The Rum Slinger is a Glasgow-based service offering its customers the ability to subscribe to a monthly delivery of three expertly selected rums from around the world.

Each month takes on a geographic theme, with tasting notes accompanying each letterbox-sized package.

Maguires were appointed to provide a social toolkit to give the start-up much-needed content to serve to prospective customers, at a time when the UK was still in lockdown.

We provided product photography tied to the theme of each release, a brand video, and a series of eye-catching typographic treatments to supplement their own organic offering.

Can Do is a collaborative enterprise that was launched in 2013, set up to support entrepreneurship and business innovation within Scotland.

Throughout the year they host a programme of large-scale events that bring SMEs and start-ups together to promote creativity and opportunity within their fields.

In 2021, Maguires were tasked with refreshing the existing brand identity, which would be used widely throughout their social media, website, and other digital platforms.

We approached the project by creating a folded typographic style, that together with a new colour palette and accompanying graphical elements, helped better position the brand in a forward-facing sector. Finally, we brought the brand to life with an intricate animated ident that uses kinitec motion that locks into place as the logo builds.

In recent years, Glasgow has developed a rich and diverse culinary scene with new restaurants and cuisines appearing on every main street. When new-kid-on-the-block Roberta’s burst on the scene in August 2021, Maguires were tasked with establishing a unique tone of voice and visual style for this glamorous City Centre restaurant and cocktail bar.

Serving primarily Italian food, Roberta’s is far from your typical ristorante, with plush velvet and leather finishes, rich warm woods, and a beautiful marble long bar for the late-night cocktail crowd. The undoubted hero of the culinary offering is the authentic wood-fired pizzas, handmade on site by famed pizzaiolo brothers Ciro and Massimo Potenza and cooked in a bespoke Neapolitan pizza oven imported from Italy.

The client was looking to capture the general buzz and ambiance of Roberta’s, so our creative studio developed a punchy new typographic style which initially featured in a series of pre-launch teaser animations and has continued to feature throughout our campaigns. Our film and photographic team also worked on site to capture the unique Roberta’s atmosphere, with pizza spinning, cocktail slinging, and story sharing all caught on camera to create a series of captivating social films.

Since launch in August 2021, Roberta’s social and digital numbers have increased, with over 2,000 on their mailing list and over 347,975 social impressions, ensuring their audience numbers are increasing month on month and engagement continues to grow.

Urban Grocer are a family-run business with a rich heritage in the fresh fruit and vegetables wholesaling industry, dating back over 70 years.

The Urban Grocer brand was launched in 2013 to supply fresh produce straight to restaurant kitchens. In 2020, against the backdrop of the first National lockdown, they decided to take that experience and expertise and offer a direct-to-consumer delivery service.

Customers can choose from a range of expertly curated fresh fruit and vegetable boxes as well as offering a range of premium pantry items and high-quality meat and poultry.

Maguires created a fresh brand identity and a bespoke suite of food photography in order to help the Urban Grocer brand ma­ke the transition to a UK-wide delivery service.

The new brand identity was launched in early December 2020, as part of a targeted social campaign. Maguires produced an animated explainer video to help showcase the service to new customers as well as a series of product-specific remarketing campaigns and seasonal box promotions and mailers.

As part of an ongoing creative retainer, we will be developing new marketing strategies to help expand their customer base, creating new content to improve social engagement and build brand recognition throughout the UK.

Princes Square is one of Glasgow’s best-loved shopping destinations.

Due to the global Covid-19 pandemic all non-essential retailers who resided in Princes Square were required to close their doors for several months, from late Spring to early Summer 2020.

When it was announced that shopping centres were finally allowed to reopen, there were a wide range of essential health and safety measures that were required to be implemented before reopening.

Maguires was instructed to develop a campaign which would both showcase this exciting reopening and also act as a set of clear guidelines for customers.

In order to ensure all its customers, and staff, were able to safely enjoy this new shopping experience, we developed ‘Keeping Safe, Keeping Social’.

The simplicity of the strapline helped to communicate the dual requirements of following the safety advice while still recognising the need to socialise with friends – something everyone had been deprived of during the long hard months of lockdown restrictions.

The colourful graphic style was based on the familiar ‘no access’ tape regularly seen throughout post-lockdown public spaces, most commonly seen as diagonal black and yellow stripes.

By utilising the brand colours developed for Princes Square in our 2019 After Hours campaign, we were able to bridge the gap between the ‘safe’ and ‘social’ elements.

This graphic style helped form the basis for a series of in-centre posters, banners and stickers. An instructional video was also designed and animated using this new style, providing a joined-up look-and-feel for all of the centre’s post-Covid communications.

The campaign continued throughout the Summer of 2020 and allowed Princes Square the flexibility to re-use campaign assets as and when required.

St Aloysius’ College is a leading independent school based in Glasgow.

In 2019, Maguires created the highly successful ‘The Start of Something Great’ campaign to promote their annual open day (view the full case study here).

One year later, and with the world in the throes of a global pandemic, the likelihood of a traditional face-to-face open day was slim. Anticipating this, the school briefed us to explore an alternative solution which helped prospective parents and pupils learn about the school in advance of applying.

We knew that a virtual open day would clearly be a necessity. This would allow for direct communication between parents, staff members, and pupils – both current and prospective. To this end, we engaged our events partner (and client) Cameron to discuss the requirements for a live virtual event.

Our ambition was to bridge the gap between the experience of a physical event and that of a virtual one. This would allow prospective parents to tour through the campus at their leisure, getting a sense of the school environment and the beauty of the city centre location.

Our solution was a bespoke, informative and feature-rich microsite that would provide a range of multimedia content which could be explored in advance of the live virtual event. The main body of the microsite was a series of six films that would help to tell the story of St Aloysius in greater detail. Using a range of interviews with staff, pupils and parents, coupled with reportage footage of the campus, facilities and daily school life, the final films each focused on a different element and resulted in over 20 minutes of high-quality content for viewing.

Alongside this, we commissioned a bespoke 3D map of the campus, drone footage of the building exteriors and a 360-degree interactive tour which showcased the inside of the main school buildings.

Finally, the virtual tour website provided a prospectus download (also designed by Maguires) and an online application form for the open day.

The site acted as a vital companion to our digital advertising campaign, which pushed traffic to an online applications page. The virtual tour site was then served to interested applicants as well as being pushed out as part of a separate, targeted social media campaign.

The results for the 2 virtual open days (Senior School, and the Junior School) were hugely encouraging. Since the campaign commenced in November, there have been 26,851 link clicks to the microsite from social channels. Campaign content served on social channels has had a total reach of 65,551 with 28,995 video views by early December 2020.

Having developed the highly successful, and award-winning, ‘Care to Join Us’ campaign for Quarriers, we were faced with a challenge on how to develop the visual content of the campaign during the first National lockdown. As both parties were required to stay at home, aside from an hour’s exercise a day, we had no means of shooting new footage of Quarriers staff in order to create fresh content for this year’s campaign.

We proposed using existing audio tracks of various Quarriers care workers, recorded as part of an earlier radio campaign, as the basis for a reimagined set of animated ads for this years’ social campaign.

By selecting three of the stores, as told by the Quarriers care workers, we create a series of playful animations, using a little ‘creative’ licence in the depiction of the scenes being described.

These three animations were brought to life by the wonderful Donna McAvoy and contained within the existing ‘Care to Join Us’ campaign banner.

We were then able to provide the Quarriers recruitment team with the required creative assets with which to run their unique lockdown recruitment drive via their own social channels.

Following a successful pitch, Maguires were appointed to produce a multi-channel creative campaign for leading independent school, St Aloysius’ College.

Our campaign was to focus on driving awareness of the school and increasing attendance at their upcoming open evening.

The school motto, Ad Majora Natus Sum – which translates as “I was born for greater things” – is the foundation upon which the school’s teaching philosophy is based. “Our young people not only have their academic potential ignited, but are also taught to look on the world with empathy, offering their talents and energies for the benefit of others”, states Headmaster Matthew Bartlett.

It’s clear that what makes St Aloysius’ College unique in a competitive sector is this ‘greater’ good, which became the heart of the campaign. We wanted to keep the existing ‘Great Things Happen in The Green Blazer’ as an overall brand strapline, but give this year’s campaign a more direct call-to-action, while remaining true to what makes the school special.

Our solution was to highlight that choosing to attend St Aloysius’ is ‘The Start of Something Great’, at whichever stage a pupil joins – from Kindergarten through to the Senior School. The use of the word ‘great’ gave us the ability to tie the campaign to the school’s traditions, while also promoting the many ‘great’ aspects of the school: the friendships, the opportunities, the facilities and, of course, the results.

The creative centred around an impactful collage style – bursting with activity, but with a singular ‘hero’ image at its core. This echoed the school’s ethos of “plac(ing) the formation of the whole person at the centre of all learning.”

All campaign photography was shot by Maguires, with the campaign film also being directed and edited by our in-house team. We developed the campaign creative across a multitude of assets, implementing them as part of a targeted online marketing strategy on Facebook and Instagram, with a bespoke canvas ad within Facebook that helped to streamline the sign-up process.

The campaign was highly successful, with a 52% increase on the previous year’s attendance figures.

One of our existing social clients, a Glasgow-based utilities consultancy, was looking to reinvent itself with a new brand name that better reflected its blue chip client list.

As well as the new brand name and identity, we were also tasked with the design and build of the accompanying website and digital marketing strategy.

One of the key objectives of the brief was to ensure the new brand would stand out in a very competitive and ever-changing industry.

It started with the name. After countless brainstorming sessions – in which we analysed the core offering of the business, its values, and its competitors – boxfish was born.

A rare and surprisingly agile creature, the boxfish is known for its impressive efficiency and streamlined movement; the way it cuts through the current with ease. For a company that prides itself on maximising cost efficiencies, saving its clients time and money – it was the perfect fit.

The boxfish’s vibrant blue and yellow colours gave us a vibrant and distinctive colour palette to work from, with its distinctive outline providing inspiration for the logo mark.

To help highlight the many services on offer at boxfish we developed an engaging illustrative style, showcasing each service with bespoke character illustrations.

The creation of a confident, conversational tone of voice – removing business speak and industry jargon – ensured that brand identity and brand voice aligned seamlessly.

Formerly Cameron Presentations, this forward-thinking, 70-year-old, family-run events company were looking to revitalise their entire communications landscape with a new look and feel across all media channels. Our mission was to design and produce a brand, website and digital comms strategy which projected Cameron’s evolution and confidence within an ever-changing and highly competitive industry.

Using ‘connecting ideas’ as a working strapline, we devised bespoke dot matrix patterns or ‘circle clouds’ which represented the notion of connectivity and alluded to light / sound wave patterns. This formed the cornerstone of the brand identity and allowed for extensive flexibility in creative execution. A vibrant and confident set of colour gradients were developed, working harmoniously with the circle clouds and providing the brand with a robust, flexible graphical backdrop. The clean, confident brand identity was then deployed in a number of new marketing materials, including letterheads, business cards, brochures, bespoke envelopes, van livery and signage. Added value came from the development of a bespoke desktop app which animates the circle cloud pattern, allowing for variations in both ring speed and wave width.

A clean, modular web build was designed and developed which projected Cameron as leaders and innovators in their sector and projected the company as an ‘Events Agency’.

Copy style was an integral aspect of the new Cameron identity – they were looking for a fresh and bold tone which differentiates them from their competitors and aligns with their ‘fun, friendly, creative’ ethos.  All copy for both offline and online comms was written from the ground up by Maguires’ in-house copywriting team, ensuring both brand identity and copy style align seamlessly.

Our social and digital strategy needed to be vibrant, on-brand and engaging, ensuring cut-through to captivate the Cameron crowd and increase social interactions. Using a mix of paid-for and organic content on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram, as well as a robust Google AdWords campaign, our strategy and content creation ensured huge spikes in engagement and massive increases in website click-throughs and online enquiries.

Check out the new website and some of the stats below.

www.wearecameron.com

Website sessions up by 70%
Page views up by 75%
User session duration up by 31%
Pages per session up by 18%

The stats above reflect the % change in key stats on the old Cameron website vs. the new Cameron website for a period of 30 days after launch.

Stravaigin is one of the best-known restaurants and bars in Glasgow. For over 20 years, they’ve taken pride in using local produce to create internationally-inspired Scottish dishes.

Maguires were approached to provide a distinctive advertising style and marketing strategy to promote Stravaigin’s monthly 5 course fine dining events. Each event had a unique culinary focus, with the menus taking inspiration from a particular country or world region.

The creative had to be distinctively ‘Stravaigin’ in style, whilst also illustrating the geographical focus of that particular month.

Taking influence from the reclaimed fixtures and salvaged antiques found inside Stravaigin, we identified geographical and culinary features from each of the countries to create unique artworks for each event. This led to multiple creative executions for our targeted social media advertising campaign, as well as posters, flyers, emails and menus for the event staff.

Having already redesigned the Stravaigin brand, we were keen to provide a strong creative rationale to tie all of these events together along with the new brand. As ‘stravaig’ is an old Scots word meaning ‘to wander’, we proposed presenting each of the events as part of a series, which we called ‘One Night Wanders’.

Now recognised as Scotland’s Theme Park, M&D’s is unique in Scotland. There are over 70 rides and attractions throughout the park, including thrill rides, kids’ rides, 18 hole miniature golf, glow in the dark indoor bowling, a massive indoor complex, a gigantic soft play area, bars, restaurants and an indoor tropical rainforest.

Maguires were tasked with updating the marketing strategy and creative look and feel for the 2018 season, to appeal to a teenage audience.

We developed a series of playful images showcasing the variety and the excitement on offer at M&D’s, with the ‘hero’ of each image being ‘text speak’ associated with a fun visit to M&D’s.
The campaign ran across all print and digital communications, as well as a substantial outdoor campaign.