Brand Work & Advertising
I am a strategic, entrepreneurial, thoughtful creative director with over 10 years of experience developing campaigns for national and international brands. Below are summaries/case studies of five of the many successful multi-platform brand campaigns I’ve created.
Bellingham/Whatcom County Tourism & Seattle Times Content Studio
While Creative Director/GM at the ST Content Studio I came up with this campaign idea—Extremely Pacific Northwest with Rick Steves—for tourism clients in Whatcom County. It was right after the height of the lockdown and Rick Steves (a Seattle area local) was not able to go to Europe. So I signed him up in 2021 to make this OTT/social series with the ST Content Studio in this north-westernmost corner of his home state he’d never actually visited.
Success metrics The county credited our sweetly informative series with a 17% YOY increase in inbound tourism (heads in beds) over pre-pandemic numbers. We ran the series on OTT and social in the PNW and placed in eight markets across the west that have nonstop service to Bellingham airport. Then there were the articles and news stories that picked up the series from the local NBC Station in Seattle to massive national travel brands like Travel+Leisure and Condé Nast Traveler. It was such a success, we made a second season of the series in 2022.
And yes, Rick is the nicest guy you’ll ever meet.
Marriott Bonvoy Traveler “CURATED”
I left Condé Nast to start my own production company in Brooklyn, Makemake Films, and one of my first clients was Marriott. They contracted me and my staff to make first one, then four separate “Curated” videos to be used as part of the new Bonvoy channels in all the rooms of their higher end hotels like the Ritz Carlton New Orleans. Of the four videos highlighting notable locals we made for that series, the New Orleans one featuring Branden Lewis from Preservation Hall and pop artist extraordinaire Ashley Longshore is my favorite. We also made social cut downs for their social channels.
Success metrics: Marriott’s team was so delighted with the first one we shot in Miami, they came back to ask us to do three more.
While working at Condé Nast as the Executive Director of Creative Strategy for the Lifestyle Group, I worked on several series for big name automotive brands like Range Rover and Audi but nothing prepared me for the way the Jeep folks go deep on an idea they like. When we proposed that we do a series with Jeep and Condé Nast Traveler, we were thinking small, maybe something easy and low lift for them like a print integration or a branded article. I quickly got the sense they had money to spend and wanted something big for the end of the year. I threw out there that we could secure Strawberry Hill resort in Jamaica and would be happy to bring in Shaggy if we could get a Jeep. This got greenlit in a matter of hours and the result was a video, a branded article and sooo many social shares. And Sting.
Success metrics: Helped, no doubt, by the fact that Shaggy talked about the production and his love of this jeep on social (which we had arranged as part of the agreement) the video and cut downs and BTS footage/stills performed better than any of our other branded car campaigns for Condé Nast Traveler, ever. There were well over 7M impressions across all platforms.
Jeep & Condé Nast Traveler
Also in my role at Condé Nast as the Executive Director of Creative Strategy for the Lifestyle Group (Condé Nast Traveler, Architectural Digest, Bon Appétit and Epicurious), I worked with a lot of big name brands looking to do something elevated that would also reach beyond the traditional Condé Nast audience. For Bon Appétit, I got to work with Danny Bowein of Mission Chinese who made a phenomenal, fast paced Thanksgiving feast we shot on a Google Pixel for Google. For Reynolds I created a social-centric “BBQ ‘n Foil” series with all new recipes from chef Rick Martinez. Then there was KFC. There was a lot of discussion when they came to us whether our brand fans would revolt if Bon Appétit did something with a fast food chain known for mass market fried chicken. Then my team and I came up with this idea to “fancify” KFC in a Netflix Chef’s Table spoof with local NYC chefs making over the top dishes using new KFC spicy chicken pieces.
Success metrics: KFC was delighted with the spots because they both achieved the goal of elevating their brand, and it didn’t put off their brand fans. Extra bonus: the Bon Appétit audience seemed mostly amused and intrigued. And perhaps most importantly the numbers across YouTube and social easily passed 2M impressions.
KFC & Bon Appétit
As the Head of Content at the Mustache Agency for three years, I created dozens of successful branded series for clients like Expedia, Visit Holland, American Express, T. Rowe Price, but one of my favorites is one that I made with my team for Stella Artois, called Host One To Remember. With our partners at the New York Times’ T Brand Studio, we found four interesting folks to each host a memorable dinner party. Musician Jonah Reider, photographer Paul Octavious, actress Gina Rodriguez and eating designer, Marije Vogelzang all created unforgettable dining experiences for this series that both T Brand Studio and Stella loved. We loved making these, and now everyone from those shoots REALLY REALLY knows how to pour a perfect Stella.
Success metrics: Stella Artois was delighted with the performance of this series, and the NYT went on to give us (Mustache) three more big deals after the launch of this.
Stella Artois & T Brand Studio (NYT Co.)
As the Head of Content at Mustache my team and I had a lot of fun projects, but few where we laughed as much as when we pulled together the new campaign for KLM. The airline came to us after we’d produced a series of award-winning spots for Visit Holland called The Original Cool. That campaign had been so successful, bringing in a 28% increase in traffic to their website/social channels. So when KLM needed help with their brand, which no one in the US knew they came to us. And we came up with “It’s an Airline,” I attached Ken Marino (because we needed it to be weird + funny + memorable) and it took off. (Pun intended)
Success metrics: First there were the spots on CNN—Richard Quest loved the series. Then the NYT wrote a piece. Then the numbers started going up and up. It was KLM’s most successful video on YouTube and the social cut downs did great as well. Especially the one where Ken explains what a Flight Attendant is.
KLM & Mustache
As the Editorial Director of LOGO, the LBGTQ+ station best known for being the home of RuPaul’s Drag Race, I spent most of my time working on the editorial issues for my websites, digital series and linear series. But we always needed money as MTV Networks’ stepchild, so I came up with a plan to get a narrative series we wanted to make in Montréal sponsored by the tourism department—a first for MTV Networks. Tourisme Montréal was thrilled because this was the LGBTQ+ audience they were trying to reach, and loved the filmmakers I picked to make the series, so they were just happy to have their city shown off…which is easy to do in a series set there.
Success metrics: The whole series racked up 1M+ streams, which at the time was better than many of our original series and a lot of RuPaul’s drag race content.