An advertisers dream:  A walking, talking billboard that can physically interact with your target audiences, speak to them, and ask them to take action.  Christopher West, a student at Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, is truly a marketing genius in my books.  As a college project, he is selling advertising space on a t-shirt every week. Christopher’s idea is simple as he states, “I am your billboard, I am your salesperson, I am your sandwich man”. All shirts created will be sold at an auction during his graduation.

After stumbling upon this project we decided that this would be excellent opportunity to showcase our creative abilities and knack for thinking outside the box...or at the very least, get an interesting blog out of it.  Our guiding principle behind any shirt design was to create an image that truly resonated our teams personalities and the SWMG culture.  And what we came up with is the image that you see above; although it’s probably not the most politically correct design—this was intentional as we wanted the the image to also garner attention from viewers and stimulate conversation.  The collage of middle fingers inscribed in the shape of a heart embodied SWMG in three important manners.  First, thinking beyond the norm of what is acceptable.  SWMG is a group of individuals who thrive on pushing the boundaries and strive to over-deliver on all our marketing endeavors rather than just being content with being sufficient or good. Second, our creative team prides itself in being both unique and innovative when it comes to bringing our our messaging to life…we truly can make any symbol beautiful…just look at the shirt design…or for our more politically correct work, have a look at the traditional (i.e. poster, brochures) and web creative that we have done. Third, we feel that marketing is all about having fun and doing something that generates buzz.

In addition to the concept, we encouraged individuals to interact with the design and speak their hearts by drawing or writing whatever they wished to express on the shirt.  The intention is that the shirt design will grow organically over the week with expressions of peoples’ thoughts and creative design, thus creating a community of voices communicating their own uniqueness.  In addition, we created a website, www.speakyourheart.ca, that directed individuals to our social media networks (Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIN) where we could communicate with them, showcase our work, and introduce the personalities that make up the SWMG team.