The Shop

Makers of shape.

Union AdWorks is a creative, totally flat, full-service design-driven advertising agency located in the outer banks of Detroit, Michigan.

On paper, our silhouette may be familiar in that at the end of the day we provide our clients with strategies and deliverables as any agency should. For us, the difference is what we deliver and how we go about it. We apply a design discipline to every undertaking and use the remarkably diverse talents of our crew to hone in on targets with a precision that is at once computer-guided and instinctually natural. The shape of the pill, the color of the coating, the cap and the bottle all deliver important messages about the medicine to us. Why? Because they do the same for the consumer.

Whether it is a photograph, a layout, a headline, a story, a website, application, video or packaging, at Union AdWorks, each and every venture takes on a unique approach.

Day in and night out, it is our goal to provide our marketing partners with an approach that differentiates their brand, elevates awareness, amplifies messaging and engages consumers through each and every visual piece of communication and crafted touchpoint. We look our best when we make others look better. Our pride is fueled by making our partners proud.

Our Story

Layers are for cakes. We go straight for the icing.

Union AdWorks saves its savviest marketing maneuvers for the clients it serves. We are a 50-person team of high-talent individuals who bring an approach to every assignment that is anything but typical. Each and every member is multi-dimensional in expertise yet our architecture allows us to toss jump drives over cubicle walls and make decisions with the precision of a Final Cut splice.

Knowing the biggest of ideas can often be squashed by timelines and budgets doesn’t prevent our creatives from finding a way to implement the biggest of ideas. A little sweat, tears, and adrenaline of our art directors and writers, as well as the blood of an account manager, are not out of the question. We live and breathe our concepts and we know how to execute them. This is where the difference shows. We’re small enough to draw a project’s direct line from the front door to the back in the amount of time the creative brief still sits on the top floor at a bigger agency.

We’re also big enough to have made a name for ourselves, bring in some big agency experience, and lure a handful of Jedis from the tech-programming trenches and art school lofts of Detroit.

Our designers, art directors, copywriters, art buyers, print and video producers, product information specialists, legal counsel and carefully assembled account team know what it takes to make it up every mountain. They also have the best sherpas on speed dial. Between our in-house talents and our talent acquisition acumen, only the leash, not the vision, limits our scope.

The greatest sign of true expertise is the ability to recognize and engage experts. —Curt Catallo, Creative Director

The Work

A journey of talent.

Print
Union AdWorks designs, writes, and produces the print automotive showroom catalogs and brochures for Chrysler, Jeep, Dodge, Ram, SRT, FIAT and Mopar brands. We also support the Chrysler Group LLC advertising initiatives with a stream of consumer-direct marketing tools. As the central hub for Chrysler’s asset creation, we influence look and feel for Chrysler’s brands and work with specific AORs to deliver assets and creative direction through a very active conduit.

Graphic Design
To our in-house custom typography obsessives, InDesign specialists, Photoshop-as-a-first-language makers, and artisans of print and digital execution, the shop floor is home base. Our lead designers literally set the tone of each and every piece that leaves here with the UA stamp. Our resident logo guru designed that, too.

Video Editing & Production
Come visit our editing suite and check out the backroom lighting where the Jedis reside. They do amazing things with auto show compilations, presentations, digital books, interviews, music tracks and sound syncing. Music blasts loudly and unexpectedly as the obscure pontification of popular culture and the state of the world fuel the camaraderie that is at times enviable, revolting and embarrassing at others. Yeah, we try not to venture back there unless we have to either.

Union AdWorks — The D-Show's Best in Show Winner for Non-Commercial Cinema. As an extension of the Imported from Detroit campaign, Union AdWorks worked with Eight Mile Style and Chrysler to create a music video for the Selected of God's performance of "Lose Yourself" as featured in the 2011 "Born of Fire" Super Bowl spot. The "Born of Choir" video was designed to send people to Apple's iTunes Store where the track could be downloaded. The proceeds of the downloaded track benefit the Imported from Detroit Project.

New Media

iPad APPS

Padalogs™
The Jeep Grand Cherokee iPad app was the Alpha test. The job: leverage assets from our all-new 2011 luxury SUV’s award winning catalog that we had just pulled off the printer. Make them move, stretch, swipe and play. Add a few bells and whistles, and call it a day, in tandem with the vehicle’s launch. Actually, call it done within several weeks upon the client’s request to give it a whirl. And the whirlwind hasn’t slowed since. We can legitimately say we’ve cornered the look, information and usability market on bringing the touch-based high-res vehicle tour to Apple’s 9"x7" screen. With 15 live and continuously updated apps now available on iTunes, the pipeline’s process is flowing with momentum as we embark on a smartphone app program.

WEB — DESIGN, BUILD, WRITE, HOST AND LISTEN

Alpine Electronics
Assigned to display the introduction of this client’s Tier One sound-system partnership with our OEM client made perfect sense. Impressing their hi-fi engineers with our design-driven savvy was also second nature. Coding flash assets and configuring 3D models and product-component logistics are the back-end processes that are only spoken of inside the agency’s programming studio. Getting our creative team to agree on the site’s embedded music-artist tracks that continuously streamed from our talent acquisition manager to their headphones took some serious team-building immersion. Shortly following its launch, the client called with the next assignment.

Badass On The Shelf
Just one of the many website features we created for our hometown-celebrity client’s American Badass Beer Co., including the design and development of the site itself. The spot, also slated to air on FOX Sports TV, means to capture the bad-boy attitude of the bottle itself — Don’t leave it alone on the cooler shelf with those lightweight, fancy micros and whatnot. Clean up on aisle five? It was worth it, as usual, to break our automotive mindset, have a little fun, and always somehow get dirty when we’re producing something for this client.

Print Gallery

Catalogs | Print Ads | Brochures

New Media gallery

iPad Applications | Websites

Video gallery

things we like

Inspire us.

I Need Nothing - A nearly useless odyssey.

April 25, 2012

Caine's Arcade

A 9 year old boy - who built an elaborate cardboard arcade inside his dad's used auto part store - is about to have the best day of his life.

Help Caine's Scholarship Fund:
cainesarcade.com

Making Future Magic: iPad Light Painting

Making Future Magic: iPad light painting from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

March 28, 2012

This film explores playful uses for the increasingly ubiquitous ‘glowing rectangles’ that inhabit the world.

We use photographic and animation techniques that were developed to draw moving 3-dimensional typography and objects with an iPad. In dark environments, we play movies on the surface of the iPad that extrude 3-d light forms as they move through the exposure. Multiple exposures with slightly different movies make up the stop-frame animation.

Chipotle - Back to the Start

March 28, 2012

Coldplay's haunting classic 'The Scientist' is performed by country music legend Willie Nelson for the soundtrack of the short film entitled, "Back to the Start." Download the song now available on iTunes. Label and proceeds benefit The Chipotle Cultivate Foundation.

The film, by film-maker Johnny Kelly, depicts the life of a farmer as he slowly turns his family farm into an industrial animal factory before seeing the errors of his ways and opting for a more sustainable future. Both the film and the soundtrack were commissioned by Chipotle to emphasize the importance of developing a sustainable food system.

Nike Better World
nikebetterworld.com
March 27, 2012

We will not rest until every living, breathing person on this planet has access to sport.

I Need Nothing - A nearly useless odyssey.

February 10, 2012

I Need Nothing - A nearly useless odyssey.

‘I need nothing’ is an original concept from Cãoceito + Burdman, shot by Moopie. Its premier happens as a tangential project of EXD’11.

‘Useless’ - the motto of biennial’s current edition - was the kick-off, and the thought on how album covers (vinyls, in this case) enable people to ‘listen with the eyes’ the main goal of the project. At a time where digital audio files dominate but where traditional mediums still seduce fans, the album covers, being useless for some, stay relevant for others.

Elements of design

08

June 20, 2011 | Posted by: Admin | 15 Comments

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Contact

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Rochester Hills, MI

Union AdWorks is located in one of those easy to miss corners of a suburban industrial park. Squirreled away within the former Mitsubishi Robotics showroom, our open floor plan fosters collaboration and creates a distinct separation from the big agency vibe from which most of our talent sprang. Apart from being skating distance from the Chrysler headquarters, there’s something to be said for a low profile when the creative wheels need to crank at full speed.

Contact details
1591 Star Batt
Rochester Hills, MI 48309
Tel:+1 248 537 0300

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