I just opened Squarespace to update my work for the first time in many years, and got a ping that a colleague gave me a shout-out.

I’ve had the same ad at the top of my portfolio since 2005. I always felt it spoke the strongest about what I believed to be “great work.” But that belief has changed. A change I now welcome after all these years. I have earned my reputation as a creative leader. Not by being “the best writer,” but by being an authentic guy who wants to share wisdom while living out my primary value: always watch out for “the little guy.” It’s a lesson my dad taught me, and he’d agree that this speaks better about me than any advertising.

My boss in Pittsburgh paired me with a junior AD on this campaign for Pittsburgh Corrning. He challenged me to do "award-winning work for pipe insulation," which we did. This is my favorite work from my favorite time in advertising. It won a bunch of stuff, and made the clients very happy. 

CONSOL is an old, giant energy company. And their marketing director was almost as old and giant. He was also smart, warm, and trusting of his agency. The ideal client. He asked us to create consolcareers.com. 

I was told, under no circumstances, was I to let him down. 

2008 Webby winner, still live today at http://consolcareers.com/

My first in-house gig. I spent years helping Prime tell its story, which was much harder, and rewarding, than I had planned. This is a small sample of the thousands of B2B and B2C pieces I managed as the director of the copy team. 

We were tasked with “make a post about the big basketball thing in town.” So we came up with an idea: let’s go play basketball. This was created in 36 hours.

Our compliance department wanted their annual fair to be "fun." So we turned it into a record store, because "You're in the band." Instead of sell sheets, people got a CD with their photo on the cover. It was an incredible success. And I got to be in a black metal poster. For a health care company. 

This is recent, and not here because of the copy - but the experience. My agency was given the chance to redo the homepage for BigCommerce. You can imagine the politics involved.
I spent a lot of time building trust with the clients, and worked with them instead of for them. They had such a positive experience that we were awarded the entire site. Actually, we kick that off today…

I got to be the lead creative on this pitch. We won the account, and they produced the "anthem" spot with one change: "Sunday" became "Saturday" because they didn't want to upset church-goers. Wonderful team, wonderful client. I love this spot. 

Our client (a small bank in West Virginia) wanted to do a sweepstakes. He asked, with a straight face, if “bling” was still cool. The next three months would be a blast, producing the most integrated campaign of my career, including WesBlingo.com and a TV spot that was pulled after the first day because it had the devil as a spokesman. 

Creating a brand for a large law firm is fun. Seriously. They loved this. It was quite painless, as they had a long relationship with the agency (Linnihan Foy) and my fellow creative director. The tiger was not my idea. 

While at Carlson, Bank of America asked us to pitch a small rewards website for their partnership with Golf Digest. The CD (who would later quit and bring me with him) decided to go after the entire brand. As a copywriter, I don’t like long headlines. As a golfer, I know golfers read them. Oh, they bought they ads. But I don’t think we ever got that website. 

ARAMARK was my first responsibility at Carlson Marketing, and I will always think of it as my first child. After gaining trust with the clients, we took on the task of re-branding the entire company and all of their parks and resorts. I got to travel to most of them. 

After spending weeks visiting Aramark park locations and hanging with the guests, we built the brand around one word — authentic. This determined the use of colors, textures, copy tone ... even the paper we used. One of the pieces of which I'm most proud. 

I have to have one page here about my CRM/loyalty work. About half of my experience comes from this world. GM, Best Buy, Amtrak and XM Radio are just a few of the clients I served. Somehow I always ended up working with NASCAR and country music. I spent a week with Kenny Chesney for GM. He liked my Iron Maiden t-shirts. 

As a “brand guy” within a digital agency, I’m often a big fish in a small pond. It wasn’t long before I was being asked things like, “Can you help us explain what we do in one sentence?”
Any agency vet can tell you the toughest project in the world is the agency brand/website. The really big shops outsource it. Hero wasn’t that big (but we’re on the way). I’ve spent a lot of time with the c-suite, constantly reminding them that “People don’t speak like that, and neither should we.” Getting them aligned around “We solve hard problems” has been a game changer for me at Hero.

During my first job at JWT San Francisco, I had nothing to do. I had a crude version of this campaign in my book from school, and my boss told me it was the reason he hired me. I was told to go out, find a hospice and, “make it real.” We had a $50 budget. Those are my Godparents in the middle. 

San Francisco show: Gold

Honeysuckle is owned by Cargill, the largest private company in America. So when they asked for a Friendsgiving social campaign 10 days before Thanksgiving, we knew we were in for a lot of work. The Doug post made it all the way to the end of the review chain before someone killed it. Because, you know, balls.