modern Healthcare Marketing Impact Silver Award

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE · November 2023

Raleigh, NC – Clean Advertising & Design’s Head of Agency, Lee Davis, announced today that Clean has been named a Silver Award Winner in the Tiny But Mighty "advocacy" category for Modern Healthcare's 2023 Marketing Impact Awards. The award winning campaign was created for The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. Clean, first established in 1996 and reformulated in 2020, is an advertising and design agency offering a full suite of advertising and design services for a variety of industries.

Modern Healthcare’s Healthcare Marketing Impact Awards are designed to recognize healthcare's best advertising, marketing, and communication campaigns across all media platforms. The award- winning campaigns have successfully advanced provider, insurer, supplier and advocacy group efforts to deliver high-quality, affordable and accessible healthcare, to promote the health of individual patients, groups and communities, and to help organizations thrive in today's ever-evolving healthcare environment.

A partner of Clean’s since 2020, the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services (NC DHHS) works to protect public health, ensuring equitable access to healthcare and improving the health of residents of North Carolina. A long-standing initiative of NC DHHS has been to encourage the residents of North Carolina to stop smoking. Several tactics have been used to promote this, inclusive of implementing QuitlineNC, a hotline providing free cessation services for those residents who need help quitting the use of tobacco.

After hotline call volumes dropped during the pandemic, NC DHHS tasked Clean with creating a campaign to boost the use of the hotline and increase traffic to the website hosting additional resources to aid in quitting tobacco. Clean developed a “Quit and Live” campaign to be run in videos, digital ads and paid social media, specifically targeting residents of high-density smoking counties in both English and Spanish versions. The campaign features two cartoon lungs, one healthy and one dead. The tagline reads “You can lose one of your lungs and survive,” magnifying the risk of living with a debilitating disease due to continued use of tobacco products. During the outreach effort, the campaign resulted in a 12.3% increase in average call volume to the Hotline, and 63% increased traffic to the website within a two-month period. NC DHHS also saw a huge uptick in traffic to the Spanish homepage with a 13,500% increase year-over-year, while Spanish-language pageviews increased 2,461% and unique page views rose 3,293%.

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About Clean:

Clean is a full-strength advertising and design agency known for creating work that is simple and beautiful, yet powerful enough to get rid of the most stubborn business challenges. Clean’s solutions are versatile enough to put the shine on brands in industries like Tourism, Healthcare, Technology, Consumer Packaged Goods, Manufacturing, Education, and more. Brands reach for Clean any time they need help with strategy, research, advertising, brand design, digital design, production, experiential, media, or public relations. Reformulated in 2020, Clean inspires action by uncovering simple, authentic truths that are brought to life through beautiful design. For more information, please visit cleaninc.com.

February 1, 2024 — No Comments

Practicing what we preach.

Here’s advertising's golden rule: as an advertising and design agency, what we do for our clients we seldom do for ourself. Well, no more. To take advantage of the playoff hockey excitement, we turned our creativity on ourselves, and created two TV spots for Clean.

The spots went from concept to trafficked in just one week and were created entirely in house. To accomplish this, we practiced what we preach. We kept the ideas simple (played off our name). We made them beautiful (on brand). And if some businesses reach out, we’ll know we made them significant. Check out some of our other work or watch our reel on our about page.