How Beutler Ink Won 4 Davey Awards in 2022
The annual International Davey Awards were established to recognize the “achievements of the “Creative Davids” who derive their strength from big ideas, rather than stratospheric budgets.” It’s an award for the best small shops worldwide, and we are humbled to announce that Beutler Ink won four Davey Awards for 2022!
This isn’t just about us tooting our own horn, however. We firmly believe in the business value of industry awards, both for us as a strategic creative agency and for our clients. Awards and award-winning work can be valuable in brand strategy. They can:
Burnish your brand equity with key audiences (customers, investors, and recruits)
Extend your brand reach into new channels
Offer “social proof” of the quality and value of your brand
We don’t set out specifically to win awards when we start a project, but we do set out to create award-quality work. And the fact we won four Daveys this year is no accident; it’s part of an intentional strategy on behalf of ourselves and our clients.
Here’s how we did it.
Gold Davey Award
Social Features-Best Brand Social Page
Cheeca Lodge & Spa is a beloved luxury resort in Islamorada, Florida. When Beutler Ink took the lead on the property’s social media strategy, it already had a vibrant and dedicated Facebook community. To enable a new generation of travelers to find Cheeca and fall in love, we turned to Instagram.
We started the account from scratch, mixing user-generated content (UGC) with professional assets. Performance analysis quickly revealed guest content was resonating with our audience more than staged photos, so we encouraged hashtag adoption by leveraging additional UGC with discounts and contests. Consistent, high-impact content deployed strategically attracted a new, passionate audience.
Cheeca Lodge & Spa now has over 65k followers on Instagram, standing as one of the Florida Keys’ top-performing hospitality Instagram accounts. Through a combination of carefully curated UGC and partnerships with content creators, our posts organically reach hundreds of thousands of people every month while maintaining a minimum 5% engagement rate, nearly double the industry standard.
We identified that this success would have compounding returns with official recognition, so we submitted for and won a Gold Davey Award for Best Brand Social Page on behalf of Cheeca.
Gold Davey Award
Website Redesign
Over the years, we had developed three central service lines—design, social media, and Wikipedia. And while all three had thrived, we nonetheless struggled to explain how they connected. At a granular level, we understood these services in and out, but our website wasn’t effectively communicating why we offered them and why it matters.
So in 2021 we initiated a series of “change projects”; internal growth initiatives designed to surface our core values, purpose, and positioning. Long before we wrote a shred of copy for the new website, we committed to working together to find our core truths and express them through messaging we could all align on.
After years of helping clients with their own “Brand Strategy,” now we were doing it for ourselves.
We rebuilt our site from the ground up, from rethinking our site map to reworking our value proposition and visitor flow. We took a fresh approach to our verbal identity, with fresh messaging and positioning.
And we updated our visual identity as well, creating all new illustrations, page layouts, and site aesthetics.
Having operated on ourselves, we were eager to show the world our capabilities, so we submitted to and won a Gold Davey award for Website Redesign.
Silver Davey Award
Individual Achievement, Art Illustration
As a creative agency, we believe in the power of storytelling. By creating a single, densely packed illustration, we’re able to tell the story of the year that was—dozens of stories, in fact. This project gives us the opportunity to invite the audience to participate in looking back, showing (rather than telling) the people and events that shaped the year. It also gives us the chance to partner with and showcase a new guest designer each year! Our motto is “We find your story and help you tell it,” and “Here’s To” is how we find and tell the story of each year.
Like any year, 2021 had more storylines and characters than we could possibly fit into one single illustration. Some, of course, are no-brainers, while some merely hold a soft spot in our hearts. Ultimately, we sought to balance widely recognizable, can’t-miss newsmakers with the smaller stories from the past 12 months.
This year, we wanted a setting that would speak to the ongoing pandemic without that being the central story. We landed on framing the depiction with an Olympic stadium; the cardboard “fans” in the audience are a grim reminder of COVID’s ongoing impact without dominating the illustration. This went into our graphic design brief for Quincy Ray, our featured artist for 2021.
Since launching in 2013, the series has generated impressive media coverage (including HuffPost, Fast Company, Gizmodo, Los Angeles Times and Laughing Squid), website traffic (especially via Reddit), and social shares. Commenters love to identify the depictions and reminisce about shows, sports, and memes.
For 2021, we wanted to be able to leverage official recognition to drive future business, so we applied for a Davey Award, winning a Silver Medal for Individual Achievement - Illustration.
Silver Davey Award
Social Features - Copywriting
Founded in 1931, Congdon & Coleman is Nantucket’s longest-standing real estate brokerage, representing buyers, sellers, and one of the largest inventories of vacation rentals.
They approached Beutler Ink wanting their Instagram presence to reflect their expertise in Nantucket real estate and their following to be on par with their comp set, most of which is much younger than Congdon & Coleman.
For an immediate impact, we began sharing user-generated content, familiarizing ourselves, and the Congdon & Coleman brand, with local creators. As the audience grew, we began reintroducing information about available real estate, ensuring that images were seasonally appropriate and following trends. Congdon & Coleman’s Instagram account was even credited with being ahead of trends in a New York Post article about the “coastal grandmother aesthetic”.
In fact, our strategy was so successful we were recognized with a Silver Davey Award for copywriting on behalf of Congdon & Coleman!
Partner With Us
Winning an award for your work is satisfying. It’s validating to know that the resources you put into strategy and execution delivered a return. But it’s more than that, too—it’s a way to elevate your brand, to position yourself in the eyes of your community as a leader in your space.
We’d love to talk about partnering on some award-winning work with you. Reach out, start a conversation, and let’s see if we can be bragging on the project we did together next year!
