IDP x Lavendr - When being ourselves really paid off

If you’ve been driving around Albuquerque, specifically southbound on I-25, you may have already seen part of our latest project! Earlier this year, we began a huge project that involved not one, but two campaigns for Bernalillo County and the Illegal Dumping Partnership, which is a multi-agency task force founded to help combat illegal dumping in Bernalillo County. The two campaigns focused on the issue of illegal dumping of tires and big furniture/items in the county.

We’d been lucky enough to have worked with BernCo just two years prior to this on a similar campaign dubbed “Don't Trash Our Home,” so we were ready to hit the ground running on these new campaigns. BernCo and IDP were looking to refresh the messaging, while not straying too far from the work we’d done in the past. Through a lot of creative conversation and brainstorming sessions, we found ourselves back at the Lavendr drawing board.

There were a lot of points to hit with these two campaigns. One is for illegal dumping, showing people that there’s a really great, free, easy service that helps you get rid of your large things. The other is to reduce the dumping of scrap tires. At first glance, you may think this would be a very straightforward PSA about the “how to’s” and details of using these two services. However, we as a team find creativity in everything we do. We pitched a few ideas that covered the “Straightforward” approach and then some that had a fun twist on sharing the message. It’s important to us to allow our clients to feel confident that we can achieve their goals, but it’s always best when their goals and our creativity collide. To our delight, they chose our more fun and creative pitch.

For the tire dumping campaign, our ingenious Project Manager at the time, Becka Myers, came up with a great idea to pay homage to a beloved and nostalgic Campbell’s Soup commercial. You know the one.

It was fun to make, and it’s fun to watch. It goes beyond targeting just business owners, but invites everyone to play a part in making sure tires don’t have to travel too far to end up in the right place.

For the general illegal dumping campaign, we came up with a couple of fun options, both trying to educate citizens on the county’s most convenient dumping service, free large item pickup, and explaining how accessible this service is.

This was born from our Creative Director, Joshua Romero, who found a great way to emphasize just how easy it can be to do hard things! Especially when the county can do it for you - for free.

We got to not only create campaign ideas, but push them to their limits in order to present them in more modes than we normally get to do. You can find these campaigns on TV, hear them on the radio, like them on social media, drive by the billboards, and read tri-folds. Crafting the message to fit different types of assets helped us learn how to successfully juggle a lot of work with a small but powerful team.

Our team was also made stronger by bringing in some good friends who are even better creators. Both of these projects required a lot of hands on deck, and they couldn’t have been accomplished without the help of members of our Creators Community. One of the core principles at Lavendr is to always find opportunities for collaboration with other creators in our community. So this was a perfect time to bring in Joshua Valenzuela, Brandon Bennett, Andy Nyikos, and Nathan Mieras. They made the vision come to life with grip, script supervising, BTS photos, and more. Neither of these campaigns would have been as successful without them!

We’re proud of these two campaigns for many reasons, but the most exciting of all is that we got to make content that felt original, fun, required some creative thinking/producing, and felt like us while accomplishing the goal of helping the community and the environment. Every step of the way, the job was clear, because it was so clearly our vision.

So thank you to BernCo and to IDP for allowing us in on another wonderful opportunity, and we hope you all have as much fun seeing these campaigns as we had making them!