Intro
Intro
Marketing Strategies
+
Content Delivery
Take a look at the whole. Consider all the data. Leverage every platform. Use every useful tool.
As that keeps rolling...
Consider communication from all sides. Take a look from other points of view. Prepare for conversations. Help people try. Make it worth their while.
Let it grow.
IS IT HARD to categorize? IF SO, COOL.
The Fin
The Fin
The Fin
The Fin
A product, born from the brand, built to tell its story.
Northwell Health approached us to create a print ad meant to explain their innovative approach to Veteran Health.
Northwell believes that good ideas can come from anywhere in the system, and had previously explained that they were beginning to consider us as an extension of the system itself.
So we decided to put that to multiple tests.
The result was The Fin, a product design that brought together experts in prosthetics, Veteran’s health and aerospace, to create more for a Veteran in need.
The Fin is a 3D-printed prosthetic leg attachment designed to give amputee swimmers the ability to navigate from land to the water and back without having to switch prosthetics. We created The Fin in order to tell the story of Northwell’s ‘Look North’ approach.
The story of The Fin’s creation was brought to life in a media kit called “The Return,” and was used to innovate in communication to an audience of veterans, their families, sports enthusiasts and engineers.
Don Julio: Global Social
Don Julio: Global Social
Don Julio Global Social:
Dia De Muertos
We relaunched Don Julio’s Global Social Media in November 2024, with “Celebracion,” a creator series and curated newsroom style look at Dia De Muertos parties held in 30 cities around the world.
Check out the results via Instagram: @donjuliotequila
T Brand / The New York Times
T Brand at
The New York Times
T Brand / The New York Times
T Brand at
The New York Times
From 2019 to 2021, I was Head of Creative for T Brand at The New York Times.
The T Brand Portfolio included leadership of T Brand Studio, experiential agency Fake Love, influencer agency Hello Society, a T Brand Consulting Practice, Story X and the advertising department’s creative relationship with the marketing industry.
T Brand is an incredible team of writers, designers, videographers, podcasters, strategists and sales department leaders working with brands and businesses to create the best impact across The New York Times Ad Products. Can’t say enough about this amazing group of mission-oriented, purpose-driven creative people.
This work lead to the development of multiple forms of native content that included custom articles, videos, podcasts and experiences. The work involved proposing, strategizing and activating marketing solutions across categories — technology, finance, cutlure, luxury, CPG, policy and more.
In 2021, we were named Digiday’s Content Studio of the Year - for our efforts in 2020 - including thought leadership for brands at the top of the pandemic called: “The Business Acts, The Brand Speaks.”
Milk Entertainment
Milk Entertainment
Milk Entertainment
Milk Entertainment
Two Short-form Reality Series, built to plant a flag in “entertainment.”
In early 2024, we ran two unique “branded content” programs that were approached in a way that broke the boundaries of the form, propelling MilkPep into entertainment itself.
”Running Sucks” is part of a program built to work across multiple franchises inside Vox Media as a way to promote joining Team Milk and to encourage signing up for Every Woman’s Marathon.
Vanessa Bayer’s “Dairy Diaries” was created in partnership with creatives at Crispin and run on the Roku Channel as a short-form reality series.
We approached each program not as “content” but as pure entertainment — a process that. yielded phenomenal engagement and category lift.
For more details, check out the release from Vox Media and the show on The Roku Channel.
GALE Gaming
Gaming with
GALE and Moonrock
GALE Gaming
Gaming with
GALE and Moonrock
A new practice, built as a partnership.
In 2023, we announced a strategic partnership with renowned gaming design specialist Moonrock Labs. The collaboration combined Moonrock Lab’s industry-leading game development and design capabilities with GALE’s award-winning integrated marketing approach, bringing advanced gaming solutions to the agency’s client base.
The results of the partnership included several activations and work that is yet to come. Example activations include The Milk Cup, “Giving Away the Truth” for the Truth Initiative, “Sir Block” for H&R Block and “The Bomb. Pop Update” for Wells Enterprises’ The Original Bomb Pop.
Work on this partnership was lead by my colleague Max Bass, Director of Emerging Connections. Together our work included strategizing, positioning and activating the partnership via agency, client and industry sessions at IAB Playfronts and The Fast Company Innovation Festival.
Advance Party
Advance Party
An innovation practice built for Brand Innovation across Emerging Connections.
At CES 2023, we announced Advance Party: an innovation practice built to explore the media landscape on behalf of the brands and businesses we represent at GALE.
Each quarter, we spend time with up to 40 media platforms and publishers to learn about their alphas, betas and unusual use cases. We take what we learn and report back to teams in the agency and the clients we represent to encourage business-focused activation across emerging media spaces.
This has resulted in 20+ client sessions, appearances at Forbes CMO Summit, Fast Company Innovation Festival, the AAF and IAB Playfronts, hosting four episodes of our podcast, a series of talks with students visiting the agency and as the the visiting lecturer at Penn State for their 2023 Hearst Distinguished Lecture Series.
The practice has been used to develop a thesis on the agency’s use of AI, the agency’s social-first content marketing practices and as a way to connect departments across the agency in evermore collaborative ways.
This is Egypt 2
#ThisIsEgypt
This is Egypt 2
#ThisIsEgypt
In May 2015 I was asked to help with a pitch. It changed the way I see everything.
And we won. So that was cool too.
Egypt has a major perception problem. So rather than first advertise to tourists, we appealed to a sense of Egyptian national pride. We created a web film that acted as both a national rally cry and co-creator style guide. We aired it in Egypt first, then to Arab neighbors. There was a simple request attached: show the world the real Egypt.
#ThisIsEgypt is an integrated campaign that builds on a social media movement. It harnesses the proud spirit of a strong group of people who want to tell the real story of the beauty of their country. It offers new points of view and revived potential in a very important part of the region's economy. And it is just getting started.
"The #thisisegypt campaign is a powerful movement which we know will resonate with the wider region as it was created initially by the Egyptian people themselves."
-Hisham Zaazou, EGYPT'S MINISTER OF TOURISM
Thisisegypt.com acted as a platform to curate the images. The video was picked up by local talk shows. Local media outlets offering free airing of the video, to maintain the momentum; in addition to publications, online and print, featuring call to action messages. All without any media spend. The images have been showcased through TV, OOH, and digital.
Pickup on Instagram has only been rising - starting with under 10,000 posts, the initial activation of the hashtag with influencers generated 20,000 more posts on Instagram in a short time. Currently the hashtag on Instagram has received 110,000+ posts. The hashtag is even being adopted by local brands in their own activations, and is quickly becoming a habitual tag for any content being shared about Egypt and its diverse experiences.
With purely organic hype, Egyptians’ interest in seeing their country in a different light, and in turn showing the world, was clear. There is much more to come.
It is important to shout out the amazing J. Walter Thompson Cairo and MENA teams. An amazing, driven, talented and special group of people Making Epic Shit Happen out their way. We studied and had access to the full ecosystem. We toured the country in the morning and worked on the Nile in the afternoon. I am forever grateful to have been asked to help.
Clicking here and here will show you a bit of news about the win. Some of the text messages I was sending back to the States and that we used in the pitch can be seen just above.
The Hardest Working Person in America
The Hardest Working Person in America
The Hardest Working Person in America
The Hardest Working Person in America
In the summer of 2010, Mitchum set out to find the hardest working person in America. This is the story of how we found him.
Mitchum was in trouble.
The once respected and previously well considered anti-perspirant, had fallen on hard times. The brand was in a sales decline and few folks even recognized or remembered the brand for the hard-working properties it possessed.
To react against all of this, Mitchum was in need of something different than the traditional marketing that once attempted to push its various properties.
So we launched a search for the hardest working person in America. A search put on by "the hardest working anti-perspirant in America."
The integrated branded entertainment campaign became a series of documentaries, a few hundred user-generated films, a YouTube contest engine, web banners, TV commercials, and ultimately a Sundance Channel TV special.
The Study of Bold
The Study of Bold
The Study of Bold
The Study of Bold
A hypothesis. A scientific study.
An integrated, multi-channel, multi-region, brand campaign.
Listerine has studied mouths for years.
We are all very very very familiar with a host of rational Listerine claims based on those studies.
So, in order to move the brand from the functional to the emotional, we decided to conduct another study:
The Study of Bold.
A study to study the Boldness of Listerine users.
Beginning with a sample size of 6,000 humans, we asked a series of questions. Questions like, “Have you ever skydived?” Do you know how to do a yoga headstand?” and “Can you freestyle rap?”
We commissioned the Study in six countries, then we studied the results.
Turns out: Listerine users are Bold. We've used the actual, true, proven to a 95% confident, legally-backed results to make Bold stuff.
Now we are making even more... Bring Out the Bold is the brand's most extensive global campaign ever, targeting the U.S., Brazil, Japan, Thailand, Germany, The U.K. China, India and 80 other countries. Content stretches across at multiple languages and lives in multiple media channels. It is an effort carried out by a global-lead, four-region client team and a bold collective of agencies around the world.
Google for Work
Google for Work
and Education
Google for Work
Google for Work
and Education
Work is more than calculating profits, balancing supply & demand or pushing paper. Work is people coming together to dream, hack, create, hustle and build."
-Google for Work
It would be an understatement to describe working on the Google for Work rebrand as a "team effort."
In September 2013, I started to lead agency creative duties on the Google Enterprise business at JWT.
I was part of a super dedicated group of individuals who have created brand guidelines, a brand voice, case studies, web banners, a Google Cardboard experience, posters, gear, and the deepest sense of camaraderie I have ever experienced in advertising.
We didn't just make "stuff." What we made can be felt in the human vibe that continues to push through the brand voice today. (It has always been a little tricky to try and categorize it.)
I am not only proud of the spirit and voice we helped to create, but to have been part of an amazing group at JWT called "Default and Friends."
Content
"Content"
Content
"Content"
Content. Digital. Innovation. Experiential. Neutral. Agnostic. And a touch of Native.
I find this section to be both a struggle and a pleasure. It's how I was trained to think, and how I've helped the people around me to think, since the start.
It's how I see people engaging with the world of communications... un-labeled. un-bucketed. un-siloed. Anything I've done that might resemble tradition has started from a strategic and solution-oriented place.
So the struggle comes in the form of "silo-ing" these solutions.
The pleasure comes in sharing them.
- a partnership between a 150 year old wine company and a major Instagram influencer. Fast Company Article.
- A live, 90-minute telethon on Hulu to celebrate the launch of Bing. Recent mention in the Co-Create Virtual Branded Content Panel.
- A "backyard" influencer event at Bonnaroo, the Virgin Festival and HullabaLOU that doubleD as a broadcast space for Spin Magazine online interview content. Original Spin Article
- A series of documentary shorts (online content) that feature badasses from around the country. (Featured as Facebook content in 2011. One went on to become a TV show).
- A site to gather videos for a voting initiative from Gap. Webby Link.
- A documentary short that was accepted into the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, where we also launched an experiential house that coupled as celebrity hangout and broadcast space. Wikipedia Article.
- a music video (which we used for a tiny touch of product placement).
- A take on a Hashtag mistake, commonly made at one of the world's great pop culture festivals. Creativity Online Mention.
- A (failed) pitch prototype that is complete silliness, and that I believe still has value somewhere within the ones and zeros.
- ProudPhotos.org. And our FWA mention.
- more.
Product Design
Product Design
Product Design
Product Design
As I have ventured in to the world of brand innovation, I have found myself in the world of product design.
This section is the result of agile, entrepreneurial processes, rooted in design thinking, that required the resilience and relentlessness of more than a few colleagues.
THE ARIA: The Aria is a prototype of a digital stethoscope and a design approach to audio innovation in healthcare that delivers a cost-effective telemedicine solution to those in need around the world. By incorporating Bongiovi’s patented MDPS (Medical Digital Power Station) Algorithm, we were able to design a more affordable system, in turn, making healthcare more accessible. The Aria aims to show that audio technology can be made available to more people, in more affordable ways. link
CONNECTED ROOM: The Connected Room is a system of smart, interactive picture frames, hung in hospital rooms, that lets patients display photos of friends and family. link
THE FIN: The Fin is a medical innovation that enables amputees to transition directly from walking to swimming. The Fin addresses an unmet need in prosthetics, providing amputees with a natural-feeling swim and the emotional benefits of societal reintegration. link
BATHROOM OF THE FUTURE: A platform for exploring the future of J&J brands, and how they might one day be connected to everything.
WIRE.PAPER.: Space, equipment and community for building, exploring and sharing ideas at J Walter Thompson New York
Ending Thumbnails
That's not all.
Ending Thumbnails
That's not all.
I have thought a lot about and helped... Milk Processors, Don Julio, H&R Block, The Truth Initiative, The Original Bomb Pop, Blue Bunny, m ss ng p eces, Farm League, The Tribeca Festival, Quibi, Wild Turkey, Listerine, The Egyptian Tourism Authority, Macy's, Häagen-Dazs, Boxed, Google for Work, Google for Education, Smirnoff, Mitchum, Berocca, Beringer, Treasury Wine Estates, Bing, Caring Across Generations, Burger King, Stouffer's, the LGBT Movement, Save the Children, MINI Cooper, Gap, Puma, Jeremiah Weed, Miley Cyrus, Brett Ratner, Elle Magazine, Chipotle, Kleenex, Sprint, Moët, Virgin Australia, Miller Chill, Sears, Kenmore, DieHard, Craftsman, Molson, Rolex, Blue Cross Blue Shield and Star Cloth Cheeseburger Deliverer... Stagwell, The New York Times, WPP, The Brand Performance Network and students at The University of Texas at Austin, The University of Texas in The Rio Grande Valley, Penn State University, The University of Oregon and Baruch College.
I have created platforms that have become... integrated campaigns, one-offs, TV spots, various forms of "digital," out of home, social, branded entertainment, music videos, experiential, activations, short films, art projects, special events, prototypes, social media command centers, chatbots, entirely new things, and also this.
I have tried my hand at... design thinking, business innovation, chief creative officering, executive creative direction, creative direction, art direction, copywriting, mentoring, collaborating, new business, strategy, deck writing, case study writing, treatment writing, a little touch of directing, and a tiny bit of data science and visualization.
Awards... Yes.
This is not the end. This is just the beginning.
