John Raymond

This is another commercial that I wrote and directed for Playhouse Square. It was to help promote their 2007 Broadway Series website. More details on the contest to come.

The Education Department at Playhouse Square asked me to come up and produce a commercial to promote their lunch-time “Speak Up Classes.” These classes help working professionals with public speaking. They wanted something outside the box and funny. So we shot this in the winter of 2007.

In the fall of 2006, I was charged with coming up with some kind of interactive contest to target a “younger audience.” The typical target audience for Playhouse Square is women age 60-65. We felt that Spamalot was a great show to test out this sort of contest.

After doing some research, I came up with a Viral Video Contest. This was a relatively new thing at the time. I carefully studied some of the successful campaigns and broke down the elements that got the campaign off the ground. With no budget, I had to get creative and wrote and starred in an edgy viral video to help promote the contest.

We launched a mini-site (which I designed and constructed) along with the video. The video got over 1000 views in the first four days of launch. We utilized html email blasts, myspace and facebook to help promote the contest.

The contest lasted a month and got 5 submissions. Here’s an archive page that contains some of the submissions from the contest: http://www.playhousesquare.us/spamvideocontest/.

Playhouse Square’s upper management saw the potential in the work we had done with no budget. The non-profit organization committed over $5,000 for a high end digital video camera and an internship to help us continue to do more of these types of videos.

I worked at Playhouse Square as the Online Marketing Coordinator for almost three years. Playhouse Square is the largest performing arts center outside of New York City and they own and operate seven theaters in downtown Cleveland, Ohio

I was in charge of managing their website and their mass html e-blast campaign. While there I implemented several mini-sites which helped market special events and many of their subscription series.

One of the most important projects I worked on was the redesign of the Playhouse Square external website. When I came on board in 2004, the site had just been redesigned. The goal of that redesign was to allow people to search through and purchase tickets for shows.

By 2006, the PSC website had expanded and the site needed to be changed to allow people to more easily navigate the website. I sketched out a redesign in photoshop and had implemented the redesign in December of 2006. I implemeted a javascript pop up navigation as well as restructured the homepage to showcase all the different things that were going on at Playhouse Square. The image show here was what I launched in 2006. If you go to the current site, http://www.playhousesquare.org, you will see that the structure of the site remains.