Making the complex simple, the abstract moving, the run-of-the-mill unexpected.
The author with baby (for scale).
I’m a group creative director with approaching two decades of experience in both consumer and B2B communications, ranging from ad campaigns in the classical mode to wild, culture-hacking tech applications. I’ve worked on everything from the most iconic candy brands to ag-science breakthroughs.
My work has won Effies and Sabres and Chicago Addys and various other metallic and Plexiglass objects. I’ve built brands, accounts and client relationships from scratch and maintained others that have been with my agencies for decades. I’ve worked with teams that fit on two sides of a single desk and others that span the globe.
I live in the great American metropolis of Chicago with my wife, son and cat. I can operate a movie projector. I make a mean walnut-and-basil pesto. I have the lyrics to “The Humpty Dance” and former San Francisco Giants first baseman Will Clark’s height imprinted on my memory forever. Writing self-promotional bios does not feel awkward to me at all.
Getting our kicks with Twix.
To launch their new Cookies & Créme variety, Twix wanted to plug into youth culture conversation. We found the perfect way in by matching our product with “cookies and cream” sneakers — shoe connoisseur slang for shoes with black-and-white leather.
We worked with big-name shoe designer the Shoe Surgeon to create a limited-edition sneaker with cookies-and-cream leather wrapped in corduroy that matched the colors of the Twix’s wrapper.
We launched the shoes with line-around-the-block events at boutiques around the country, a tongue-in-cheek video playing up Twix’s “same but different” brand essence, and an extremely cool shoe box.
The results spoke for themselves, with a dramatic uptick in sales pickup, sneakers going for four figures on eBay, and a Gold Effie. Now that’s pretty fresh.
Client
Twix
Media
OLV/public activations/earned media/some actual shoes
Sharing the dirty truth about cleaning.
The International Sanitation Supply Association, or ISSA for short, wanted to raise businesses’ awareness of the importance of real, professional cleaning.
To do that, we needed to make sure customers were concerned about cleaning, too. So we set out to show the unlikely places dirt and bacteria can hide in public places by sending the world’s most celebrated germophobe, Howie Mandel, out with an ISSA scientist to explore what gets dirty in public places — and how ISSA expertise can get it cleaner.
We created a three-episode digital reality show, Howie Clean It, to start the conversation, and supported it with a broader campaign — “Rethink What Clean Means” — to help businesses lay claim to a new standard of cleaning, and share it with their visitors.
The campaign gave Howie a great platform to speak to earned media, we were able to explore exciting new media placements with on-demand video through Roku, and we were shortlisted for the SABRES. Feels like a clean victory.
Client
ISSA
Media
OLV/Print/Educational Materials/The Cutest Little Stickers You Ever Saw
Making the joy of pizza measurable.
Water is wet. The sky is blue. People like pizza. None of these are news.
What DiGiorno, America’s leading frozen pizza, wanted to make into news was the idea that baking your pizza rather than having it delivered was a richer, better, longer-lasting sensory experience. So we set out to prove it. And we did.
We custom-built mood-measuring software using Google’s facial-recognition API to track the emotional state of people hanging out in a room where a DiGiorno was baking. And it turned out their moods improved more during the baking than they did while eating the pizza.
We created content and did expert media outreach to get the news out, and we did, with writeups ranging from Food and Wine (a first for the brand) to marketing-industry tastemakers like The Drum.
Client
DiGiorno
Media
OLV/Social/Earned Outreach
Saluting 240 years of medicine.
Takeda, with its roots in the 18th-century marketplaces of Osaka, has been a pharmaceutical company since before pharmaceuticals existed.
To celebrate 240 years of that legacy, Takeda needed a creative approach that shared their values and saluted the people that make the company so vital more than two centuries down the line.
We found and interviewed employees across Europe, Japan and the United States with personal stories about their relationship to Takeda and its values — from a third-generation employee at the company’s Osaka headquarters to a mom who worked with the scientists who had cured her son’s life-threatening illness.
We created a distinctive grid-like look that brought images of Takeda’s history and values together with portraits of our employees and used the company’s website to invite internal and external audiences to learn more about Takeda’s legacy, employees and values.
Client
Takeda Pharmaceuticals
Media
Print/Digital
Talking about heart disease with heart.
It’s easy to think of disease in the abstract, especially long-term debilitating disease like ejective heart failure.
Novartis wanted to give the disease a human face — and a believable story — so we created a short documentary in which a patient and her son described the struggles of living with a degenerative heart illness, all the while surrounding it with atmospheric images of the full and rich life they fought to have every day.
Client
Novartis
Media
OLV
Facing the opioid epidemic with a human face
Fighting the ongoing opioid epidemic nationwide takes more than law enforcement or education. It takes effort on the part of doctors to understand the dangers of prescribing opioids without exploring alternatives. And the state of Minnesota understood the urgency of bringing doctors into that effort themselves.
To do that, we created the Flip the Script campaign, a series of educational materials, videos and events designed to educate doctors about the dangers of overprescribing opioids.
To give the issue a human face, we created a powerful documentary about the effort to de-escalate opioid use through the voice of both a doctor and patient in rural Minnesota, including the doctor’s brave, powerful self-examination as he discussed the his past prescribing habits.
Client
State of Minnesota
Media
OLV/Discussion Guides & Collateral/Events
Cultivating an iconic ag brand’s story.
Today’s farm equipment is huge, AI-powered, and terrifyingly loud. They’re like those big machines in Dune that go out into the desert and get the spice out of the sand, except real — and essential to America’s food production.
Case IH, the country’s second-largest ag-equipment manufacturer, wanted help telling a more concise story about their equipment. So we helped them develop a customer-centric strategy that spoke about these giant machines in the simple, human terms of the end user’s experience.
Our work started with developing individual campaigns for specific pieces of equipment, and then built to a full reimagining of the brand’s iconic “Built by Farmers” campaign.
Client
Case IH
Media
Film/Print/Social
Getting smart about mobile service.
Tracfone offers users a just plain smarter deal on mobile service — month-to-month, no-contract service at unbelievably low rates.
It’s so smart, we decided we needed a really smart person to explain it, so we got Ken Jennings on the eve of his ascendancy to Jeopardy! host to come in and show how Tracfone’s deals mirror some of the most complex and esoteric concepts in the universe.
Speaking from a leather-lined study full of the world’s knowledge, Ken offered tongue-in-cheek commentary on Tracfone’s best deals — and shared the content with his millions-strong social audience.
Pretty darn smart, if you ask me.
Client
Tracfone
Media
OLV/Social
Growing the future of tomorrow’s farmers.
Bayer Crop Science doesn’t just help farmers grow crops. They also help grow rural communities, from STEM education for tomorrow’s farmers to food support for families that need it.
We helped tell the story of those efforts through the “Tending Tomorrow’s Farmers” campaign, in which we created video, print and digital assets that captured and articulated our efforts, and invited farmers to join in to get support for their communities.
Client
Bayer Crop Science
Media
OLV/Print/Digital/Social