Digital Hive Mind, a Rockford-based advertising and creative agency, has developed a billboard campaign for Forest City Gear designed to spotlight careers in precision manufacturing and celebrate the people behind the world-changing work happening throughout the region.
The campaign development began earlier this year when Forest City Gear approached DHM with a series of employee portraits captured inside the facility by shareholder and Mindy Joy Photography owner Mindy Young. Rather than traditional corporate photography, Young photographed Forest City Gear team members as the heroes of their environment—using dramatic lighting, smoke, machinery, and the atmosphere of the shop floor to create imagery with an almost cinematic, action-movie quality.
DHM saw an opportunity to feature those images in a workforce recruitment campaign that presents manufacturing careers in a striking light.
Using Young’s photography as the centerpiece, DHM developed a series of billboards that puts Forest City Gear employees front and center. Bold typography and messaging complement the dramatic portraits, giving the people and the work the same larger-than-life treatment more commonly associated with athletes, performers, and other cultural icons.
The goal is simple: make the trades look as appealing as they are.
Forest City Gear manufactures precision gears for some of the world’s most demanding applications, with its work supporting industries and technologies that extend far beyond the Stateline region. The billboard campaign brings that story closer to home by focusing on the skilled people whose craftsmanship makes that work possible.
The campaign also supports Forest City Gear’s broader commitment to workforce development and introducing more people to careers in advanced manufacturing. By showing real employees in their real working environment, the creative challenges outdated perceptions of manufacturing and presents the trades as highly skilled, technology-driven careers with an impact that can reach around the world.
The billboards will appear throughout the Stateline region, bringing the faces of local manufacturing to commuters and communities across northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin.
The campaign continues DHM’s longstanding creative partnership with Forest City Gear, spanning advertising, branding, photography, video, trade show exhibits, and other initiatives designed to communicate the company’s precision manufacturing capabilities and culture.
