In 2021, Vistaprint embarked on a major pivot, going from a print promotional-materials maker (Vistaprint) to a marketing partner that helps small businesses grow (Vista) focusing on digital innovation and design through its acquiring of the graphic design platform, 99 Designs. But no one knows Vistaprint in design circles, which are tight-knit and we needed a fast way to build credibility.
Luckily, small businesses were rising to pandemic challenges, pivoting for a new online reality dominated by ecommerce social-media innovation, which Vista could help with.
Our Way In? Exemplify Design in every form. We had 3 core categories - Design in Action, Design by Association, Design by recommendation.
We needed to collaborate with tastemakers that influenced entrepreneurs and culture to deliver outsized returns on an undersized budget.
We partnered with Complex to create 99th Street at ComplexLand, the virtual shopping festival drawing 500,000 people each year.
99th Street was an ode to mainstreets everywhere — and the first-ever neighborhood for shopping small in the metaverse. We selected five small BIPOC owned businesses for the big moment, providing them support to develop, launch and sell new products exclusively at ComplexLand.
We tapped into 99designs by Vista’s global network of designers for logos, branding and package designs for each business.
Next, we offered community support and mentorship from designer Melody Ehsani, rapper and activist Killer Mike and artist Louis De Guzman to personally consult each business and drive hype for 99th Street.
Every business supported sold out of product, and drove outsized returns and brand mentions among SMBs and Entrepreneurs, as well as winning an Anthem Award.
One of the main problems plaguing young strategists today is that they often get no chance to train in strategy.
They’re thrown into the fire because of a lack of resources, a lack of time, or a lack of care. It’s what pushes them out of our industry and into safer waters.
That’s why I created The Takeaway at Essence, a thought leadership program run by our juniors and overseen by me, designed to find the weird, the wild, the interesting, and push internal and external teams to greater heights. It was a program specifically focused on giving junior strategists the place to practice writing insights, finding weird shit and trying to make it all relevant to our long list of clients.
Essentially teaching them all of the core fundamentals that would not only serve them well in strategy, but would help them grow as humans. We covered everything from the metaverse, love, to found spaces to AI and more.
It started small in North America then grew to global proportions expanding to APAC and EMEA, running for half a decade and over 100 issues written by a team I couldn’t be more proud of.
During the pandemic, more people than ever were embracing the outdoors. After all, where else could we go but outside, given all our normal third spaces were persona non grata?
However, even though more people were in the outdoors, there were still stereotypes surrounding BIPOC audiences that loved the out doors and TNF still had a hard time reaching more diverse audiences that had decided to make the plunge.
The Insight: The paths we’re most comfortable taking are ones blazed by those that look like us, especially for underserved audiences.
How: We partnered with BDG & Bustle to launch the “Discover Your Trail” campaign.
Through talent-led videos and inspiring on-site features, we shed light on the organizations who are working toward equity in the great outdoors. By partnering with groups fighting against inclusion disparities (including TNF’s own Explore Council), we created a platform for changemakers to share their experiences, all the while increasing awareness of The North Face as a boundary-breaking brand whose mission is to help all people experience the power of the natural world.
Results: We were able to drive over 3 million impressions with a small budget, with above industry standard responses across Instagram and social extensions .
During my time at Essence, I had the privilege of starting a new strategic discipline called Trends & Culture.
Not only was I responsible for creative and comms strategy - I was also tasked with bringing thought leadership to the forefront for clients in order to incentivize new thinking.
I worked across Target, The North Face, Universal Pictures and more trying to bring the wild, weird and sometimes mildly interesting to the forefront to create good ideas and better impact.
Resulted in opening up 3 new lines of business for the agency, as well as taking a primary role in new business wins for the agency.
For the launch of the Pixel 2, Google Pixel wanted to inspire people to question the smartphone choice that they’re blindly following.
Today, people trust and rely on Google to answer all their burning questions and make life simpler and easier—because we challenged the status quo. We want them to do the same—always desiring to explore a better way. We had a chance to break the stereotypical ideal, without compromises or filters.
With an upcoming launch centered around Valentine’s Day, we needed to find a way to break through.
The Insight - Despite our knowledge on love and sexuality growing everyday, the way we show it in media is filtered through binary lens.
We needed to change that.
How we did it: We built the “Love Your Way” campaign. Pixel inspired people to capture and share what love means to them, rallying celebrities, artists and influencers to lead by example. We used star TV talent from shows challenging norms—Broad City, RuPaul’s Drag Race, but also used smaller influencers that represented humanity across the sexuality spectrum - bi, asexual, and more.
We wanted to show what love really looked like, unfiltered. Yes, we won some awards, but what’s more important was challenging an outdated norm.
Efforts to promote Halo 5 began well before its October 2015 launch date, cementing a truly momentous struggle between Master Chief and Spartan Locke, a new character entering the franchise. The Hunter (Locke) vs the Hunted (Master Chief).
But it’s an impossible task to make anyone believe that Chief could be a villain. Seriously. Just look at that armor.
Key Insight: The only thing worse than a villain are men who believe.
We set up the central idea that when it's our beliefs that drive us, we can do things either miraculous or villainous, depending on whose perspective we look from. It’s the only way to make Master Chief feel realistically evil - to have him view himself so right that he couldn’t be wrong, no matter the consequences. This was the central driving idea behind the OLVs and other digital assets we made for the launch. In addition, we built a digital interactive experience pitting the creeds of our two characters against each other, and rewarded viewers for fully interacting with the rich back and forth discourse and videos we created.
Resulted in passing client expectations for impressions and click through within the first week of the experience and helped cement a great launch for Halo 5 overall.
I started a podcast. Because who didn’t during the pandemic? It was designed to examine the ins and outs of what's new in advertising and ad culture and hosted by yours truly.
Part dialogue, part debate, part pure unadulterated speculation, we covered topics spanning culture, media, and technology in an effort to make advertising more valuable for everyone. Check it out if you want to learn how I think… I think.
Prior to the launch of the Master Chief Collection, a one of a kind collection of all the storied games in the Halo franchise, our client was searching for a way to espouse the rich Halo history we had at hand. They weren't sure whether or not to do an experience for it, and were planning on letting the name of it stand on its own.
After all, it’s Halo.
But we wanted to make an impact.
Key Idea: "The past lays seeds for the future"
There is so much storied history and lore in the Halo-verse that were unexplored - and became amazing foreshadowing for games to come.
Instead of treating the launch of the collection as a stand alone event, we wanted to create an experience that could tie into Halo 5, launching next year.
We created a rich digital mobile first experience where consumers could use their phone to explore the Halo universe, find scenes from old battles, and seek hints for new adventures. We could also use this experience for new Halo ideas and endeavors, creating a truly growing digital experience.
Results: At launch the Master Chief Collection broke sales records, and the experience itself outperformed industry standards across impressions, usage, and more.
Context is Everything
I had the pleasure of working across 6 different launches of the Pixel phone.
Introducing Google’s new device as a premium alternative to the big two (Apple and Samsung) was no easy task. Given the competitor market domination, we had to approach this from a deeper consumer mindset. The market was saturated. Features and form factors were singular and commonplace. How could we break through?
No one cares about features, unless it meets the moments that matter.
It’s the one theme that kept coming up in all of our research.
In order to meet that, we built creative expressions that embraced showcasing humanity through the lens of Pixel at the right time, at the right place (and with the right feature).
How: A bit outside regular creative strategy, I built a structure that mapped moments of opportunity (everyday moments, culturally significant moments, and content) for each viewer contextually (location, time of day, weather, and publisher), on a near global scale. It led to us developing best-in-class dynamic creative with mapped variables across each creative expression to make each one as unique and relevant as possible.
This approach led to us taking over digital duties for all global launches across APAC, EMEA, the US. Over 5 years and six product launches, our award-winning design, content, and media evolutions delivered billions of relevant ad impressions resulting in record lifts in aided awareness, feature awareness, and purchase intent.
In both Japan and Korea, mobile gaming is crowded and well established. Which meant gamers already had their go-to habits for mobile games and that’s a hell of an uphill battle to win. Google Play wanted to not only make a splash, but actually get gamers to try new games and drive trials and downloads, vs just positive favorability.
We needed to drive action, not just impressions.
Key Idea: No better time than down time.
We wanted to focus on making downtime a space for play, vs idleness. Research had shown that this was the most optimal time to incentivize new behavior. Working with both media and creative teams, we placed a sense of urgency within our creative but also served it at just the right time to try. We specifically dayparted against things like weekday/weekend, travel times, commutes and other moments where your fingers are still but your mind may be racing. We worked with global teams to localize and make sure that we were still staying true to each culture we touched.
Results: Campaign broke industry standards on trials, resulting in its expansion to across regions and duplication to similar success.
Client: Nike
Situation: Nike wanted to better understand the Women's fitness category, which has been historically under-served for the past few years.
Current research and insights started and ended with phrases like "she is driven, stylish, and ambitious" which although true, were so vague as to be useless.
In other words, they wanted us to provide a fresh and current POV on the Nike North American Women, also called a Modern Girl of Fitness (MGOF).
But… we had no budget. Of course.
Solution: Personally organized some of the first primary research done on the account at the agency, which consisted of 20-25 participants from different markets (West Coast, Midwest, and East). We arranged one on one interviews via Skype, as well as homework assignments asking participants to keep journals over the next week recording things such as how mobile/digital was integrated into their fitness lifestyle, fitness regiments, inspiration sources, etc.
Results: Created a comprehensive POV deck on the MGOF for the client, which inspired work and thinking on media and creative teams across partner agencies and grew our scope overall
