Leverage Scores With

Playful Use Of Scrabble

What’s an eight-letter word for winner? How about L-e-v-e-r-a-g-e?

The Leverage Marketing Group of Newtown has been named a recipient of the 2000 American Graphic Design Award for “excellence in communication and graphic design” for its creation of pocket Scrabble boards sent out to announce its advertising and marketing services.

The firm won in the marketing/self-promotion category for the miniature Scrabble game key chain and accompanying brochure. Leverage, plus its pre-merger companies, Liazon and Goodwick Associates, were spelled out using Scrabble tiles under the theme “Play to Win in 2000.” The theme was chosen because Scrabble was first marketed from Newtown in 1948; Goodwick Associates was incorporated in Newtown in 1984, and Liazon was established in Newtown in 1994.

The winning piece was one of 10,000 entries in the competition sponsored by the commercial arts publication Graphic Design: USA, according to Laura K. Roth, the awards director. Earlier this year the piece won a Communicator Award.

The Leverage creative team who designed the Scrabble keychain includes Pat Ueckerman, concept/artist/production manager; David Goodwick, agency principal and senior creative director, and Peter Howland, senior writer and associate creative director. This is the third year in a row that the team has been nationally recognized for “excellence in communication and graphic design” by the publication.

“We’re pleased that our first project under our new name [Leverage] is now a two-time award winner,” said Mr Goodwick. “Since Scrabble and our component agencies all have their roots in Newtown, not to mention that we’re all in the business of marketing high-scoring words, we thought this made a lot of sense.”

Prior to merging last fall, Liazon and Goodwick Associates were not strangers to winning awards. Liazon, a consumer sales promotion firm with such national accounts as Sprint, Coca-Cola, and Alamo Rent-a-Car, was a co-recipient last summer of the industry’s prestigious Reggie Award.

Goodwick Associates, a 15-year-old business-to-business advertising company with such clients as Sealed Air and Ridgefield Bank, was previously a four-time winner of the American Graphic Design Award for projects under the direction of art director Heather Patrick.