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.
The NCC came to Carlson with a lack of identity, strategy, and self-awareness. We started over with a blank page and completely re-branded the company—from advertising to room key jackets. A bright client, a solid team, and a great time.
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.
I was brought on as a freelancer to "knock out the company website in a couple weeks" at my full rate. Needless to say, it lasted over a year. I was one of two ACDs on the project, and got a lot of experience herding squirrels.
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.
