Stiff Rowlands

NME Radio teamed up with HP for a University tour featuring top acts and a truck full of HP goodies. We created the tour’s co-branded logo, a hub, traffic driver ads and a homepage takeover.

Check out the Wild Beasts hub we created for NME.COM, right here.

NME.COM just love homepage takeovers! Here’s another we created for The Maccabees. Mind the wet paint.

We just helped NME.COM with a homepage takeover to promote Jack Peñate’s new album “Everything is New”.

The Samsung NME Radar Tour 2009 showcases the best new music with a string of dates across the UK, featuring La Roux, Heartbreak, Magistrates and The Chapman Family. We created an online advertorial to promote the tour and Samsung’s Bang & Olufsen-powered “Beat Edition” phone.

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the iconic Adidas 3-stripes brand with a memorable Frankie Valli soundtracked ‘House Party’ TV ad (below). NME Radio partnered with Adidas and JD Sports to bring the party to London in the form of three exclusive gigs.

We helped NME.COM with an online advertorial to promote the events. We assume our invites got lost in the post?

Special projects manufacturer Studio Caparo required an email marketing campaign to showcase a selection of their stunning and innovative work for renowned clients such as Established & Sons and Nude Skincare. We recognised the need for brand sensitive design that would appeal to their target market: Artists, Designers and Architects. Check out the newsletter and Studio Caparo’s unique “Stack” project here.

As part of our ongoing work with Manchester International Festival, we have helped them to produce regular newsletter campaigns including this one – announcing their programme for 2009.

Online marketing is a vital component in the build up to the festival, helping to increase awareness and generate all important ticket sales. It was therefore essential that we created a reliable and flexible newsletter that could be easily updated in-house. Equally important was that the email campaign system could handle in excess of 15,000 subscribers with regular mailouts.

We chose MailChimp for its excellent track record, ease of use and in-depth campaign reporting. Whatever system you choose, carefully targeted email marketing can have an impressive impact, even for a modest budget. MIF’s latest campaign contributed to a ten-fold increase in traffic!

On Tuesday, 9 December 2008, Stiff Rowlands took to the streets of Manchester armed with a dodgy Santa outfit, a handful of £5 lottery scratch cards* and just one aim: to spread some Christmas cheer to random, unsuspecting members of the public.

This map forms a record of the events.

* Well, would you take food, drink or mystery gifts from a bargain-bin Santa?

Our redesign of the Manchester International Festival website launched last Thursday, 9 October with the announcement of  the first three events from their 2009 programme. Our approach was definitely “less is more”. With world-class acts such as Rufus Wainwright and Zaha Hadid, we really didn’t need the design to shout. We hope it provides a great online presence for all the brilliant shows and events taking place next summer.

MIF Marketing Director, Cathy Gallagher said:

“We chose Stiff Rowlands for their range of experience but also for their attitude and approach. They had an intuitive understanding of what we wanted and an appreciation of the particular challenges that an artist-led, commissioning Festival is likely to present. They’re particularly good at keeping calm and coming up with appropriate solutions. It’s been a great experience working with them.”

The Festival runs from 2 – 19 July 2009 at various venues across Manchester.