Over three decades, Cisco's business has seen exponential growth across a vast portfolio of products, services and strategic acquisitions. Creative teams operated in silos across the company and around the world, resulting in customers experiencing many different versions of Cisco.
To achieve a consistent brand, Cisco streamlined the global agency roster and built a world-class in-house creative team with The Hatch. As global agency partner, we worked in close partnership with The Hatch to bring Cisco's brand to life by connecting with audiences at a human level and unify every touchpoint.
To achieve this, we went back to the roots of the company: Connection. The Bridge to Possible campaign was born, underscored by Cisco's logo, based on the Golden Gate Bridge. Cisco has always been the bridge between what is hoped for and what can be. The Bridge to Possible pulls it all together and provides a north star.
In just three rocket-fueled years, Thrasio raised over $3.4 billion and became a category pioneer, leading the industry with over 100 competitors following every move they made.
And despite the fact that more than 1 in 6 US households have purchased a Thrasio product, most didn’t know Thrasio existed.
We needed to differentiate. We needed consumers to know that what gets delivered to their door delivers. We needed sellers to have more than just the best possible buyout, they needed peace of mind that their legacy is in good hands. And we needed investors, and every single employee, to understand exactly who, and why, we are. We needed to be a brand.
Thrasio's brave new mission: reimagine how the world’s most loved products become accessible to everyone.
To achieve this, we leveraged world-class expertise and the smart application of data science to figure out what products garner great ratings, reviews, and rankings — and why. We worked to make these items as good as they can be or create new ones to meet changing demands. We sought out entrepreneurs who share our passion. And we constantly looked to the future, searching for ways to make our company more diverse and inclusive, our processes more sustainable, and our world more equitable.
This brand was built with an all-star team: with Sterling Brands defining the strategic foundation, Pentagram architecting a bold new visual identity design, Mischief setting a unique new tone and voice, and a rockstar internal team, Thrasio’s Brand Central, architecting this brand from the inside out was one of the highlights of my career.
Credits: Sterling Brands (Strategy), Pentagram (Visual ID), Mischief (Verbal ID), Thrasio Brand Central - Salit Kulla (Global Brand Marketing), Jeremy Villano (Strategy), Dave Bourla (Creative Direction, Copy), David Byrd (Creative Direction, Art), Lauren Rogers (Copywriting), Catherine Mitchell (Art Direction)
It was an honor to represent Havas and be a part of the winning campaign in Google’s hackathon for the United Nations.
3 days. 7 ad giants (Havas, Dentsu, IPG, Omnicom, Publicis, WPP and W+K). The world’s biggest challenges. Here’s what unfolded at the YouTube Space New York when the world's top communications agencies came together as part of partnership with Common Ground. The goal? Mobilize Gen Z around the United Nation's sustainability goals.
With the Cubs on the verge of their first World Series title in 108 years, it seemed a shame that legendary announcer Harry Caray wouldn't be in the booth. But through a bit of editing, we brought him back to call the final out.
According to AdAge, Budweiser became the first brand to simultaneously have the most engaging brand posts on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, raising the bar for emotional storytelling in real-time.
As Harry would say, "Holy Cow!"
Agency: VaynerMedia - Chris Bradley (ECD), Gary Vaynerchuk (CEO), Craig Miller (CW), Arturo Aranda (AD), Alex Slavin (Account Supervisor), Joe Leotta (Account Director), Chris Caldwell (Account Exec + Ultimate Fan)
Press: The Washington Post / Twitchy / Chicago Tribune / The Daily Mail / Fox Sports / Esquire / Philly / CBS / Yahoo!
Facebook's Creative Shop's mission: partner with agencies and brands to deliver the world's most engaging content.
We covered a mind-boggling spectrum of marketing services, everything from creating work sessions based on the hackathons that the Facebook engineers were famous for, helping wrangle and award the Creative Council, positioning Facebook's first-ever video ad offering to even helping launch Facebook's first foray in to hardware: the Facebook Home phone. All that talk about making a more open and connected world? They're just getting started.
The New York Times, Digital and Mobile Strategy brief, the New York Times Magazine relaunch and the Times Insider launch campaigns.
Campaign Exploration / Creative Strategy / Brand Positioning / Design / Event Planning / Product Design
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The story comes first.
Period.
In a world that pushes all of us to do things faster, cheaper, easier, we must never forget that some things still require time, money and hard work.
Like telling the stories that matter.
Stories that connect us to the world, to each other and to ourselves.
Stories that shape opinions, provoke actions, and shed light on the undiscovered.
Stories so factually sound, rigorously crafted, and well-told that they have the power and credibility to topple governments, save lives, and change the course of human history.
Or to help you bake a better flan.
Because depth and understanding are more important than ever, even when the story matters only to you.
Which is why we promise that we’ll never sacrifice the quality of the stories we tell and the content we craft just for the sake of an expedient world.
And we promise to never stop innovating in how we better tell those stories, in ways that fit the way you live your life.
We take these responsibilities seriously. And always will.
That may be old-fashioned, but we’re ok with that.
The New York Times.
Made for our Times.
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Team: Darren Moran, Ninja von Oertzen, Arturo Aranda
This was the beginning of what evolved in to AT&T's national "It's Not Complicated" campaign. What started as a small online campaign blew way beyond everyone's expectations.
How it started:
Every year, millions of americans fill out college basketball brackets. But there's one insight that every sports fan is familiar with: it’s always those who know the least that create the best bracket.
Since AT&T is in the business of connecting you to whatever you need whenever you need it, we introduced a new kind of “expert” to help build a winning bracket, someone who knows nothing about basketball — a class of six year-olds.
Credits: Grant Smith, Rick Ardito, Arturo Aranda, Jesse Snyder, Carl Jannerfeldt, Alex Taylor
Snickers satisfies. So we created a thoroughly-satisfying website for Snickers where anyone could experience a daily dose of interactive hilarity. Each day brought a new experience - from using a fan to blow the toupee off a bald man to slapping an obnoxious TV lawyer silly.
This was one of the funnest campaigns of my career. The entire agency was invited to participate, we vetted hundreds of ideas, with nearly 100 going live. Earning AdAge's interactive work of the year and a boatload of awards.
Every moment of satisfaction was created in Flash, which is pretty much extinct now, but the simple and hilarious interactions are timeless. Below are a few selects if you’re one of the few hipsters who still have Flash installed.
Click to view Snickers Toupee
Click to view Snickers Shadow Puppets
Click to view Snickers Metal Detector
Click to view Snickers Break Up
Click to view Snickers Liquid Nitrogen
Click to view Snickers Shredder
Click to view Snickers Cat
Click to view Snickers Shuffle
Click to view Snickers Slap the Lawyer
Click to view Snickers Tree Hugger
Click to view Snickers Karate
Credits: Eric Silver, Arturo Aranda, Michael Aimette, Vina Lam, Ron Lent, John Heath, Brett Simon, Rob Seale, Henry Cho, Donovan Goodly, Joseph Bradley, Steve Longbons, Katy Walker, Fatima Osman and David Singer and countless others.
What business does Citi have sponsoring Team USA? It's a bank. Not a sneaker company. So how does this brand connect?
Our answer came in a simple truth: these athletes, just like business owners, parents, or retirees, are Americans who constantly try to make progress towards their larger goals. And Citi’s goal is supporting American progress, wherever people compete for something better.
Execution Type: Full 360 integration across Broadcast / Print / OOH / Digital Film / Bikes / Event / Website
Role: Concept and Creative Direction for entire campaign with Dave Bourla
Agency: Jeff Weston (ECD), Everett Ching (AD), Tim Yuen (CW), Beck Hickey (AD), Keiji Ando (AD), Derek Shevel (CW), Said Farad (AD)
Film: Anonymous Content // Mark Romanek (Dir) // Reed Morano (DP)
Photography: Gary Land
To highlight the absurdity of doing nothing in the face of catastrophic climate change, Cabot Norton and I created a line of classic toy-inspired likenesses of prominent public figures who claim, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that there is no reason to act.
Bringing the Climate Inaction Figures collection to life took an incredibly talented team. None of this would’ve been possible without the generous support of Joel Bach and David Gelber of Years of Living Dangerously. The sculpting process was led by artist extraordinaire Nao Matsumoto. The eye-popping renderings were exquisitely executed by Chris Williamson. Ninja von Oertzen did a gorgeous job with the logo and packaging design. TackleBox Films, Beast Editorial, Pull and Method Studios did exceptional work bringing the commercial to life. And a big thanks to Tractor and Relish Interactive, led by Steve Huber, who worked closely with Mike Sheppard to create the site. And a shoutout to my buddies Darren Moran, Jeff Greenspan, Andy Tider and Gene Na for all their input and support.
As a way of bringing GE’s new tagline “imagination at work” to life, we created the world’s first mass-scale drawing tool, a digital canvas that allowed you to send a drawing to anyone anywhere in the world. I remember watching the stats on this campaign, and we had over 19 million people using this application in over a hundred countries around the world within a week. Schools and universities contacted GE asking for permission to use this application in their curriculums. The campaign was only supposed to live for about three months, but GE ended up keeping the experience alive for a decade. The One Club nominated this experience to be one of the top ten digital ads of the decade.
When you love someone you want to shout it from a Mountain top.
This AT&T Valentine's Day campaign featured bearded mountain men literally shouting your message of love from the mountaintops. Submit your bulletin of undying affection, and AT&T technology delivered your messages to real-life mountain men who shouted tweets, Facebook posts, and texts throughout the live event on Valentines Day.
For the holidays, Starbucks and (RED) brought musicians from 156 different countries together online in a giant singalong of The Beatles' "All You Need Is Love," which was streamed live at starbucksloveproject.com. The audience was invited to join the cause and upload their own versions of the tune or add drawings to the site's Love gallery.
The interactive music page went live Dec. 7th. Visitors added their voice to a montage of over 170 recording artists from all over the world who simultaneously sang All You Need is Love, streamed live online, which the Guinness Book of World Records recognized as the largest global singalong ever. As more and more people add to the track, the result will be a worldwide coalition of voices symbolically joined in a unified front against AIDS. For each new voice added to the track, Starbucks donated five cents to fight AIDS in Africa. In one month, the Love Project generated enough money to buy more than 7 million days of medicine for people living with HIV in Africa.
Meet high-powered internet attorney, Kent Wesley. Kent thinks you deserve an AT&T 4G smartphone this holiday season. Using info from your Facebook profile, Kent’s legal team creates an air-tight personalized case proving that you deserve an AT&T 4G smartphone. Just select the phone you want – and who should buy it for you. Then let Kent work his magic.
The Samsung Infuse 4G has colors so real, it’s almost unreal. Just ask these guys.
Instead of punishing copyright violators, Blink-182 rewards them.
To launch “Up All Night”, blink-182’s first single in eight years, we created the blink-182 Film Festival You Didn’t Know You Entered, which used Google’s ContentID technology to search YouTube for every instance of fans using blink-182 songs in their videos without permission from the band or label.
But instead of getting the fans in trouble for breaching copyright, we rewarded them by making a music video for the song made up entirely of clips from the best of their videos. We also had the band members perform an award-show ceremony, wherein they declared fans winners in categories like “Least Tattooed Travis Barker Impersonator” and “Best Use of Father’s Bank Account.”
It was the anti-user generated contest.
Seizing on the powerful notion that protecting forestland far away could have a direct impact on environments at home, we created the “Lost There, Felt Here” campaign. The participatory centerpiece was a multimedia experience that brought a simple proposition to life: all it takes to start reversing climate change is the protection of a single acre at a time. To encourage prospective donors to give $15 to protect an acre of their own, we created informative animations that brought to life all the diverse wildlife their chosen acre supports, and provided pathways to view behind-the-scenes stories on Conservation International’s global efforts to address this critical environmental issue. And to make the interaction as social as it was emotional, we housed the experience in an interactive virtual forest where acres could be tagged, saved and shared.
In an increasingly cluttered space, the Protect an Acre experience has made an impact online — and even more importantly, continues to impact the world offline. To date, more than 22,000 acres have been protected, raising more than $330,000 in donations. On the post-launch analytics side, Conservation International enjoyed a 38% increase in site traffic and a 20% lift in average session length. The experience has also resonated within the industry, with the effort garnering a Webby, a Gold New York ADDY and the WebAward for Non-Profit Standard of Excellence.
Executive producer James Cameron, along with correspondents Harrison Ford, Matt Damon, scientist Joe Romm, and others have created “Years of Living Dangerously,” an original documentary series for Showtime®. In it, we are taken on a journey across the world, showing us a side to climate change we’ve never seen before. The goal is simple: To get us to open our eyes to what is going on, and make a change before it is too late.
Our task was to help facilitate this goal from a digital strategy standpoint.
This included:
An interactive website, allowing viewers to get an inside look before the series airing.
A campaign to tell the story behind the story.
Social media outreach to get people talking.
To keep them talking.
To help them take action.
We are typically a pretty happy-go-lucky bunch, but allow us a soapbox moment when we say being a part of this project is, and will be, our single greatest contribution to society. And we are grateful.
For the biggest shopping day of the year, Target wanted to highlight the fun, design savvy appeal of their brand and get people pumped to go to their thanksgiving 2-day sale. So we created cartman. Viewers were introduced to this intrepid little shopper in 4 tv spots. He did whatever it took to get to the sale – appearing in print, being projected onto buildings and showing up in the subway. Virally, he ran on youtube and at the end of each clip, viewers were directed to the target website where they could play a game with over 20 chapters.
AT&T's brief was simple - they wanted to figure out how to use the world's largest social network. I give AT&T a lot of credit for being open-minded about this effort. There was a lot of learning, experimentation and listening to the audience. This was a special effort for me, as we started this exercise while I was at BBDO and continued it when I joined Facebook's creative group. I'm proud of what I started and even prouder of what the team led by John Heath accomplished.
The GE Visible You 3D Virtual Scanner is an installation that allows visitors to see what it is like to look inside their own bodies. The scanner detects the real-time motion of individuals, moving as they do, and reflects these motions in life-sized, high-definition 3D renderings that illustrate the body's four major biological systems: cardiovascular, muscular, nervous and skeletal.
The GE Visible You has established itself as the most popular exhibit in the American Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo, with thousands of fair-goers (Including U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton) lining up to hop, skip and jump for Visible You.
A fun and simple way to show how GE employees are working for a better future. We filmed 20 employees at various GE locations. The entire film is interactive, each employee’s story is expandable allowing for a larger and more focused view. Amazing collaboration, thinking and execution with our friends at Honest.
GE's Ecomagination campaign was created to raise awareness of the need for more abundant and safer sources of energy and water, and technological solutions to address those needs.
On GE Seeds of imagination, you can plant the seed of an idea, and watch it grow in to something amazing. By interacting with your seedling in as many creative ways as possible you could nourish your plant in to something amazing. Like snowflakes, no two flowers were alike.
With over a quarter-million flowers created, people curated their own virtual museums and shared them with each other.
From Target's Nov. 23 PRNewswire:
Today at 2:00 p.m. EST, David Blaine, the world's greatest endurance artist and magician, provided a thrilling conclusion to one of his biggest challenges to date. Last week, Target(R) presented Blaine with the following challenge: escape from shackles while dangling five stories above New York City's Times Square in time for the Target 2-Day Sale on Friday, November 24 at 6:00 a.m. This afternoon, Blaine freed himself from his restraints and jumped 50 feet to the platform below him. As a result of finishing the challenge on time, tomorrow Blaine and The Salvation Army will host 100 children on a shopping spree at Target to kick off the holiday shopping season.
Since Tuesday, Blaine had been locked into a gyroscope, spinning continuously, and suspended high above the ground in Times Square -- on a lot on West 46th Street near Eighth Avenue. To end the challenge, he surprised onlookers by jumping from a dizzying height of five stories onto the platform below him.
"I am thrilled that the challenge is over and that 100 children will receive a dream holiday shopping spree tomorrow at Target," said David Blaine, moments after the conclusion of the challenge. "This has been an amazing experience and I could not have spent my Thanksgiving in a more fulfilling way."
David Blaine's challenge will directly benefit 100 deserving children this holiday season. With the successful conclusion of the challenge, Blaine will be on hand tomorrow morning, Friday, November 24, at 5:00 a.m., one hour before Target opens to the public, to escort the kids on a truly magical shopping excursion. Specially chosen by The Salvation Army, each family will receive a Target GiftCard valued at $500.
"There's absolutely no one else who can grab the public's attention like David Blaine," said John Remington, vice president, marketing, Target. "Target is thankful that he accepted our challenge and succeeded in time to join the children and their families for the start of the Target 2-Day Sale. With David's help, this should be a wonderful and unforgettable season for all."
A simple and charming 'thank you' from GE directly to it's employees. We collected signatures of every employee involved with a GE innovation, and placed them all over the product they committed so much effort towards. Here's a jet engine, we also did one for a wind turbine and a locomotive. Yes, every single signature was real. Lots and lots of scanning.
To highlight how AT&T’s mobile internet speed lets World Cup fans stay connected to the action, we let fans test their own speed with this first-of-its-kind banner-ad.
The audience could practice their heading skills with this World Cup banner game for AT&T, created a collaboration between BBDO, Zugara, and Zoic Studios. Zugara applied its ZugMo motion capture tech that allows users with a webcam to practice heading in some corner kicks.
