• Work, Clients & Agencies

  • (RED)
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It’s nice to get some recognition for Breakfast NY and quite frankly, for myself. Yes, I am Precious won a Silver Cube for Interactive at the ADC awards and as the copywriter, I got mah mitts on one. Read about the project here. Buy me a beer here (which would link to any pub near us both if it were linked.)

Congrats to Zolty and the team at Breakfast. And here is a gratuitous picture of Precious smelling the glove cube.

I should probably also mention YIAP was selected for the CommArts Interactive Annual 2011. Boy is gettin’ some play.

YESIAMPRECIOUS.COM was conceived by BREAKFAST NY as a way to follow Precious the bike as he traveled across the USA in 2010. They built Precious a real brain, and while I wasn’t involved in the concepting or design of the site, my job was to fill that brain with the thoughts (above) that ended up on Twitter. Actually, if you think about it, I really powered the site. Literally! With my damn legs! HA!

This project did what I think any good digital project should do for any brand – tell a rich and compelling story. I essentially wanted to tell the story of my trip through my own blog and twitter, but then have Precious give a different POV and experience of that story. BREAKFAST sure took care of that wish. At the same time, we wanted to raise some dough for LIVESTRONG along the way, and that worked out pretty well.

Brief summary of the pieces and my involvement:

THE BRAIN/SITE
The brain, inside a box that sat in a bag under the bike seat, was loaded with bunch of sensors. These sensors measured things like temperature, speed, gradient, location and heading. All of this data formed the basis for readings on the site, while certain manual things would be ‘pinged’ in by me as I saw them (roadkill is a good example). I would also upload a new photo from the road every day to keep the background fresh and the site looking awesome. If you want to know how the brain worked, there’s a case study by BREAKFAST, and I also made an ‘on the road’ video talking about how it worked and what I did every day.

When certain criteria were met – a certain temperature, a GPS position – the system would would reach deep into the brain, find a thought that matched that criteria and send it out to all Precious’s followers on Twitter. I wrote all those tweets well in advance (examples above), and created the personality of Precious (more examples here). In essence, I was the copywriter and brand manager. :)

THE CAUSE
The site provided a direct link to donate. Milestones were also set up in the system to send out donation-based tweets when certain financial goals were met, as a way to encourage followers to get involved. During the course of the ride, Precious raised over $7,500 for LIVESTRONG and also got a shoutout from Lance on Twitter. Not too shabby. (It should be noted that this was a PERSONAL project on behalf of LIVESTRONG. They didn’t have anything to do with it, beyond Lance giving it a tweet after it was live.)

THE OTHER STUFF
Precious has essentially become a brand in his own right. As part of my Kickstarter Project, I made a ‘book of Precious’ for backers. The “Yes, I am Precious” book is now available to buy for anyone who became a fan of Precious during the trip, either on Twitter or on his Facebook page. He still tweets – mostly about how I don’t take him out of the house very much.

This is the book below. Buy it!

FREE FLAT RATE SHIPPING offer codes (expire Jan. 31, 2011)
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Everyone’s journey is a personal experience. The memories created, the emotions experienced, the visceral reactions of you to your journey are your own. The LV City Guides guide your journey, but they cannot experience it for you. That’s where AMBLE comes in, giving you the power to overlay your personal memory and experience to the places you visit. Where the guide leaves off – recommending restaurant for example – you can pick up and add comments, images, emotions and data to create a digital memory of your experience.

Right concept, wrong phone. Posted for my own amusement. :)

A simple phone for texting fiends, aimed squarely at young folk. While AKQA created a video ThumbFu so people could test their texting prowess against expert texters, we handled the supporting banners and social media that would drive people to take part. These kids text fast about all sorts of things, so ideas played off the ability to text like a speed demon (a beat-the-banner execution), but also this idea of oneupmanship (text banners) and declaring yourself a rival of your friends in some way (Facebook app). The facebook rivalry app allowed people to add their rivalries and get friends to declare where they stood on them – Boston vs. New York, boxers vs. briefs – anything was fair game.

From a series of webisodes introducing the new Cranberry Raisinet. The copywriting was split between myself and Matt Christiansen at Ogilvy. This first episode is primarily me – but Matt added a gem of a line about Cran hitting the chocolate “haard”. Oh, yeah she does.

Episodes as they are released will appear here.

Lately, I’ve been working on a project for a financial client in London. It’s been great working on the launch of – let’s just call it “The Thing I Can’t Name” – from the get go. From the very germination of the brand, to thinking about how it will launch internally (they need their own people to use this thing), and externally to the world. This work was the internal teaser, created by Zolty and myself before he so rudely moved to London.

We wanted people to get excited about “The Thing I Can’t Name”, so we put several of the above installations in the elevator lobbies on each floor of their corporate headquarters. Each installation demonstrates the idea of product evolution – of how you never look back at the thing that is replaced – and included a matching copy line that helped drive home the idea.

See pics of all installations here.

At the same time, throughout the offices we continued the theme with posters sans installations. Click through to see a bunch of featured copy lines here.

The external launch is not due until February/March 09, which is when I’ll remove all this cloak and dagger stuff.

UPDATED: It was for Morgan Stanley. Product called Matrix for internal broker use.

A client book from Noodle on Vimeo.

Here’s something I wrote for a TV client to present some campaign ideas we’d had for their re-brand and new summer show. But we also used this book as a way to challenge them into thinking about how television networks should approach this freaky-deaky internet when it came to their content.

With the Dell (PRODUCT)RED experience, Andrew Z and I wanted to build a site that showed the cause and effect of buying a (PRODUCT) RED computer. Basically, you do this (consume), and people in Africa get that (medication and more). Regardless of whether or not people see it as an insincere “increase their profits” thing on Dell’s part – this is how I see it. The more they sell, the more money goes to Africa. And quite frankly, that’s all I care about.

I am Gaming from Noodle on Vimeo.

“Hey, we wanna mark ourselves in the Gaming space. Ya, dig?”

We dug. And we went in there with our frags notched on our belts and gaming juice running through our veins. A lot of stuff came out of that presentation – and ultimately, none of it lived to see the light of day. Until now! Working with Mother, we created a new kind of catalog (which I’ve spliced together in the video above, minus the product pages. You can read the Gaming Catalog copy here.) The challenge as a copywriter was to tap into the spirit of gaming, while also showing how Dell computers could live in the same catalog as Alienware and gaming consoles. Because Dell sells them all.

But of course, the strategy for gaming was a two pronged instrument. We went in guns-a-blazin’ with Mother to show how things lived in perfect harmony online and off. This is how it would have lived digitally with the gaming microsite.

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