Highlights
One of the highlights of the work I led for Kraft, was in response to a client request that we develop a brand action that would generate earned media during Q2. With a successful and long-running campaign we developed around “imperfect parenting,” Mother’s Day seemed a no-brainer. But about Moms, kids and Mother’s Day could we lean into that would get not only our consumers engaged, but also the press? Especially since many other brands were discovering and leveraging the same “imperfect parenting” insight. So we conducted research to find new insights around parents’ imperfect behavior. What we found and decided to focus on, in the words of our client, was either going to get us all famous or fired: the fact more moms admit to cursing in front of their kids than dads. (Now that might be because moms are more honest than dads, but we’ll leave that up to you.) To tell the story, we turned to the expert (and mother of three), Melissa Mohr, author of “Holy Sh*t. A Brief History of Swearing.” With a great script and even better performance by Melissa, a $50k budget returned almost 1B impressions. Not a bad ROI.
SunnyD had not only a product problem, but a brand problem. Sure, it tastes good (to some), but their campaign claim directed at moms that it had 44% less sugar than soda wasn’t connecting. I mean, how low a bar can you set? Better than soda? It’s also better for your kids than cigarettes. We needed to appeal to moms and their kids with more of an emotional message. We found that SunnyD connects to people in a remarkable way. It’s not about the product itself, it’s how the brand makes you feel. This was particularly true among Millennial parents who grew up on it. And while many of them haven’t had a sip of SunnyD in years, our research indicated they still unapologetically could relate to the fun the brand stood for. We wanted to reignite that fun.
So we decided to lean into a cultural phenomenon that was just starting to emerge: our nostalgia for the 90s. Our expression of this was to recreate an iconic SunnyD spot from the 90s. You know, the one with the “purple stuff”? So faithfully, we created the same spot. The twist? It was the same kids and same mom. Only 20 years later. And mom wasn’t having any more of it. The campaign cut across TV, digital, in-store, social, PR, promotions, web, experiential. The work galvanized the SunnyD internal teams, customers and consumers, and was responsible for a net 12% sales increase in test markets.
After beginning my career in NYC, I made the move to Boulder (who wouldn’t?) to lead SRG’s transition from a smartstrategic shop to a smart creative shop. Led agency revenue growth of $7MM+ through both organic and new business. Authored a new agency philosophy for how account and creative teams work together. Made Partner in an unprecedented one year.
The strategic and creative highlight of that tenure was contemporizing a sleepy brand of frozen Mexican food, called El Monterey. Based on the insight that El Monterey made it easy to make one of America’s favorite shared meal experiences, we creative a multi-media campaign based on a telenovela. The campaign included a social media page with all cast membersrepresented, a virtual hacienda, in-store and a television campaign.
For almost a century, Canon had been a leader in photography. And for almost a decade they had relied on forgettable commercials featuring Andre Agassi. I was hired to make the work better. Over the course of time, the work got better. But only marginally. The big break happened when Canon introduced an SLR camera that also could shoot video. But what does a photography brand do when confronted with videography? For Canon, they wanted to bury it because they felt that videography was inferior to photography. My first challenge was to not to change their perception of videography, but to change their definition of photography. This led to a new category I invented: Moving Photography.
To express this new category, we hired one of the most famous photo & video journalists in the country: Pulitzer Prize winner, Vincent Laforet. What we created was a video story told in 10 chapters by 10 photographers. The twist? The only thing the photographer had to go on was a final still photograph taken by the teller of the chapter before it.
The result was 3 Cannes Lions, an Effie and a shortlist for the Academy Awards. More importantly, we saw Canon’s market share in digital SLRs increase from 17% to 55%.