I am a creative director of the copywriter variety living in Portland, Oregon. I am also the author of two young adult novels, and have been known to write poems when the situation calls for it, as well as when it may not.
I was into the Oxford comma before it was cool.
United Nations
REAL LIFE HEROES // UNITED NATIONS CAMPAIGN FOR WORLD HUMANITARIAN DAY
World Humanitarian Day was created by the United Nations in 2008 to pay tribute to aid workers who risk their lives in humanitarian service–providing medical care and life-saving services to those caught in crises. They fight famine and flood, displacement and disease, war and injustice. In 2020, the COVID pandemic made their work even more daunting. The UN asked us to create a campaign thanking humanitarians for their dedication.
As we concepted, we kept coming back to the word “hero.” It seemed to be everywhere in 2020, and not always used in good faith. But what other word fits a person who runs toward danger to save others? The obsession with fictional heroes has been with us since the dawn of culture. The heroes of our world, here and now, are just as worthy of admiration and celebration, because they’re real: choosing to help in the most extreme circumstances, when others do not.
Role: ACD
FILM
The centerpiece of the “Real Life Heroes” campaign is a film featuring real humanitarians from around the globe.
COMICS COLLAB
It is known that heroes belong in comic books. We collaborated with indie publisher Dark Horse comics to create short comics about five real humanitarians, featured in social and on the landing page.
RESULTS
My data friends told me the following: 150k mentions. 105M impressions. Posts from 136 countries. 12k website visitors. 1.1M video views.
My internet friends told me this other stuff:
Kettle Brand Chips
stirring the pot since 1982 // kettle brand campaign
Did you know that Kettle Brand Chips were born in 1982 in Oregon, founded by a countercultural foodie who got his start driving around a crazy orange van full of cheese? We didn't, either. But once we did, it was impossible not to center this campaign around the brand's awesome heritage and legacy of progressive values. They've literally been stirring the pot since 1982, something that never felt quite so relevant as the insane election year of 2016. Plus, I wrote a jingle, so my life is basically complete now.
Role: ACD
OOH
We featured bags of Kettle Chips in archival and 1980s-inspired imagery to show that Kettle has been doing their thing since 1982, along with headlines that play with our history of going against the grain.
For the campaign's debut in Portland, OR, we created a wall of chips free for the taking that would be refilled each day at 4:20, because we're juvenile.
Social
the jingle
They just don't make 'em like they used to. But we did.
California Tobacco Control Program
wake up // anti-vaping campaign
You know how sometimes, you make some ads, and then they’re out in the world quietly going about their business in a totally uncontroversial way? This wasn’t one of those times. For 25 years, the California Tobacco Control Program, part of the Department of Health, has run the state’s anti-smoking campaign. But in 2014, they chose us for a new assignment: educate people about the dangers of e-cigarettes. Our campaign was called Wake Up, and used the humble asterisk to communicate all that we weren’t being told about vaping by the e-cig industry. We concentrated our messaging around health implications, youth uptake, and the connection with big tobacco. The campaign ran in TV and digital, with innovative and interactive OOH as well. And we made a whole website, stillblowingsmoke.org. From a research and substantiation process, to content strategy and finally writing the whole darn thing, it was a truly herculean effort. The results: a massive increase in awareness, and a whole lotta outrage from the opposition, including a parody website, vandalism of our out-of-home pieces, and 20,000+ mentions of our campaign on social channels. Oh, and Fox news got mad at us. Mission accomplished.
Role: ACD
WINNER: SILVER EFFIE, SF BIG CAMPAIGN OF THE YEAR, PIXEL AWARD, BEST IN SHOW AT THE AD AGE HEALTHCARE MARKETING IMPACT AWARDS
Teen Vape Documentary Film
It's hard to comprehend just how popular vaping is among high school students—not as a way to quit smoking, but just for its own sake. For this short film we found four California teens and interviewed them about vaping. The result is a haunting and illuminating documentary that says so much more than any headline ever could.
Stride Rite
stride rite // rebrand
For anyone older than Gen X, Stride Rite was the iconic shoe for kids' first steps. But they’d become outdated and irrelevant to millennial moms. We created a new brand platform: “Built for childhood since 1919.” It drew on the brand's rich heritage without feeling fussy, and captured all the wonderful, weird, chaos that comes with toddlers. We brought the idea to life with a brand book and advertising concepts from print to digital and in-store.
Role: Senior Copywriter
body copy reads
“Have kids,” they said. “You’ll be so fulfilled,” they said. They never told you that you’d be living with the most adorably devious agent of pure domestic chaos. Our shoes are designed to be easy to put on while defying kids’ attempts to pull them right off. So at least one thing will be under control.
Kat Von D Beauty
kat von d beauty // website
Kat Von D has a shrine to Beethoven in her tattoo studio. I have a plastic bust of Beethoven on my bookshelf. Ergo, we are kindred spirits. And I was delighted to work on the site for her beauty line, developed in partnership with Sephora. We called the site concept “punk rock Pinterest,” as it blended Kat’s and her fans’ content with rich product stories, all in the baroque-punk-goth-fairy-tale style that befits a creator like Kat.
Role: Senior Copywriter
“I wanted to create shades that went with barefoot piano playing, gasoline glamour, and burning old love letters—among other things.”
Cannabis
CANNABIS BRANDING // BATCH SEVEN + HERB & LEGEND
I am not a stoner (no disrespect). But it turns out that writing for cannabis products is very fun. I helped develop brand manifestos, copy guidelines, website and product copy, and even fun little magical postcards telling folks what kind of adventure their THC-enhanced treats might take them on.
Role: Freelance ACD / writer
BATCH SEVEN
Mindfulness meets on-demand cannabis delivery in this brand named for San Francisco’s seven hills.
HERB & LEGEND
This brand is what would happen if you threw every bizarre California subculture into a whirlwind, but made it pretty.
Brand manifesto
We’re mystic pixie dream girls and boys (like manic pixies without all the baggage). We’ve been out in the desert meditating but we stopped for In-N-Out on the way back. We’re of the moment but hold in our soul the whole history of California, of generations and generations of misfits and dreamers, skaters and punks. We’re lovers of stories and might drop references to urban legends and ancient myths, to local poetry from beat to hip hop, from King Arthur and the Loch Ness monster to Joan Didion and back again (by way of the Goonies). We’re high and highbrow and lowbrow all at once. We have an air of mystery but we’re easy to be friends with. We’d like to welcome you in, offer you a cup of tea, and share a tale, a toke, and a treasure map.
Retail concepts
Each store location revolved around local lore and legends. I helped develop stories for the brand’s Sonoma and North Beach locations. This might not sound super interesting, but just you wait.
Sonoma
Where the land bears fruit, where the sun is unimpeded outside of the redwood groves, the grasses brown against the hills, where the Miwok people say Coyote perched when he decided to make the world. Where Burbank created a kind of botanical Eden, conjured peaches, plums, pears. The mouth waters. Where Ripley dared us to believe it or not, and we chose to believe. Just south of the Emerald Triangle where the cannabis plant thrives, we too bloom here, ducking in and out of shade like hawks, coaxed by the daily dance of sun and night. A green rush of courage heartens generations of farmers to entice a new kind of magic from a fantastical herb. This place’s legends stroll hand in hand with paradigm shifts and determined tendrils of grapevine, with rumored hauntings and musical ghosts that send notes sparking toward the sky.
North Beach
North Beach, a storied neighborhood in the city of myth, where shrines to saints were built on Barbary Coast rubble, iniquity and transcendence mingling like the scents of espresso and garlic, like foghorns and Fernet. Invented and reinvented, gold rush city, beatnik city, city with bridges disappearing into fog, a streak of international orange shifting in and out of view. This is our home, this fabled place. Local legends twist through us like the tunnels that run beneath our feet, as do the pulse of the tides and the underwater palette of greens, blues, and shimmery flecks of sun in the vast Pacific (and the creatures that may dwell there). There is a world of magic that exists underneath our world that cannabis helps us see. There is a San Francisco, too, that lives beneath the tourist-friendly version, one that’s far more enigmatic, alluring, and fascinating. Let us welcome you in, open your eyes, spin you around, and send you back out into mythic North Beach—pondering parrots, pirates, or maybe just pizza.
Blurb
blurb // print
We all have them: a collection of treasured photos sitting in a cardboard box (or the modern equivalent: a dusty old hard drive). But Blurb, a print-on-demand bookmaking company with a passionate following in the creative community, encourages us to collect those memories in a printed book.
Role: Copywriter
FEATURED IN THE COMMUNICATION ARTS ADVERTISING ANNUAL, NATIONAL SILVER ADDY, BRAND NEW AWARD
body copy reads
Suddenly he wants to go where Dad goes – the neighborhood barber shop, all manly conversation and straight razors, where there’s no such thing as a “stylist,” where he looked just the tiniest bit nervous. An expression you never want to forget.
With a beautiful book, you won't.
Make yours at blurb.com
body copy reads
The guidebook called it the blue lagoon, but you know better. You swam in a volcano where everything was steeped in green, a summery arctic sunset – or sunrise? It’s easy to lose track of time when the light is like this. You found something more important. Now you just need to remember what it was.
With a beautiful book, you can.
Make yours at blurb.com
body copy reads
You couldn’t take your eyes off her from day one. It was certainly easier to talk with the camera in front of your face. Something about the way she was drawn to water made you fall in love and never look back. Except sometimes you do. When you want to remember the day she said yes.
With a beautiful book, you can.
Make yours at blurb.com
John Muir Health
john muir health // healthy conversations campaign
With its “Be Heard” campaign, John Muir Health had established itself as the place where doctors actually listen to their patients. So we decided to take it a step further and go inside the doctors’ offices to hear exactly what those conversations might be. We’ve all had the experience of being at a check-up, afraid to ask one of those kinda sorta embarrassing questions about our weird human bodies. But when you have a good relationship with your doctor, there’s no such thing as TMI.
Role: ACD
OOH / Print
Formula X
formula x // website
Sephora tasked us with concepting and executing a website for their new line of nail lacquers and effects, Formula X. We envisioned something far more than a showcase of shades–we created the first social hub for nail art enthusiasts. Inspiration was the driving force behind every creative decision, so product always went hand-in-hand with user-submitted mood imagery, color palettes, and manicures. Rather than the usual showcase of slick, retouched beauty photography, we assembled an endless grid of images that was richly tagged to make search functionality part of the fun. Start typing a color, a mood, an occasion, and the predictive text would show undreamed-of possibilities, so trains of thought could jump the tracks from crimson to ruby slippers to gutsy.
Role: Copywriter
WINNER: 2014 CLIO & OMMA FOR WEBSITE EXCELLENCE
Get all up in the details of this x-cellent project. VO by moi.
Tahoe South
tahoe south // #TEAMSUMMER CAMPAIGN
Not unlike California itself, Lake Tahoe is split between north and south, two areas with different cultures. Both sides of the lake are naturally gorgeous. But the north shore's rustic, sleepy vibe is completely different from the south's casinos, clubs, and extreme sports bravado. Also, it's weird, in a good way. For this campaign, we imagined summer as a person. The kind of friend who makes you arm wrestle and gets you into trouble. But we love that friend. We need that friend. We're #teamsummer, all the way. And winter can step the eff off.
Role: Senior Copywriter
StubHub
STUBHUB // THANKS, TICKET OAK Campaign
StubHub is the far-less-sketchy-than-Craigslist way to buy or sell tickets to any kind of event. But the client wanted to go further: to be a destination for folks looking for activity inspiration. And how do totally normal people find fun things to do with their lives? They stalk their buddies on Instagram! Or maybe that's just me?
Role: Copywriter
Print
With the venerable spokestree, Ticket Oak, we used hashtags (hey, it was 2013) to tell the story of wild nights enabled by StubHub. Also I used the word "panties."
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Food Trucks // experiential
To interact with fans, we deployed food trucks to camp outside sports and music events and give away delightfully-named (artisanal) hotdogs and ice cream whilst coaxing (hopefully drunk) people to sing karaOAKe or play trivia. As they waited in line, digital screens streamed upcoming games or shows in their area to incept events they may not have known about.
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DIGITAL
We partnered with Rolling Stone, who created fan-bait content about the most rocking venues in America. When users arrived to this page, our rich media banner would suggest shows that were close to them in awesome venues.
HomeAdvisor
HOMEADVISOR // TV
HomeAdvisor asked us to create a spot that not only clearly explained that they provided referrals for home improvement pros, but that made an emotional connection. It made a certain sort of sense: the most intense human experiences–getting married, having a baby—are often a time to fix up a house. So we decided to tell the story of a family through their home improvement projects, using a search bar graphic to explain the site at the same time.
Role: Senior Copywriter
Glasses.com
GLASSES.COM // TV
Glasses.com, the brainchild of 1-800 Contacts, sells eyeglasses. On the internet. And most people like to try on glasses before they buy them—like five thousand times. So the internet has some limitations. Beside Warby Parker, Glasses.com was the only company that offered to ship customers five pairs to try on, completely free, in their own homes, where they can be as freaky as they wanna be. True story: our client had to briefly pull this spot because their shipping department couldn't keep up with new orders. Boom!
Role: Copywriter
