When Tropicana came to us and said “let’s do something with AI”, 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.
Above 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.
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 an 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 911 is Porsche’s flagship. But the uninitiated thought of it as a garage queen, a trophy car, something to be only taken out on 72-and-sunny days. The truth is, it’s meant to be driven hard, and driven often. That’s why we made the above three ads.
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.
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 above, “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 what Michael Bay spends 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 headline. Above are a few good ones I managed to get through. The last is the first ad I ever sold on Porsche. 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.
It’s a simple, powerful idea: the First Survivor of Alzheimer’s Disease is out there, somewhere in the world. And the Alzheimer’s Association is going to find them. I’ve never seen people cry in focus groups, until this campaign.
We live in partisan times. But everyone can agree on taking down Alzheimer’s. This campaign ran on the 2020 presidential debates and hyper-partisan sites like Breitbart and MSNBC, in order to make that point.
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.
10 years later, they compete with the Fidelity’s and Schwab’s of the world, on a fraction of their budget. And their assets under management now exceed $1 trillion.
That, friends, is called building a brand.
Shouldn’t your investment strategy be as customized to you as your Netflix queue? Yes, of course it should.
Sometimes advertising is simply telling the truth about a brand, its values, how it acts. That’s what we did for Edward Jones.
When you’re trying to convince Wall Street power players to come work for you in St. Louis, you do not f—- around. So we didn’t. We hired world-class portrait photographer Mark Seliger to make Edward Jones look like the uber-successful investment machine it is.
This was the campaign that relaunched and modernized the Edward Jones brand. It celebrated the face time that is the firm’s calling card, and inventively used film, mobile and OLA to show just how close that face time was.
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?
We surrounded the spot with in-game social response to the game itself, celebrities, fans, even other brands.
Buzzfeed ranked this halftime-score tweet one of the best of the Super Bowl.
5’10” Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson was named Super Bowl MVP. And 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 easy (easy-ish) to do great work on beer or sports cars.
It’s a little harder to do great work for a big, risk-averse, testing-heavy CPG behemoth like Kellogg’s. Actually more than a little harder.
But for the three years I ran it, we did a lot of great work.
Here’s a small sampling of it.
The last Kellogg’s campaign I sold before I left Leo Burnett, from the crazy-good mind of Pete Lefebvre.
School’s tough. But with Snak Stix, it’s less so. An intro campaign with a heavy dose of truth.
Eat Special K for two weeks, get thinner. Sometimes there’s no need for words.
The spot that introduced the word “pantlicker” to the national vernacular. Thank you Michael Corbeille.
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.