First National Bank – Born & Raised TV

Big project, almost a year in the making, finally done. Here’s the only taste I can give you right now:

Copywriter/ACD = Me
CD = Cliff Watson
Art = Aaron Christensen
Director = Phil Brown
Production = Mighty Films

Footage of an Account Service vs. Creative argument:

Marketing News Magazine

I tricked AMA’s Marketing News Magazine into thinking I knew how to write taglines. They were so convinced, they featured me in an article. Check it.

Valentine’s Day Cards

I know Valentine’s Day was about 4 months ago, but here’s some Valentines Day cards Carrie Ratcliff and I did for the AIGA Valentines competition. Although we didn’t take home the top prize, our cards placed very well and received a ton of praise at the show.

If you’d like to purchase one, just contact me. Cost is $4.00/ea.

Enjoy:

Inside copy: Love you to pieces.

Inside copy: We were made for each other.

You can also view these in my online portfolio.

Music.

I’m currently working on a sales video for one of our national clients and I’m at the stage where it’s time to find some music. And just today, I thought to myself, “man, this takes forever.” But it should. Music is a very, very important choice. A great music track can take your commercial or video to a whole new level. A bad music track can make people turn the channel or push ‘stop’. So I take music really seriously.

Don’t get me wrong, great ideas win. A good music track can’t polish a turd idea. FYI.

So what commercials do you think have great music? Music that works really well with the rest of the spot?

One of my favorites comes from a company who bats about .999 in great commercials. And they do so because they pay great attention to every little detail…like music.

Rock and Roll aint no riddle, man. To me it makes good good sense.

Portfolio – Catholic Charities

Here are some billboards we did as part of a campaign for Omaha Catholic Charities. Catholic Charities provides a number of different services, but most people don’t know all of things they do. Hopefully this series of boards shows the many ways Catholic Charities is fulfilling lives.

Art Director = Aaron Christensen

Portfolio – Trek Up The Tower

This a poster for Trek Up The Tower, a race up Omaha’s tallest building.
Art Director: Anthony Lane

Portfolio – Bozell Internship

The Bozell Internship program is one of the finest, and one of the only PAID advertising internship programs in the region. And every year, we run a campaign to attract the best and brightest advertising talent around. This year, we took a very interesting approach. Instead of just sending a poster to colleges and hanging it on their bulletin board, we wanted to shoot for something bigger. Something that would not only attract potential interns, but something that Bozell could build on in the future.

And we had to do it all with about $0.00.

The insight for this project was fairly simple and straight-forward. College juniors/seniors could either find really crappy summer jobs, or they could work in advertising…which is much more exciting . So, to execute this, we developed Whatacrappyjob.com, where anyone can post a horribly crappy job, and in the corner was a button that read, “Or you can work in advertising, with a link to our internship information and application.

And to drive people to the website, we came up with these great (and very cheap) crappy job posters and flyers. The goal was for them to really look like some crappy company was looking for workers…then a whatacrappyjob sticker was plastered at the bottom of them:

As of this post, there are still 9 days left for people to apply, and applications and inquiries are through the roof compared to last year. I’ll post actual numbers when we get the final ones.

Anyway, great work to art directors Carrie Ratcliff and Jill Rizzo and to web-guru Ryan Weidman for doing a great job of intentionally sucking.

And for any potential interns, hurry and get your app. in. Only 9 days left!

Yes.

I’m jealous of the writer who got to do this hilarious Old Spice commercial:

Via The Denver Egoist

Edward De Bono on creativity

This is a great short video from one of the most influential authorities on creativity, Edward de Bono. What he talks about here barely scratches the surface of what he illustrates in his fantastic book, Serious Creativity.

My favorite quote:
“The creative idea must have value. Far too many people who believe they are creative think that just being different for the sake of being different is creative. It is not. And that is what gives creativity a bad name. So if you look at a door and said ‘doors are normally rectangular, let’s make a triangle door.’ Now, unless you can show value for that, that is not creativity. That is just being different for the sake of being different.”

Anyway, hope you like this video: