What I’ve done & Where I’ve done it

Resumes are boring, so here’s a story.

I went to school for Political Science & Philosophy, thinking I’d be a lawyer. But Logic class wasn’t as fun as writing a (hit) play for the drama festival and talking about movies in film class. And writing got a lot easier for me when I had to do a bunch of research for it first. So, I said no thanks to law school and got a job editing an online dictionary.

After that, I started writing product descriptions for big brands like the NFL and Toys “R” Us as my first job in advertising. Then, my big break—I got a gig doing social media and helping design a campaign to launch a new Hyundai aimed at hipsters. So “work” was suddenly flying to LA and watching Skrillex play for 250 influencers in a tiny converted warehouse. And, it’s where I learned that the best campaigns tell a story and ignite an audience. It was awesome.

After that, it was building a copywriting career into a creative director career. On one hand, that looked like working for a few different agencies, working on bigger and bigger accounts (Aetna, MetLife, Comcast, Xfinity), from local to national and progressing as the years piled up. On the other, it meant I learned how to not just do good work, but how to get other people to do good work with me, and how to do good work together. It meant learning how to listen to what clients want, and translating that back to teams of designers and editors and animators. And, more than anything, it meant solving problems, and seeing those solutions on my TV during commercial breaks, and on my browser and in my social feeds.

So, that’s where I am today—solving problems, telling stories and having a damn blast.

I’ve done a lot in my career—broadcast commercials, digital videos, social media campaigns, product descriptions, how-to videos, voiceover direction, on-set oversight, highly technical and regulated scripts for tough markets, but here are some recent projects I’d like to highlight.

Building Character

Sometimes, I love coming into a project in the middle. I feel like I’m on Chopped. Ok, Tony, your ingredients are an old brand spot for this financial institution, a new promotion and a voice over artist. You have two weeks, the clock starts…now.

Because I knew I could work with my editor and make this happen. And I knew that if it went well (spoiler alert, it did) it would lead to more work. And more work meant a whole new campaign, a whole new shoot and a much bigger budget. And a blank slate.

The Ask

The client wanted to maintain a visual connection to the earlier brand work, but they also needed their budget to go as far as possible. They had a lot of products and a lot of promotions, and couldn’t shoot something new every few months. They were concerned with their potential clients going to bigger, national brands who didn’t understand them, and they were concerned with coming off too small, too local.

The Solution

What I pitched to this client was not just a creative solution, but a practical production solution as well.

Overall, we’d give them a dynamic footage library that we could re-combine to help them tell whatever stories and promote whatever products they needed on short notice. We’d use voiceover and graphics to fill in the specifics, and use the visuals to do the brand work.

The brand work, to meet their ask, was to establish a strong point of view and to portray local towns in a cinematic way—to show their customers that they, the brand, sees these towns the way they do, loves these towns the way they do. We wanted to show customers their homes and communities the way they’d never seen before on TV.

And, most importantly, we’d draw specific characters. Characters with wants and needs and homes. We’d see their families, feel their wants and see through their eyes as they drove home and met with bankers and took the next steps to make their dreams come true.

Sure, I wrote it and creative directed it and oversaw the actual shoot from on set, as well as directing VO, working with editors and approving graphics and final cuts. But, I got to use all of my skills on this one—I got to pitch evocative stories and paint 3D characters, but I got to use my knowledge of production to design an elegant and efficient architecture for them as well. I am just as proud of building the machine that allows us to make the content as I am of any line in the scripts that I wrote or shot we planned.

In Media Res

An ongoing relationship can yield some really spectacular results.

One of our clients, a very big media company, gave us ongoing work to create video content promoting different film and TV priorities. My role grew from being brought in to help with scripting for a growing account to overall creative direction of that account and beyond—a unique role for a unique relationship.

The Ask

Oh boy, there were a lot of them. Fundamentally, it was to promote both content on and features of the client’s media platform. But it was also to get to know them, their needs and their goals, and match that up with our abilities and talents to produce some really interesting and engaging content over the course of more than four years.

The Solution

There were a lot of solutions. Put simply, it was maintaining a relationship by evolving content to match changing needs. That ranged from writing blurbs to creating multi-year content plans, shooting a live-action TV show and making celebrities play Perfection. The solution was to know what they wanted, sometimes before they even did.

What I found so rewarding about this project was I got to put in a lot of research (and that meant, in part, keeping up with TV, movies, sports and games), and got to work with so many talented people with diverse disciplines. One day, I was workshopping jokes with the host of our little TV show on the set I helped design as he pitched it to a digital segment I wrote, directed and sat with an editor cutting. Another day, it was looking over footage of celebrities answering questions I wrote to put together a segment promoting the new Fall TV schedule. There was a lot going on.

As a case-study-within-a-case-study, one big ask was promoting the animated version of The Grinch, alongside their typical TV and movie promotions. We came up with a top-down live action cooking show of the Grinch ruining holiday recipes, a digital segment where we inserted him into popular TV shows we were asked to promote, and an effects-driven animated segment where the Grinch “stole” clips of Christmas movies (that just so happened to be on sale on the platform that week)—it was a blast to find all these creative solutions, and I felt so lucky I got to oversee the whole thing.

All works on this site are the property of my clients.