Portfolio Spotlight: Embrey Mill

AdsIntelligence helps a diverse collection of clients reach their even-more-diverse audiences. We mix unmatched creativity, proven marketing experience, and acute advertising intelligence to form the secret sauce to our many successes.

As an award-winning, full-service advertising agency that keeps its clients on the forefront of an evolving marketing landscape, we wanted to show some of those successes. And so, our portfolio spotlight illuminates Embrey Mill.

Embrey Mill is a new-home community just off I-95 in North Stafford, VA. It was artistically and purposefully designed to provide homeowners a vast array of amenities, scenery, and places where there is always something to do.

Embrey Mill is also a neighborhood that caters to a wide range of homebuyers. Families are an immense part of the community’s DNA, and with Quantico just 5 miles away, military families, specifically, have always been a key focus. With the active-adult Cascades at Embrey Mill section coming soon, the definition of “family” in Embrey Mill includes every age. And with a proposed Live/Work section, the meaning of “community” expands even more.

The challenge was to develop a campaign concept that applied to all these products and audience segmentations, while celebrating the community’s unifying spirit. It also needed to convey the strong sense of connectedness, adventure, and fun that make Embrey Mill such a desirable place to live.

We created an expression to encompass all the different audiences while making them feel like one connected community: EmbreyONE. It’s simple, playful, clever, and, most importantly, memorable. Because At Embrey Mill, each homeowner is part of the bigger whole and the abundance of amenities yields the promise that there is always “Something for EmbreyONE.”

Working as a team and building off each other’s ideas, this phrase blossomed into a series of rhyming couplets, each aimed at a specific audience or community feature. These couplets were blended with existing brand colors and fonts to create a unique campaign that felt both new and organically connected to previous marketing efforts. This complementary evolution is important to prevent brand shock (i.e., that disruption in perception when a brand completely changes its image) and continue to include all the audience segments already engaged.

By combining rhymes with the bright colors and fonts already in use, this new campaign had a very family-friendly feel. With children’s-book-like simplicity, we were able to impart all the most salient details about the community in an easy-to-digest format.

The couplets also provided messaging across a multitude of mediums, including TV/video, digital, social, out of home, and print media. They could be used singularly, for example, as a series of engaging social media posts, or collectively as narrative for a video.

This new campaign gave the community a refreshed feel, while maintaining everything that made Embrey Mill so special. It engaged its audiences with a fun and creative tone, instantly informing them of the familial and inclusive vibe of the community. The client was very happy with this new direction, and the campaign won a few GALA awards too.