THE IDEA THAT STARTED MY CAREER
The first time I pitched to clients was one month into my art direction internship. It was a panel of 7 at White Castle during the yearly planning meeting. White Castle fans are like no other. They get married at the restaurant, they book reservations for Valentines there, they even take their vacations from out of state to visit. So they needed a truly unique loyalty program that spoke to their insane levels of fandom. The client loved it and after two months of my internship I got hired on full time as an Art Director.
MY FIRST PRODUCED CAMPAIGN
American Greeting was launching their largest card line ever. It was also their first foray into building an app and more importantly, targeting Millennials. Being one of those Millennials I was put on the project. The other creative team we were competing against was our ECD and his CD wife. Our idea won. It won because we took a single line from the brief and made it our whole campaign: We talk like you talk. Add some Tim and Eric style production values and we were off to the races. It won 6 local and 2 district Addys and remains to this day one of my favorite things I have worked on. (LA music legend Har Mar Superstar sang the audio sign-off)
It’s beginning to look a lot like adweek
My goal was simple: get our agency holiday card featured in a trade pub. By following the trends that continually got covered I decided to do an experiment. Could I get us featured simply by merging Christmas with what constantly got articles written about it? This year Dove was all the rage and seemed like a good fit. The experiment worked and we were featured next to some of the biggest agencies in the world. ADWEEK
The Wild West of the World Wide Web
Amazon Web Services was trying to get developers to adopt the Top Level Domain of .BOT when creating their own bots. Snatching up domains always has felt like the California Gold Rush, staking your claim before someone else gets it. So we harnessed the pioneer spirit to appeal to these pioneers of technology. I worked closely with world famous illustrator David Sossella who created my favorite poster from the iconic Ray Ban Never Hide campaign. We created massive printed banners for developer conferences as well as digital assets for social posts.
RETAIL AS EXPERIENCE
T-Mobile has interactive displays in all of their flagship stores in big cities. They wanted something that was contextually relevant to each city that would draw people into the space. So I took the food that each city is most famous for and turned it into a skateboard that could be used to explore that city and do some sick tricks. Anyone who participated would also get a free voucher for that food from a local restaurant. I still wish I could do a kick flip on top of some pepperoni.
LIFE’s A PITCH
We pitched Squatty Potty and a large component was our in-house production capabilities. The thing is, we didn’t really have any. So I concepted, shot, art directed, designed, starred in, and did VO for all the “Squat related content” in this video. Still makes me laugh.
This video won us the pitch for Tinder’s first brand campaign. But then there was some back channeling and they handed it to Wieden + Kennedy ( who wasn’t even apart of the pitch.) I’m not bitter…you’re bitter. Still really love the mood it creates though. The music and all footage were pulled from my personal art direction archives and gives some insight into the type of work that excites me.
MONSEE
Once a year all Red Bull CDs from the 7 Kastner locations go to Austria to meet with Mr. Kastner and the founder of Red Bull, Dietrich Mateschitz. There are two main priorities: deciding what 5 cartoon commercials will be hand drawn that year and pitching any idea big or small for the founder to consider. Hundreds of cartoon concepts are brought for the longest running campaign of all time. They are then worked out and refined in the room with Mr. Kaster, then presented to Mr. Mateschitz. Below are a few of the many, many, many cartoon concepts I came up with.
