An office employee attempts to enjoy his chicken parm hero sandwich.

Recognition

SILVER MEDAL – Society of Illustrators 55th Annual 2012

OFFICIAL SELECTION – Brooklyn Film Festival 2013

OFFICIAL SELECTION – Florida Film Festival 2013 

OFFICIAL SELECTION – Woodstock Film Festival 2013  

OFFICIAL SELECTION – New York International Children's Film Festival 2013  

 My role: – Everything (except the voices, which are by David Fransen)

Best Black Friday Ever

Samsung’s Best Black Friday Ever campaign was multi-faceted. Samsung wanted a responsive, retail web site that would only be live through the month of November. The site would reveal exclusive, week-by-week deals culminating with Black Friday. This was paired with a social media campaign that used agressive social response to primarily provoke discussion around Samsung products during Black Friday and secondarily drive to the site.

The Website

Each week, the Best Black Friday Ever site would unlock new deals. Visitors would self-identify as online shoppers (which we termed Black Friday ‘haters’) or in-store shoppers (‘lovers’). If they hated going to the store on Black Friday, we directed them to save online deals to their wish lists, which they could then purchase from home on Black Friday. If they loved shopping in-store on Black Friday, and were most likely insane, we urged them to set up a plan of the products they wanted to buy and we provided them with a map of where the products were available at their local retailers.

I was brought onto this at RGA as an ACD to oversee the final design and take it through launch. The site was hugely successful. So successful that Samsung guaranteed the business to RGA for the next year.

Social Media

There were two ideas for social media. Neither of which I came up with. Both relied on solely on Twitter, and neither were mutually exclusive. First, was Tweetducken – a reference to the infamous Turducken on Thanksgiving. We described this concept to the client as “a tweet within a tweet”. That sounded so awesome, that the client was on board immediately. When it came time to actually execute, no one knew exactly how a tweet within a tweet within a tweet would work or be communicated effectively. Nevertheless, we soldiered on. The rules were: you follow Samsung on twitter, you retweet a Samsung tweet with your own witty addition, and then if Samsung (er, the RGAers hanging out in the studio onblack Friday) it would be deemed a Tweetducken and Samsung would award the tweeter with a prize. We made direction “ingredients cards” to explain the process and I made a fun Turducken graphic.

The other social idea was The Samsung Singers. We hired an improv comedy troupe that could sing. We had them on set for all of Black Friday. We combed twitter for witty, Samsung-related tweets, mostly from people bragging about the Samsung products the managed to snag during the insanity of Black Friday. The Samsung Singers would take the boastful tweet and re-imagine the tweet through song on the spot, and we filmed it live, and chucked it back into the twitter-verse in minutes.

A couple of friends and I made an animated sketch comedy show. The show was a celebration of the mundane. I would post it, but we're currently pitching it to networks. Don't worry, when it gets thoroughly rejected, it will be up on this site. 

Anyway, one of the sketches involves a fridge and an oven. They are twenty-something dudes who are roommates out of circumstance. They spend most of their time squabbling about their mundane lives. When you're hanging with your roommate and your roommate is your best friend, it's a party all the time FRIDGE AND OVEN. 

We liked this idea a lot, so we spun it off into a micro-series. You can watch all of them at fridgeandoven.com.

Priceless Surprises

I worked on MasterCard for most of my time at RGA. Translation: I churned out sexy decks twice a week only to watch them decompose in MasterCard's mass concept grave. 

The big campaign that I worked on that actually happened was the Priceless Surprises campaign. Priceless Surprises was cloaked in lots of eloquent, ad verbiage, but at the end of the day, it was a simple sweepstakes campaign via a hashtag. MasterCard would encourage people to use #PricelessSurprises on social media (primarily Instagram and Twitter), and then they would award random hashtag enthusiasts with surprises.

MasterCard conveniently had Justin Timberlake on hand as their quasi-sponsor/pitchman. The only problem was that JT didn’t want to be viewed as a shill. But he certainly liked to deposit shill-size checks. They ended up paying JT a bunch of cash to surprise an unsuspecting fan, which was documented in a very visible TV spot.

I pitched the design concept for the site that the client bit on. The office in Sau Paolo executed on the design concept. MasterCard reduced the nature of the surprises program to a random sweepstakes. The site became little more than a nicely designed social media aggregator for #PricelessSurprises.

Our task was then to come up with visible surprise stunts. Endless conceptual rounds followed. We got so close to getting JT to photobomb unsuspecting people in mundane photobooths in random towns. But the MasterCard gods balked at the last minute.

Elevate your Holiday

Ah, Don Julio. It's an amazing product. Delicious tequilas from authentic, humble roots in Jalisco, Mexico. A perfect gift to give to a friend during the holiday season. Clearly this campaign would write itself, right?

Wrong! I've never witnessed such a paradoxical strategic straight jacket in all of my modest little ad career. They wanted Don Julio to be presented as a top shelf, sophisticated luxury product. Meanwhile, they've got Lil' Jon – yes, that Lil' Jon – as a pseudo-official spokesman. He's even got his own special Don Julio bottle. There are pics of him on the internet doing creepy things to women with tequila. He tweets things like this. And yet.

Most of the engaging things we presented were deemed not "luxury" enough. When we lux'd it up, it was not "high energy enough". Seriously people, WTF. After some initial heady ideas, we returned to our default dance of despair.

We did manage to lord over the (many) other agencies and set the campaign tone with our Elevate your Holiday concept. Diageo liked it so much, they decided to use it for their summer program...wait for it...Elevate your Summer.

This is the work we rolled out across our digital channels for Elevate your Holiday.

My role:

Art Direction, Design, Creative Direction

​Smarter Computing

Smarter Computing was a challenge because nobody really knew what it meant. It's not a product, but rather a vague thought leadership umbrella term for the new digital paradigms of Big Data, Optimized Systems and Cloud Computing. All things that IBM was (in theory) totally going to rock. Which would be conceivable if  IBM was not a giant, bureaucratic maze of corporate inception. Endless Russian dolls of corporate speak buried inside itself ad infinitum. What do I know though – perhaps that's their strength.

Anyway, I art directed and designed this puppy. I also got familiar with Agile, which was a surprisingly efficient way to work.

My role – Art Direction, Design, UX Concept

Dynamics CRM

Actually explaining what Micosoft Dynamcis CRM is and/or does would make this here page an eternal scroll. Suffice it to say Microsoft makes a lot of software that organizes and automates all kinds of business stuff (inventory tracking, workers, what-have-yous) across all kinds of different industry silos (financial, professional services, government, etc).  Long story short, they wanted some accessible rich media banners that conveyed how Microsoft Dynamics manages all of your business and/or government needs efficiently.

​So I came up with this Rube-Goldberg idea and decided that we could house this cause-and-effect organizing chain mechanism inside literal houses that represented each industrial silo. Mostly this was an excuse to utilize an amazing production team of illustrators and animators at JWTwo and make something that looked really cool. I was disappointed that we weren't able to get some VO talent into the ole budget, but we made Microsoft Dynamics CRM as cool as we could.

My role – Concept, Art Direction, Design 

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ON: Being more Efficient

Microsoft was all about communicating the efficiency of their offerings. Microsoft's products streamline your business, your office, etc. On: Being more Efficient was our next big campaign push after Because IT's everybody's Business and Brand Journalism.

The video is intended as a pre-roll. I also got to do some print ads for a change - a good change of pace, as I don't get to do that often these days. 

My role – Concept, Art Direction, Design

My role – Everything

​A cautionary tale of late night internet-ing, set against the backdrop of a hypothetical, dystopian invasion of Des Moines, Iowa by multiple Godzilla-sized David Hasselfhoffs.

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Recognition

​MotionMaker Selection of the Week Daily Motion 

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My role –​ Everything 

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Smarter Commerce

Yet another silo under IBM's Smarter Planet umbrella, Smarter Commerce is supposed to inform businesses about how best to adapt to a rapidly changing, hyper-tech business environment. IBM wanted an iPad app that would serve as a hub for all of their Smarter Commerce content that provided thought leadership on what they saw as an emerging paradigm shift in commerce. 

I came up with two concepts. The first was a more standard iPad  site with a swiping UX for content overlays and page navigation.

The second was a bit more ambitious. Here, a hero HD video would explain the four pillars of Smarter Commerce sequentially, while the user could interact with a color-coded timeline that would serve as navigation, revealing supplemental content below the paused feature. 

My role – Art Direction, Design, UX Concept

Various digital marketing materials

An opportunity arose for a digital designer/art director at Bobbi Brown back in 2008. I thought a client side gig might be an interesting change of pace. I gave it a whirl. I was intrigued since I had never done anything in beauty before and was completely ignorant of that entire universe. 

Things got off to a rocky start. Apparently the designer dude before me was some hack who faked his book and was covertly referred to as "Slash" by the rest of the team. The office had an infamous rodent situation. Slash got fired. Slash then purposefully left uneaten food in all of the drawers in my cube. Yeehaw.

Anyway, I essentially designed 10,000 emails and a ton of other direct digital material. I updated their ancient web site with relentless promotions. I had a minor hand in the implementation of their current web site that was conceived by Zeus Jones. Here are some of my better layouts. 

My role – Interaction Design, Art Direction

I invented an alter ego artist named Jonny Country that made ponderous photographs. "Jonny" is short for "Jonathan", and "Country" is a riff off "Campo", which means "open field" in Spanish. My goal was to make the worst art possible.

I had big dreams of getting some of my art history friends to craft some overwrought criticism and mythologize Jonny Country in a totally bogus yet beautifully crafted, hardcover monograph that I'd install in bookstores around the city. 

Alas, this project got away from me. But I did manage single awesome photo shoot. When I consciously try to make something shitty, it's usually a lot more interesting than the work I take seriously. 

Another Day at the Beach

Back in 2008, Neutrogena wanted to stress the life-saving SPF content in their skin products. I got hired to design a 'real-time' and 'cinematic' microsite. The concept had already been solidified when I showed up.

The idea was to have this wide shot, interactive video beach scene. The user could scroll around and zoom in on a single person/situation. On zoom, a whole bunch of 3D data sets would populate. In 'real' time, you could check out stats of the situation, the person, the impact of a certain level of SPF, etc. To me it was a little scare tactic-y – "Look! This girl in a bathing suit is dying before your eyes! Watch as her skin slowly morphs into your next pair of boots!"

Neutrogena ended up putting the kibosh on this. I'm gonna go with budgetary concerns.​

My role – Art Direction, Design 

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A couple of friends of mine were working at an agency and came up with this zany concept for Ritz Crackerfuls. They wrote a few scripts and, lo and behold, Ritz thought they were too weird. 

My friends still wanted to execute the scripts. So, for a modest fee, I agreed to execute them. The bulk of the creative direction was: "animate it, badly".

"Can do, capitán!" I replied. Well, without the "capitán!" part.  This is what happened. 

The Follicle Chronicles

We pitched Propecia at my last staff gig, back in 2007 at DraftFCB. Propecia wanted us to flesh out their Save the Hair campaign. We wanted to make an animated comedy series about hair follicles. The Follicle Chronicles was born.

There was still the problem of having to pay lip service to Save the Hair while making our pet project. Our genius solution? Put the Save the Hair tagline at end of the short! Problem. Solved.

I animated the pilot episode. We were very excited. We were going to write a web comedy series about hair follicles. We wrote a few more episodes. Our lives were going to change!

Propecia hated it. I still love the concept.

My role – Concept, Art Direction, Design, Animation 

Celebration of Service​

IBM turned 100 a year or so ago. They made an entire site, IBM100.com, to celebrate it. I was tasked with designing the Celebration of Service page, which was supposed to track and display every IBMers' pledged and completed community service hours for a variety of different causes. 

My role – Art Direction, Design ​

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Need a Reuben Now Syndrome

BBDO NY hired me to breathe some new life into Arby's reuben sandwich campaign. At first, they wanted a St. Patrick's Day themed 'big idea' to be the cross platform campaign – because reubens are Irish and all. Oh wait, they're not, but you know, corned beef.

Anyway, e thought of all kinds of crazy shit. One idea involved a leprechaun posse touring the US mainland on synchronized mopeds, showing up to random Arby's establishments off I-95 to shower real gold on unsuspecting diners. Arby's did not like this.

Finally, after many cognitively dissonant rounds of review and little progress, they decided that no, they didn't want a big St. Patrick's Day idea after all, but that they did want to throw a few thousand bucks at some "viral videos" about "Reuben Mania" which was based off this one-off TV commercial about a fictitious disease called NRNS (Need a Reuben Now Syndrome). Oh, and they also wanted those viral videos done in a week and a half. I promptly wrote these date/breakup themed scripts in a morning blitz. Somehow they got approved internally that afternoon. This is what some little production company in LA coughed up for a pittance.

No, they're not great. You could even say they suck. But they're important for me because a) it's rare that that I get to write anything in a professional environment, b) much less get something I wrote actually approved and shot and c) it was fun!

My role – Concept, Script, Art Direction

Facebook App

I got called in to work on various Hershey's accounts at then Euro 4AD (now Havas). I knew Hershey's was large, but I had no idea that Hershey's owns the entire candy aisle. Literally. With few exceptions. When I wasn't making Facebook headers for Reese's, Twizzlers or Jolly Ranchers, I worked on designing this Ice Breakers Duos Facebook page. 

I had never done a candy account, and there was a lot of visual hanky-panky to get used to. Gradients and glows galore. Not to mention the sudden spike in my sugar intake. I had little input on the concept development on this one and served as a hired art director gun to design and refine the various apps on this page and guide it through production.  

My role – Art Direction, Design 

Brand Journalism

I perma-lanced at JWT for about a year in 2010. During this time I worked exclusively on various Microsoft projects. Brand Journalism attempted to address Microsoft's dilemma of communicating to an audience that's averse to advertsing. The solution was to penetrate the desired tech audience through influencer channels of bloggers and thought leaders that this IT heavy demographic respected. 

Even though it wasn't the most blindingly successful campaign according to the numbers, we (hastily) cobbled together this slick ​case study for the awards shows, and it ended up winning a handful. 

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​Recognition

Bronze Cannes Lions Titanium 2010

Best Digital D&AD Awards  2011 

Winner Bees Awards 2011  

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My role – Art Direction, Design 

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Episode 1 - The Date

Minotaura goes on a dinner date. The first episode in an ongoing series. And by 'ongoing' I mean it's a decent substitute for my procrastination on other projects. 

My role – Everything 

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While I was client side over at Bobbi Brown – well, really Estee Lauder, who owns Bobbi Brown, sometimes work for other smaller clients trickled through the cracks. This particular project really slipped, and someone was really angry, and in an emergency I designed this entire microsite in less time than I thought imaginable.

My role – Art Direction, Design 

Megadebates​ was supposed to be a live Twitter debate platform. Thought leaders, bloggers, celebrities, anybody, etc. could debate others that stand on opposite sides of issues. They would have a time limit and Twitter's character limit to debate real time. Spectators could watch passively or comment and interact with a debate.

My role – Art Direction, Design 

​IT Feud

While working on Microsoft, there were always some long simmering ideas in the background. This concept had already been sketched by the time I got there. The concept was to recreate Family Feud, but instead of families, we have groups of IT guys competing. There is actually a Family Feud set that you can rent (!). Unfortunately you can't re-animate Richard Dawkin's body (too soon?).

Anyway, we were going to rent the set, take it to Vegas, and film a bunch of episodes that would air live on the internet. Everybody loved this idea. Even Microsoft. I designed the initial site concept. Most everything was signed off. And...wait for it...when it was about to happen, Microsoft pulled the plug. I'll always have this jpeg though. 

My role – Art Direction, Design​

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