Blackstone Creative Group

Strategic business thinking, creative tactics, and advanced cross-media capabilities.

Blackstone: Award-winning creative solutions

Blackstone has been family owned and operated since 1979 to provide high quality marketing communications. Our clients enjoy personal service, team-based collaboration, creative innovation, and measurable success.

Our cross-media services include:

Advertising (print and online)
Email marketing
Interactive media
Personalized microsites, or landing pages
Print (both variable and traditional)
Variable 1:1 direct marketing (online, print, interactive, text messaging)
Website development
Wireless SMS text messaging

Blackstone Creative Group, LLC

Blackstone will work with you to develop a focused, integrated strategy to achieve your marketing goals:

Increase marketing effectiveness
Stand out from the competition
Adapt to marketing complexity
Expand participation and increase loyalty
Build reputation and improve branding
Boost strategic enrollment
Deliver unique, personalized online experiences
Eliminate paper waste
Spot trends and provide measurement
Improve results and boost ROI

Create once, publish often

We can help you create an integrated cross-media communications platform to deliver personalized, variable content via print, online, interactive, and mobile applications.

Cross-media campaigns integrate database intelligence to deliver an enhanced experience and more relevant information.

Cross-media is strategic. Deliver communications to your audience across multiple media types with a consistent message and entry points.

Increase effectiveness

Blackstone can help you:

Find and engage your best prospects
Reach your audience with interactive mobile, online, and print media
Focus resources on your target audience
Measure results in real-time
Adjust your campaign on the fly
Integrate with your CRM system
Get better results with your budget

Define your brand's personality

Are you making a clear, bold statement about who you are? Expressing it in a compelling way?

Delivering it in a compelling way?

We'll help define your brand's personality, build your reputation, and differentiate your position in the marketplace.

Reputation matters. And effective marketing builds institutional reputation.

Better students are attracted to schools with which they are familiar. Strong faculty and effective administrators want to be associated with schools whose reputations will further their own professional goals and objectives. Donors give and give more often to schools that have name recognition. Foundations value institutions that are valued by the marketplace.

Blackstone can help you get the right message to the right audience at the right time to build relationships, build your reputation, and build your brand.

Define smart strategies in a world of marketing complexity.

How do you reach an audience that is tuned out, overloaded with information, and can ignore what it wants?

How do you coordinate all customer touchpoints in a buying process that's more individualized than ever?

How can you fully reflect customers' individual contact preferences?

How can you manage added complexity in all facets of marketing from organizational structure to campaign planning?

Increase relevance. Maximize impact.

Increase the value of your alumnus' credentials and they will reward that effort with increased support.

Fully utilize your databases and identify segments. Dedicate resources to deliver the highest value to your leadership and long-term donors. Make a personal connection with communications customized for each individual. Nurture recent alumni to become future leadership donors. Collect email addresses and valuable feedback from your participants.

Make a first impression.

Today's teens are experienced, knowledgeable consumers. Like their parents and peers, they recognize value, and will spend significant dollars on product and services they perceive favorably.

Audience-centric variable content and personalized communications build value:

Deliver a personalized experience
Encourage recipients to connect online
Utilize automation to significantly reduce administrative costs

Personalize online experiences

Each personalized microsite is a unique web address for each participant and can be integrated with email, direct mail, text messaging with online communications.

Personalized microsites can include many customer-oriented features:

Surveys, reviews, ratings, comments
Opt-in offers, conditional offers based on history or demographics
User-customizable appearance
Pre-populated with participant details
Variety of media choices for response and feedback
Immediate response and follow-up

Make a personal connection.

Customize images for each recipient and increase the emotional response to your campaign.

Can you afford not to?

Make every dollar count. Cross-media campaigns focus resources on the best prospects.

Blackstone can design a program tailored to your audience's preferences. Highly personalized tactics increase the value of online and mobile communications.

End mass mailings. Limit quantities and distribution to highly targeted audiences. Decrease outdated material, warehousing, and mailing costs. Provide added value to your audience through user-customizable documents.

Get immediate feedback

Can you instantly and accurately measure campaign results?

See who's opening, reading, and responding to your integrated marketing campaign -- at every step.

Automatically and accurately track both data-driven and broadcast media. Use your increased knowledge of your prospect to:

Increase marketing response rates
Respond to prospects 24/7
Refine content for future campaigns
Increase sales conversion rates
Accurately track leads and response rates and ROI in real time
Boost response rates 3x

Boost ROI up to 3x

Relevant one-to-one variable content connects with your best prospects. The result? Integrated marketing communications using personalization, variable data, pURLs, and lead tracking boost response rates 300% and more over traditional static campaigns.*

*PODi, Response Rate Report: Benchmark information for relevant marketing programs, December 2008.

Typical static response rate: 2%
Typical personalized response rate: 6%

Caslon analysis of PODi and DMA data):

Cross-media tactics

A cross-media campaign integrates database intelligence to allow the campaign to deliver a better experience and more relevant information.

The cross-media campaign does more than utilize print, online, and mobile medias, it delivers a consistent experience and entry point across those media.

Personalized microsites are a new call to action, provide a unique interactive experience, and automate custom, personalized responses.

Selected clients

Technology

Agfa Corporation
Banta Corporation
Kodak
Polaroid
Sonopress Arvato

Non-profit institutions

Brown University
Dana Farber Cancer Institute
The Haverford Schools
Moses Brown School
New England School of Law
Northwestern Memorial Hospital
Quincy College
Westminster Schools

Consumer

Talbots

Political

Frank Belotti for Governor
DNC, New England

Award winning creative solutions

Selected awards and exhibits

Higher Ed Marketing, Gold, Direct Mail, Poster, Boston, MA
Biberist Papers, Gold, Direct Mail, Zurich, Switzerland
Sappi Papers, Bronze, Corporate Brochures, New York, NY
Creative Club of Boston, Best of Show, Boston, MA
Society of Publication Design, Gold, Magazine Design, New York, NY
San Francisco Art Director's Club, Gold, Catalog, San Francisco, CA
Page, New Work, Hamburg, Germany
Communication Arts, Design Annual, NY, NY
NY Art Director's Club Show, NY, NY
AIGA, Annual, New York, NY
Type Directors Club of NY, NY, NY
Hatch, Gold, Catalog, Boston, MA
Desi Awards, Packaging, Collateral, Direct Mail, New York, NY

Kodak

Goals

Build new business initiative to expand sales into new markets
Support local Kodak dealers across the seven European Union countries
Grow awareness of new technologies and new business opportunities
Provide incentives to attend event
Maintain company branding

Audience

Graphic arts industry
Existing customers
Traditional printers
New media service providers
Industry influencers

Kodak

Tactics

Personalized direct mail from local Kodak dealers to known customers
Variable data for title, company name, location, dealer affiliation, call to action
Call to action: Invitation to event
Localized in seven languages
Mailed in clear poly envelope with ink-jetted address meeting EU postal standards

Kodak

Goals

Build new business initiative to expand sales into new markets
Support local Kodak dealers across the seven European Union countries
Grow awareness of new technologies and new business opportunities
Provide incentives to attend event
Maintain company branding

Audience

Graphic arts industry
Existing customers
Traditional printers
New media service providers
Industry influencers

Kodak

Tactics

Personalized direct mail from local Kodak dealers to known customers
Variable data to title, company name, location, dealer affiliation
Call to action: Invitation to event with tear-off card
Localized in seven languages
Mailed in clear poly envelope with ink-jetted address meeting EU postal standards