In 2023-24, as the lead copywriter and associate creative director for Real Chemistry's Galderma Aesthetics account, I helped articulate brand overhaul of Dysport, a direct injectable competitor to Botox. With my art partner, we oversaw the look, feel, and tone of the re-energized brand, making it more youthful, more dynamic, and more personable to consumers. The tag line "Uniquely you. Definitely Dysport." was our conceptual first step in selling through the entire concept through to the client. We eventually expanded the conceit of "Uniquely You." to an entire suite of other adverbs (like "Boldly", "Brilliantly" and "Beautifully You") to reflect the character of the model we would elevate, while helping consumers identify themselves with the brand.
The rebrand has been a creative success. We incorporated the tagline, updated brand voice, and visual approach throughout the whole brand, including an overhauled website, a CTV spot, several social videos and animated featurettes, sales pieces, and in-clinic signage, along with a detailed brand guideline deck, so any agency who works on the campaign has to incorporate our tone and voice for Dysport. By creating this campaign, we’ve been able to make Dysport more visible as a challenger brand and gain inroads in the ultra-competitive, Botox-dominated, injectables market. You can see our website here, for a deeper look.
A long time ago, back in the Web 0.5 days, at my first ad job in Boston working on 3Com's web site and banner campaigns, I met with Nicholas Negroponte, who founded the MIT Media Lab. My head was full of wonder and awe at the possibilities of putting brochureware (with hyperlinks!) on the Web. While I was peppering him with questions about the gloriously Brave New World we were entering, he handed me a book. It was his book, but that's neither here or there, he said, "Open it to page 50." I did. He then said. "You have just made this as interactive as anything that is on the Internet." Mind. Blown.
Years later, I remembered this lesson when submitting our Audi magazine for an award at Cannes. After winning local and national ADDY awards, we wanted to go international by telling the story of the sublime interactive luxury experience of Audi magazine, compared to the digital world. What's weird is that I conceived of this months before IKEA did the same thing. Can I prove it? Yes. People sent me emails of a similar IKEA piece after this had been sent to France for consideration at Cannes. Still, I like it for what it says and represents — print is still a premium Interactive experience that can convey luxury in a way that being online can't.
Here’s an Intel diversity campaign we worked on under rather extraordinary conditions. We developed a tag line and a story during a preliminary phone interview with the various subjects, while simultaneously planning a shoot for the next day. Our subjects were flexible, their stories interesting and the results were quite beautiful. I helped by asking the right questions, developing a rapport with the subjects and then assisting with the edits to help the people and the corporation tell the story they wanted to tell.
This was pitch-winning sizzle video for Yamaha MusicCast that sought to capture the thrill and intensity of music, and what it means to us fans. The team at Yamaha liked the pitch video so much, we made a few edits to it, ditched the copyrighted material, and re-recorded it as a YouTube video/marketing tool that eventually had over 1,250,000 views and established the multi-speaker music system in a crowded marketplace.
This is a video we did for Intel where we were able to work on a launch for an AI product from a company Intel just bought. Movidius. We wanted to showcase the human element of artificial intelligence, which we did using smart messaging, almost all stock images and our own motion graphics. This was a well-received video that drew applause at the launch party. So that was cool to hear.
I knew as soon as I pitched the idea in a meeting, it would work. What better way to show off one's product storytelling chops than to breakdown one signature technology — in this case, Audi quattro — and give it 35 angles (one for every year of its existence). Some 50 scripts later, we whittled it down to 35 stories, told over a variety of archived, existing footage in short, concise bursts. This piece, which Audi uses in 35 individual shorts and as a 10 minute mega-cut (shown here on their YouTube channel (with, collectively, 100,000s of hits), for loop viewing at dealerships and dealer training seminars. It's a showcase of how a team can produce a complex series of videos with a deceptively simple idea for a technology that is central to the brand's core promise of performance and technology.
It's said you'll always remember your first reel. My first TV commercial, actually, even in this day and age of being able to find everything online, has disappeared into the ether. It was an ad for Clear Blue Easy home pregnancy tests that I wrote for Direct Partners in NYC sometime in 2000 or 2001. The pitch was that OTHER home pregnancy tests were basically a crapshoot — we used a custom Magic 8-ball — while Clear Blue Easy was for those who wanted certainty. I think I even remember seeing it once, but alas, it's lost to history. A curio whose legend, I like to think, is passed on from those of us who worked on it in small whispers over drinks when we talk about Back in the Day. Here are some other clips, though, that showcase Bosch TV spots, as well as some Audi brand and product videos that were used to fill various needs for dealers, owners and fans.
I helped to launch the beautiful Audi e-tron by diving into the promise of the full plug-in luxury vehicle, announcing to the world there’s no reason to sacrifice performance with a sustainable sensibility. It’s a gorgeous drive, that makes you feel like you are doing the right thing. That’s an electric feeling.
Kite, a leader in the cell therapy space, wanted to reinvigorate the story they were telling about their approach to beating cancer. They had the science, and we helped tell them that story in a more direct, and visual way on their new site.
But we also wanted to highlight the emotional impact of their science, so we focused on telling Stories of Hope. This video series, which garnered over a million views on their YouTube channel, focused on patients, and their families, beating certain forms of lymphoma and leukemia through cell therapy. It was an important story for Kite to tell, to lift cell therapy from an unproven and potentially risky way to fight cancer into a viable, safe, and efficacious approach.
I helped to write the synopsis of the 14 video series, edit the stories for maximum emotional impact, and develop the themes that carried through the tone of voice throughout.
Working with partners is a skill. For this original Audi Magazine exclusive comic, we worked with a team of artists at Marvel Comics, liaisons at Disney/Marvel, internal stakeholders at Audi of America and our own team to produce a very cool custom piece in advance of the second Avengers movie, featuring one of the vehicles that was due to be featured in the film. It was a heroic effort on everyone’s part.
Jazz legend Ron Carter not only agreed to be interviewed, he demanded it. An Audi lover, Carter was outraged with a previous cover that featured Tom Brady and, as a Guinness Book of World Record holder for being on the most recordings — including those of Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock and Tribe Called Quest, he asked why wasn’t he in the magazine. It was an excellent question, so we immediately went to New York to talk with him, his passion for allroad and his amazing discography. Carter even played a brief bass solo set for us, which hit all the right notes for me.
Bologna. Handcrafted performance. Soul. Ducati, which was part of the Audi family, had a great story to tell. We were able to tell it by going to the factory, soaking in the history, the pride in manufacturing, and the personal touch found in every Multistrada. For me, it was finding the deep beauty in a legendary brand, while dreaming of the sweet life, taking sharp corners on backroads through the Apennines.
This article is an example of going deep on an elemental truth — aluminum is a crucial component of Audi vehicles. Through infographics and copy, we show why this material works so well in the new world of automotive construction.
Print is a premium. It's a tactile experience that conveys permanence, tradition, luxury. It's just different than digital. It's interactive, but it's also tactile. Not to mention the lush, plush, images that don't need high-bandwidth to download. They are right there, next to the copy, waiting for you to explore.
I've done quite a bit of print for luxury automotive, Infinit and Audi. Different visual palates. Different tone. But both crafted to build desire and make an emotional case for beauty. The print brochure is a way to express desire, showcase a narrative of a vehicle or a brand. It tells a story and it is kept as a keepsake for those who want to fall in love. It's a romantic medium that aims for the heart as much as the intellect.
Sometimes you are presented with a creative challenge like "how do you show something that's not there?" In this case, we are talking about the Audi commitment to shaving pounds off their vehicles for better performance and greater efficiency. The art director in this case showed the way to tell a tricky product story in an original way. I helped her craft the message and added a little something to the story of less (the X's on the meat), but the spread is arresting, memorable and to those with the taste for it, delicious.
I chose this example to show how I can help tie the visual to the message. In this case, I was given a layout and cycled through a bunch of other thoughts before settling on the core message: The striking, easily recognizable, signature LED headlights of Audi and, as portrayed, how they look in a line up. This is an example of wordplay that provides alignment to the visual message.
When taking on product storytelling, it's important to think big sometimes. In this case, as big as an elephant's skull. An Audi engineer, as the story goes, saw an elephant's skull at a museum and became amazed at its structural integrity. How, he wondered, could an animal carrying something that large and heavy on its shoulders? The genius of nature's design came through — the skull is actually a series of honeycombed chambers which provide strength, but at a minimum of weight. The Audi engineer employed this kind of design in order to create aluminum pieces that were light enough to provide better efficiency, but still were rigid and powerful enough to maintain structure integrity for the frame of the vehicle.
Infiniti is a different beast than Audi. Here, we were able to control the imagery a little more, since we shot the bulk of it. It was also more of an impressionistic brand, with a unique brand voice that we helped develop. In this case, I tried to connect the then-new EX, its style and the color of the spread through impressionistic copy. I tried to make style feel like a gorgeous autumn day.
As a Japanese brand, Infiniti had a different foundation of conceptual storytelling than the German luxury brands you'll see in this portfolio. In this case, we tied in the way the interior lighting was designed in the spirit of the welcoming roadside inns of Japan called ryokan from the Edo period. There's a mood generated by light which appeals to me on a sensual level and wanted to include it as an example of the kind of deep dive I can make to take one small piece of a story and connect it to a larger cultural narrative.
The challenge of writing for a challenger brand like Infiniti is to try and elevate the perception of what it offers. So we worked hard to take a luscious shoot and connect it to sumptuous language. The deep browns, the gorgeous leaves, the connection between nature and the vehicle. It's a beautifully composed spread, I think, and worked hard at elevating the understanding of the substance of an Infiniti interior.
We did a series of B2B brochures for different types of industries on behalf of Southern California Edison, who commissioned these pieces to give businesses the tools and information they needed to lower their energy usage during peak periods. It was very technical and very complicated — as one would expect from a utility company — but we were able to convey the topline messages in a simpler, more elegant way with big headlines, bright graphics and easily processed information. It was successful at the end user level as well, with an appreciable uptick in adoption on behalf of the business. The end result was big savings for them and the grid.
When we took on a campaign for Merck Oncology, we didn’t just want to highlight the breakthrough science that has helped countless patients beat cancer, but we wanted to also talk about the part of the story about how preventative science can prevent people from becoming patients at all.
It’s vital we find ways of curing cancer. It’s even better if we celebrate its absence altogether.
We had the Fatburger account for a couple years when I came onto the New Business practice. They were notorious for not paying and we weren't real confident they'd always pay us, but we still did some impressive work for them. From the copy perspective, we were able to live without boundaries of taste or propriety. One ad that I wrote, but can't find, noted the economic downturn of 2008 with a $2.99 meal deal and a headline that said 'Bite This, Economy', which made it onto a Yahoo story on the financial situation. But while they may have been crass and I was able to tryout some dick jokes, they suited our target audience. This ad actually is part of a case study the agency has about how we can solve problems. When we came on, Fatburger had a confusing burger classification system, King, Double King, XXL, etc. We simplified the menu and sales on the higher-margin Large and XXLarge went up 40% or more. Eventually, of course, their tax-evading CEO (who had previously served time for said evasion) stopped paying us. But we had a tasty run of provocative copy.
We had the Bosch appliances AOR account for 4 years. We did all of their print work, some microsites and their point-of-sales materials. They strove for the kind of Bauhaus-influenced minimalism that you see in the ads — and in their own design. Clean design lines begat clever copy lines. Headlines alone had to carry a sense of personality for the brand. They were wildly successful because of their signature, top-of-the-line dishwashers. We helped them increase those sales, helped them expand into washer/dryer lines and induction heating. It was a great account to write for and you can see some of our efforts throughout this portfolio.
Black mayonnaise. That's how Robert Kennedy Jr. described the chemical sludge at the bottom of the Hudson that was created through GE's efforts upstream. The EPA had instituted hundreds of millions of dollars in fines, but GE was dragging its feet on their clean-up responsibilities. Enter Hill of Beans. A pro-bono agency Kara Thurmond, Chris Reese and I started because the problems of the three of us didn't amount to...Well, it's a Casablanca reference and Kara had a relationship with the Hudson River environmental non-profit that RFK Jr. founded. So we were asked to publicly shame Jack Welch, the CEO of General Electric and their role in an environmental catastrophe. Riverkeeper paid for a billboard situated over the West Side Highway. Kennedy later told us that Welsh himself actually saw it and had a legal counsel threaten the Van Wagner people to take it down. They refused, since it was already paid for. Who knows if it ever spurred Welch to act, but GE eventually did and the clean up continues to this day. I like to think the three of us had a little impact on getting rid of all that black mayo.
Copy-wise or not, this is definitionally a gorgeous ad for high-end luxury pseudo-seutical SkinMedica. We did a series of ads for them using the "not" device as a pivot to change perspectives. This was an elegantly devised composition, I think, and I was happy to be able to help distract the viewer from the beautiful woman who is clearly the fortunate product of good genes, no matter what the line says.
Sometimes, you just do what you are asked and do it as well as you can. What we did at Deutsch, then Draft/FCB for Bank of America was to try and innovate their marketing efforts. In this case, we designed and developed an "off the shelf" print ad solution for different markets and different branches to use. This ad, for example, talked about their investment in art scholarships and could be used in different places all over the country. We did other ads for local media placements for their Military Bank division, individual branches and even checking services. I wrote hundreds of headlines and am proud of the craft I put into this assignment.
I wanted to include a single ad out of a rebranding effort we provided the Island Hotel in Newport Beach, CA. This ran in the luxury travel mags and helped the Island transition from an old Ritz-Carlton property into a new player in the Orange County luxe scene.
Arcellx, a company dedicated to cell therapies to combat cancer and auto-immune diseases, has a heady mission; to “advance humanity by engineering cell therapies that are safer, more effective, and more broadly accessible.”
How they aim do to that involves biotechnology terms of art like “D-Domains” and “anitocabtagene autoleucels” — this was the opportunity and the challenge for me as a writer. We needed to humanize the company to advance the technology they’ve created. And do to that, I needed to understand the science well enough to be able to credibly explain it to HCPs, investors, clients, and ultimately, the people whose lives it would save.
Cystinosis, a rare genetic condition that causes crystals to form in organs and tissues from birth, hits adolescents hard. It causes excessive sweating, makes it difficult to catch your breath, and can make uncomfortable situations like trying to date, even more difficult. So we created a series of Instagram posts that tried to humanize the experience for those patients who have a lot on their plates already.
I was able to work on the launch of Zurzuvae on social platforms. In this role, I helped in the messaging narrative to this fast-acting, revolutionary postpartum depression pharmaceutical, focusing on its ease-of-use, efficacy, and its potential impact for new moms looking to beat an old foe. I’m very proud to be on their side in this fight.
One of my first assignments as Editorial Director for the Mercedes-Benz account at Critical Mass was a microsite for the SLR McLaren, a $450,000 Supercar whose stock was pre-sold before it ever came out. Still, we wanted to tell a story, connect it to a larger heritage of performance and generate some halo action for the brand. This piece, The Obsession, won an IAC (Internet Advertising Competition) award. The great irony for me is that I hadn't even driven a car in years, because a New Yorker didn't have to drive. Still, it was a great opportunity to do some intense, almost comic-book style storytelling with a client that gave us a pretty good-sized leash.
Knowing very little at the time about cars, never mind legendary supercars which I am sure I'll never be able to drive, I tried to write it like I wrote my fiction — pulpy and stylized. The narrative here I think builds the drama.
The microsite storytelling was enhanced by its IA, where we told a story in a linear, engaging, surprising way. Today this might be an app, but then we incorporated video and enhanced content to tell a multi-media story in an innovative way. This particular page takes a deep look at how racing technology found its way into this singularly amazing road-raging SLR McLaren, which, given the two brands' respective heritages, isn't surprising in the least.
This is a slide from a Mercedes-Benz SLK microsite which won a 2005 Webby award for its design and storytelling. We took important numbers and engaging imagery to tell the story of this stylish cabriolet for the German luxury legend.
This site we developed and wrote for Mercedes-Benz was part of an 18-month long lead program for the R-Class, which was then a brand new vehicle for the brand. Knowing that the 7-seat, three-row behemoth was a tough sell, we told deep brand stories that combined the stories behind the design with the kind of people who engage the attributes of the vehicle. We wrote and posted videos with everyone from the Mercedes Design lead Steve Mattin to dance impresario Mark Morris. This was an immersive, digital project that sought to define a new breed of car. Sadly, the R-Class didn't catch fire, but given how things look now in the crossover/SUV market, it may have just been ahead of its time.
The cause, being the R-Class. But this was one example how we were trying new ways to connect brand avatars with the products and features in the new vehicle. We used emails, among other pre-historic social mediums, to try and craft this message. I think this is well-written at the very least.
I did a ton of print, point-of-sale, training, video and Web work for Samsung and for various reasons, I don't have any other than this digitized. This was part of a sweepstakes that used pop visuals with branding copy (and a Sears card incentive) to engage users on different Samsung products used for different part of the house. I was there just as Samsung went from a cut-rate brand to an industry leader. I was able to watch the brand evolve and its product quality improve over several channels, from early-era HDTV and cell phones to Internet-enabled refrigerators. It was pretty cool.
