Case Studies

Alpha Kappa Psi is a business fraternity serving women and men alike based in Indianapolis, IN, and they represent one of our longest and steadiest client relationships to date. As a non-residential fraternity (the oldest business fraternity in the nation, in fact!), much of AKPsi’s focus is on the continuing education of its membership, from undergrad through matriculation and into the workforce. As such, the need for consistent business-related content is significant, and Metonymy has provided blog content to students and alums alike once per week for nearly five years without interruption. We’ve also become the fraternity’s go-to content partner, standing by whenever a need arises to discuss other writing projects, including their quarterly publication, The Diary.

It can be difficult for many brands to find writers who can handle their subject matter. This was the case with Bass Pro Shops, one of the country’s biggest names in the outdoors. As many brands do, Bass Pro Shops trusted a number of agencies with their marketing needs, but found that they were consistently coming up short when it came to providing content for 1Source, their lifestyle blog designed to help outdoors enthusiasts succeed at their chosen sports. Metonymy Media was contracted by a third-party agency to provide just that support, relying not only on our own love for the outdoors and experience with fly-fishing in the Montana wilderness, but also on our ability to source subject matter expertise and package it in a way that’s approachable to a client’s target audiences.

In a world where everybody can access any information they need on a device that fits in their pocket, every company becomes a technology company. iLAB, a software quality testing company with offices in Johannesburg, Brisbane, London, and Indianapolis, knows this better than most. Their clients—banks, big business, healthcare organizations, even government entities—all live and die by the quality of their technology, and they rely on iLAB to make sure their many complicated pieces of custom software work together and serve the needs of end users. In turn, iLAB relies on Metonymy Media to help them speak not only to tech people, but to business leaders who need to know their tech will work when it needs to. In addition to providing content writing and strategy consulting services to bolster all of iLAB’s external marketing, we also help them communicate with their vast internal team of over 600 employees around the world.

There’s something about the non-profit world that really draws us in. Maybe it’s the chance to tell real stories of people making a difference in others’ lives, or maybe it’s how service organizations give us hope for tomorrow. Maybe, like in the case of Katalyst, it’s the infectious energy the people bring into our office for every meeting. When Nicole, the visionary behind this new offshoot of Kiwanis International, came to us with a plan to start a service hub for adults looking to give back, we couldn’t help but get on board. Through our voice and messaging workshop and our time collaborating with Nicole on web copy, we helped Nicole give some structure to her story as she prepared to launch the new organization.

National Trade Supply, LLC is an E-Commerce retailer based in Greenwood, IN that specializes in filters for home refrigerators and furnaces. Originally, they simply resold OEM and third-party filters, but have since gotten into the manufacturing game. After getting burned in a big way by their previous digital marketing partner, NT Supply’s marketing department was reticent to trust outsiders with their content. We were brought in on a short-term basis to help them find their voice as they continued to build out their internal resources—an arrangement we happily fit into. Over the course of about one year, we worked with NT Supply to breathe new creative life into their E-commerce blog and supported them with content writing and editing services. With our help, they eventually were ready to handle content internally, and we passed the baton to their fantastic team of writers in house.

When a client of Scofield Digital Storytelling came to them for help producing a series of videos for an upcoming training event, it quickly became clear that this was no ordinary project. Scofield’s client, a national civil engineering firm, was well aware that training videos had plenty of potential to lull a roomful of employees to sleep before it taught them anything about their work. With that in mind, they wanted to shoot something more creative and tell a story, one full of humor that would be easily relatable to their employee base. Scofield brought Metonymy Media in and, after a bit of creative brainstorming, we suggested coming up with our own take on the awkward workplace mockumentary format made famous by The Office. The result of this super fun collaboration was a script written by us, which Scofield turned into a fully-produced three-part film series documenting the struggles of engineers trying to overcome the steep demands of a client and the shortsightedness of their well-meaning, but largely incompetent, boss.

It’s rare that we get a chance to help someone craft their story right from the very start, and Trail Crest Brewing Company is an organization with quite the story to tell. An upstart brewpub based in Flagstaff, AZ, Trail Crest is a place that aims to be part brewery, part restaurant, and part community center for the many outdoors enthusiasts who visit or call Flagstaff home. The owners, avid hikers and runners themselves, were referred to us as they sought help taking all the passion in their hearts and the story in their minds and turning it into the kind of content that can help build a community. We worked with them in a voice and messaging workshop, helped provide some structure to their future content marketing strategy, and wrote web copy for their website.

It’s common for a brand to hire us to work as something of a loudspeaker for their internal experts. Maybe we’ll ghostwrite for an executive, or source case study information from project people on the inside. Far rarer is it that someone contracts us to help them write for vegetation. At Two-EE’s Winery in Huntington, IN, a simple mission drives everything they do: let the grapes speak for themselves. That’s evident in the rare wines they make out of arcane varietals, and also in their dedication to producing wine from grapes that are grown locally in the Midwest. We worked with the Two-EE’s team through one of our voice and messaging workshops, and also gave them a full-bodied content marketing strategy to help them identify their best opportunities to give their grapes a platform and get locals excited to fall in love with their wines.

UIndy has played an important role in the growth and development of Metonymy Media. As our founder’s alma mater, it has served as a great connection for sourcing interns, and we’ve found a great like-minded partner in the school’s English department. Flatteringly, we’ve also found many at UIndy to be big fans of what we’re doing, to the extent that we have managed to find work with three completely unrelated departments of the school. First, we were brought in by the school’s Admissions department to write for Inside UIndy, a magazine aimed at recruiting high school students. Next, the marketing department called on us for help in writing new content for each of the School of Arts and Science’s many departments. Finally, President Robert Manuel enlisted us to help tell the story of Vision 2030, his master plan for the school’s future, in a report for the school’s community and the city of Indianapolis at large.

When a large national insurance company sought to build an innovative experience in order to train their call center employees, it must have felt a bit like writing the plot to an Avengers film. This big bad was way too big for one agency alone to slay, and it was up to VisionThree, an Indianapolis-based experiential design firm, to build out the A-team. Metonymy Media was chosen as the writing component of the squad, which was also filled out with education experts, digital designers and developers, videographers and editors, and engineers to build something like a museum exhibit. The result? A series of interactive, video-driven games and activities to help customer service representatives display more empathy on their calls. In the process, we developed characters, concepted branching interactive stories, and wrote scripts for the final product.

In our first meeting with Women & Hi Tech, one member of their board said that being a woman in the tech industry is like being alone on a small boat in the middle of a wide ocean. For nearly two decades, this visionary non-profit has aimed to give women in tech not only a life preserver, but a whole fleet to meet up with and discuss the challenges of building a career in what has traditionally been a male-dominated field. As you can already see, these experts know their story well and can eloquently communicate it; they merely needed Metonymy’s help to formalize that story and clean up their top-down communication. We engaged Women & Hi Tech in a voice and messaging workshop, helped to re-write their website, and have provided ongoing services capturing their events and telling the ongoing story of their membership, who are today’s leaders in the growing technology industry in Indianapolis.

Some industries are downright difficult for outsiders to understand, and we can’t think of a better example of this than the life settlement market. When we first met the experts at Life Settlement Advisors, it was a crash course in how life insurance works and the limited options seniors have when they can no longer afford to pay their premiums (or when they no longer want to). Since then, we’ve played an instrumental role in helping LSA increase and nurture leads, step up their SEO rankings, and produce quality, engaging content through some voice and messaging work, web copywriting, blogging, email marketing, social content writing, and more.

When Metonymy Media was founded in 2011, HCCMIS was our first client and the original inspiration for our vision to professionalize creative writers. Months after their last internal copywriter left, the marketing team at HCCMIS (an insurance company with a strict compliance department and unique rules for writing to ESL audiences) were struggling to keep up with their content needs. SEO companies failed to provide quality writing services, and it was costly and time-consuming to manage a mercenary army of freelance writers. Metonymy Media’s team of writers ended up filling their need for content fully, writing blog posts, email campaigns, eBooks, case studies, web copy, and social content.