Hockey one day, horror the next.
Partner and Executive Creative Director of a Los Angeles agency, 2014 to 2017. More than twenty clients. These are the ones the work still speaks for.
Campaigns · Social · Web · Identity · Print
Partner and Executive Creative Director of a Los Angeles agency, 2014 to 2017. More than twenty clients. These are the ones the work still speaks for.
Campaigns · Social · Web · Identity · Print
From 2014 to 2017 I was a partner in Soda & Lime and its Executive Creative Director. I built the creative department and ran it: more than twenty-five active clients and a team of twenty. An agency is only as good as what it puts into the world for the people who hire it, so this page goes client by client.
Agency of Record
We Are All Kings.
One line, one look, every surface in the city. Player key art on a white ice ground, grit blowing off the edges, the skyline burned into the shadows. It was built as a system first, so it could be cut to a nine-by-six transit poster and a sixty-foot bulletin without a redesign.
Eight players and the team, across Clear Channel, Outfront and Lamar. Every format had its own crop and its own place for the line, and each one had to read from a moving car.
Freeway bulletins for the commute, wild postings for the walk to the arena.
The four street views are mockups. The files above them are the production art.
March 2016. The same line picked up a playoff lockup and the ice went dark: smoke, embers, and a harder crop on the faces.
LA Kings · The 2016–17 Season
A legacy on ice, and a game tonight.
An anniversary season has two jobs. Honor five decades of the franchise, and still sell the next home game. So the legends went on the same boards as the current roster: Gretzky, Blake, Vachon and the Triple Crown Line next to Doughty, Kopitar and Quick, under one gold 50.
Season ticket renewal is the most valuable mailing a team sends. For the 50th it became a thirteen-page book: a letter from the team, a collage of the five decades, the packages, a personalized jersey, the statue, and first call on the 2017 All-Star weekend.
LA Kings · Agency of Record
Passes, pucks, programs and every post.
Agency of record is a marriage, not a campaign. Behind the billboards sat the daily work: passes, flyers, sponsor ads, the charity calendar, the newsletter, a mark for every program, and a social feed that posted every game.
Matchups, finals, countdowns, birthdays, theme nights. A template system a small team could turn around between the horn and the handshake line.
BH Tilt · Theatrical Social
Four releases, and a séance on Facebook Live.
Horror marketing is honest. The audience shows up on Friday night or it doesn’t. Across 2016 and 2017 we ran social for four BH Tilt releases: The Darkness, Incarnate, The Belko Experiment and Sleight. Each got its own structure, its own voice in the comments, and a countdown built to peak on opening day.
For The Darkness we put a mystic and a paranormal investigator in a candlelit room and streamed it a week before release, Friday, May 6, 2016. Facebook Live was weeks old. The audience asked the questions and the press wrote it up before it aired.
A film about an office told to kill itself got an office’s voice. Phase one welcomed new employees. Phase two asked for their attention. Phase three handed them a weapon, and let Facebook reactions do the choosing. The page answered complaints the way Belko HR would.
Theatrical for the date, thematic for the dread, and faith against science for the argument the film is actually about. The countdown was written in fire.
Friday the 13th got a countdown in blood red, in English and in Spanish. Sleight, a street magician’s superhero story, got sunlight, quote cards and a deck of cards.
Responsive Redesign · 2015
Every template, every ad state, three screens.
A celebrity weekly lives on ad sales, so the layout had to survive them. We redesigned okmagazine.com as one responsive system: home, article, gallery, celebrity landing and search, each drawn at desktop, tablet and phone, and each drawn again with every ad unit the sales team could sell into it. The final round ran to seventy-one pages.
The grid is numbered. Editors knew which story landed in which slot, what size the photo had to be, and that after row four the pattern repeats. A mega story could take the top without breaking anything under it.
Skins, overlays, a 300 × 600 where the 300 × 250 was. Plus the states that usually get left to development: the mega menu, search, and a reader tip form with its success and its error.
E-Commerce · Lookbook · Social
An activewear label, sold in black and white.
Koral’s product is the color. So the store, the lookbook and the feed stayed quiet around it: black, white, a lot of air, and photography doing the selling.
Travel + Leisure · The Africa Channel · Red Bull
Publishing, television, energy drinks.
The roster is the real education. A new industry most weeks, which teaches you to learn a business fast, find what actually matters to it, and design for that.
For Time Inc.: the Local Experts program, city pages and the newsletters that fed them. It was the start of an editorial thread that ran through OK!, then TMZ, Banijay and Amazon.
A mark for Demand Africa, the channel’s streaming service, and identities for the Ubuntu Awards and Ubuntu Week, each with its own animated open.
On the card it said Executive Creative Director. In practice, as a partner, the job was the creative department itself: the hiring bar, the workflow and the budgets, and sitting across from CEOs to win the work in the first place. Every account ran the same loop, whatever the industry: discovery, brief, concept, presentation, proposal, production, campaign, optimization, and around again. That loop was the real product. It is what let one week be hockey and the next be horror without the quality moving.
It is also where design and business stopped being separate subjects for me. Clients rarely buy design. They buy confidence: the rationale, the presentation, the way a subjective opinion gets turned into a principle in the room.
The department. Established the creative department: hiring, standards, workflow.
Pitches & AOR. Agency of record for the LA Kings through AEG, with Orion and Fox on the roster; about $1M in new contracts from proposals.
Campaigns. Season, playoff, and 50th-anniversary creative for the LA Kings.
Social. Four BH Tilt theatrical campaigns, and the first Facebook Live digital séance.
Operations. $12M in managed media, $9M+ in billings, a team of twenty.
Digital. Responsive publishing for OK! and Travel + Leisure, e-commerce for Koral.
Clients. LA Kings, AEG, Blumhouse, Fox, Fox Sports, Orion Pictures, Travel + Leisure, OK! Magazine, Time Inc., LA Angels, NHL, Red Bull, Koral, B. Draddy, The Africa Channel.
Tell me what you're building and where it's stuck. I'll tell you honestly whether I'm the right person for it.