When Tropicana came to us and said “let’s do something with artificial intelligence”, my first thought was, kinda tough when you’re orange juice. My second thought was, let’s remove the letters AI from the name, since there’s nothing artificial about it. And thus, Tropicana became Tropcn. We launched at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas, got covered by everyone from CNN to AdAge, The Drum loved it, and it earned 1.6 billion impressions. That’s 1 of every 5 people on planet Earth.
In my 15 years on Porsche, I’ve led their most successful new-car launches, created award-winning, iconic work, written ads the client has framed and hung on their office walls — and would have done it all for free.
These are a few of my favorite things.
These are the two ads the Porsche client has hanging on the wall at their headquarters in Atlanta. Two-page spreads in the New York Times. They’re my favorite ads I’ve ever written. The client said they were some of their favorite Porsche ads ever too. I like to think it’s because they captured the elusive truth of what a Porsche is.
When launching the 2024 Cayenne, I was inspired by something I’d read where Hemingway once bet he could make his friend cry with a 6-word story: “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.” That inspired this idea: really fast stories inspired by the Cayenne.
I created Porsche’s most important and successful launch ever, for the Panamera. Built around the car being another branch on the Porsche family tree, it included this iconic spot, a feature-length IFC doc featuring Jerry Seinfeld and other Porsche owners, a UGC-driven site linking the Porsche family tree of owners, YouTube outtakes that were like crack cocaine to loyalists, even a coffee table book that sat in the Porsche HQ waiting room for years. You might say it was a big idea.
The Everyday Magic campaign, the definition of a disruptive idea. It had the audacity to say you could drive a two-seat sports car every day, to the hardware store, PTA meetings, the Piggly Wiggly. In recessionary times, it may well have saved the 911, Boxster and Cayman. And it was recognized by the One Show, FWA, the Webbys and Communication Arts.
The "Time To Get In" campaign targeted people who had the itch to buy a Porsche, but hadn't scratched it yet. It featured celebrity owners like Red Hot Chili Peppers guitar god Dave Navarro (before he got punched in the face by Perry Farrell) and Instagram stories that teased you into taking the plunge.
Part of the fun of working on Porsche is defeating misconceptions. This campaign attacked the idea that a Porsche is just a trophy car for poseurs.
Is a car designed by a committee a bad thing? It depends on the committee. The above was a real wang-dang-doodle of a production that shot in Germany, Spain and the Austrian Alps. And I missed it because I had some dumb stage shoot in LA. Life’ll kill ya sometimes.
Everybody knows race car drivers. But nobody knows race car drivers. Teased in three short trailers, “The Enduring Bond” was a longform episodic series that peeled the curtain back on the most elite drivers in the world, revealing them to be the regular (sort of) Joes they are.
To launch the new 911, we traveled to Rennsport, which is like Woodstock for Porsche loyalists, and made this film for about what most spots spend on craft service. Watch it and tell me it’s not the most killer thing ever. Props to shooter Luke Partridge.
Sometimes on Porsche, you just gotta write a good line. This is the first ad I ever sold on the brand. Not bad for a beginner.
My mother-in-law died of Alzheimer’s. So working for the world’s largest organization fighting the disease has been one of the honors of my career.
I could not be more proud of this work.
For the Alzheimer's Association's first donations campaign, we created Generation Hope, which refuses to see Alzheimer's as a death sentence. Generation Hope included none other than Samuel L. Jackson and Diedrich Bader, who you know as Rex Kwan Do from "Napoleon Dynamite" and Lawrence from "Office Space". The result: a 133% increase on donations. No joke.
For the Walk To End Alzheimer's, the world's largest fundraiser to fight the disease, we needed a big statement. And we made it: one day there will be millions of survivors of Alzheimer's, and it will be beautiful.
We live in hyper-partisan times. But everyone can agree on ending Alzheimer's. This campaign aired on the presidential debates, as well as platforms like Fox News, MSNBC and Breitbart.
The symptoms of Alzheimer’s can lay hidden, especially in poorer communities that don’t have access to doctors. So this campaign dramatized that point by actually hiding symptoms in the work itself.
Our core job as marketers is to build brands.
When I started on Edward Jones, they were seen as hicks in the sticks, barely a blip on the financial-services radar.
Now they compete with the Fidelity’s and Schwab’s of the world, on a fraction of their spend. And their assets under management now exceed $1 trillion.
That, friends, is called building a brand.
This was the campaign that relaunched and modernized the Edward Jones brand. It celebrated the face time that's at their core, and inventively used film, mobile and OLA to show just how close that face time was.
With some clients, it's easy. All you do is tell the truth about the firm.
Changing investors' minds about Edward Jones is one thing. Winning over Wall Street power players and attracting high-end financial advisors to the firm is another. So we didn't f--- around. We hired world-class portrait photographer Mark Seliger to make Edward Jones analysts and strategists look like the bad-ass financial minds they are.
A photographer like Mark Seliger can make anyone look good. Even this guy.
My job for Morgan Stanley was to take the brand off its pedestal, and convince investors this white-shoe Wall Street powerhouse actually understood regular investors like you and me.
This guided tour of your subconscious did that. It snagged a One Show award, and got pulled off the air after a few weeks of airing because people thought it was a little too honest. True story.
There are tough briefs, and there are tough briefs.
Convincing parents of kids who want to enlist in the Army of its benefits, in the midst of two wars?
That’s a tough brief.
For Heinz, I’ve done everything from giant Super Bowl campaigns with real-time social-media interaction to miniature donkeys urging millennials to try a new ketchup to custom social content celebrating the most notable days of the year .
It’s what an iconic brand deserves.
Heinz’ first Super Bowl ad in 22 years featured, yes, a fart joke. Of course it did; have you ever squeezed the bottle?
During the game, we tweeted fun content about teams, their players and football itself. And other brands took notice.
We interacted with fans.
We cheered on a defensive stand.
We tweeted out the score at halftime in ketchup. Buzzfeed ranked this one of the best posts of the Super Bowl.
When 5’10” Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson was named Super Bowl MVP, we were ready.
After our Super Bowl success, we were awarded the Heinz social business, and created a bunch of posts circling around pop-culture events. This was for the series finale of “Mad Men”.
April Fools Day.
World Sight Day.
4th of July.
Season premiere of “Game of Thrones”.
March Madness.
Baseball’s opening day.
Cinco de Mayo.
To launch Heinz Jalapeño Ketchup, we hired an actual mini-donkey named Lil’ Kicker to be its spokes-ass, and partnered with Buzzfeed to give the campaign even more kick.
It’s one thing to do great work on beer or sports cars.
It’s another to do it for a big, risk-averse, testing-heavy CPG behemoth like Kellogg’s.
But for the three years I ran it, we did a lot of great work.
Here’s a small sampling.
The Pop Tarts "Crazy Good" campaign ran for 10 years, and somehow boosted market share for a brand that was already at 80%. Talk about crazy good.
When you're a pre-teen, school's tough. But with Snak Stix, it’s less so. An intro campaign with a heavy dose of truth (and insanity).
Eat Special K for two weeks, get thinner. Sometimes there’s no need for words.
And sometimes there's a need for a lot of words.
The spot that introduced the word “pantlicker” to the national vernacular. Thank you Michael Corbeille.
I love elegant solutions for brands. Especially ones that had previously relied on poop jokes.
All banks have interest rates. Only one has something called the Human Interest Rate.
For Flagstar, we parlayed found footage into a portrait of a bank that’s actually interested in people’s lives, versus their account balance.
