Download my resume!View My Portfolio
Thanks to the wonderful Drop.io, interested parties can now view my full PDF portfolio! Just click the download link to share in the wonder!
The images below are samples from my advertising portfolio.
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Bradan Ferrari Rebrand
Working again with the fine folks at Bradan and Onetwentysix Design, my latest project was to refocus the Bradan brand on Ferrari tuning, rather than BMW modification. The first project we worked on was just sort of an interim website until the company hammered out the final details, but this branding was a head-first dive into serious business. From the new company mission statement, to a full-scale marketing concept for the company’s flagship product, this job proved much more intense and rewarding than the first. Every bit of copy on the site was written by yours truly, but the real challenge proved to be the more conceptual aspect of the marketing, rather than just straightforward writing. With a fresh face and voice, it’s only a matter of time before Bradan takes the Ferrari world by storm. Just remember, you heard it here first.
Lelands Sports Auctions
My latest project involves helping the lovely folks over at Lelands write their second 2009 memorabilia catalogue, focusing mostly on sports, but extending into popular culture at large. We’re in the process of writing copy for over 1100 items at the moment, so needless to say, I’m going to be a busy fella for a week or three. Still, the job is great so far; all the items have something great to angle with, and the company has some excellent writers on staff with whom I get to work. If anyone out there wants a $5000 ball signed by Ruth and Gehrig, these are the guys to go to.
Bradan Website Content
The guys over at Onetwentysix came to me to write the content for a branding / website project they were working on for Bradan, a company specializing in BMW performance engineering. I could sit here and muse about the intricacies and details thereof, but why listen to me go on when you can check it out for yourself?
All content, including their company mission statement, was handled by yours truly. Very happy with how it all came out; when I was researching similar businesses, I couldn’t find one website that didn’t sound like it was written by a spammer in 1999. I feel like we presented something with a little more polish and class.
These guys are great; they’re friendly, professional, and know their stuff inside out. We have a few other interesting projects coming up together, but I’ll hold off on writing about those until they’re done.
Onetwentysix Proposal
PDF
Latest updates
Suffering the economic fiasco of 2008 and weathering the 2009 fallout, I have re-emerged stronger and with 100% more awesome. So, what have I been up to since the last update? Well, lots of stuff.
An aside before I get into the meat of this post: This blog was never meant to be a regularly updated, well nurtured piece of internet. Rather, I meant for this to be a sort of stand-alone job-interview-in-a-box. Just my work and some musings on my thought processes involved in the creation thereof. Still, I’m a narcissist at heart, so here’s a brief update on the last few months.
Back in August 08, I landed this crazy awesome freelance gig that should, by all means, have gone full time. Then the whole world sort of cashed out in September, and by November 08 I was sans-employment and out on the job market again, along with half of New York and 90% of the rest of the world. I applied to the dwindling pool of jobs I found, but ended up deciding it was for naught for the time being and started writing a novel in December (which I’m still working on). Then came March, when I decided that full-time novel writing, though fun, was not helping my resume much. I decided to take on an internship with the good people at Fifteen Minutes NY, who are great and I had an fabulous time working there until the LA office decided to shut us down. They couldn’t pay for my travel anymore, so by May it was time to move on.
Whatever doesn’t kill you, right? I mean, I’m broke, but who isn’t now?
And all this “working for free stuff” isn’t so bad - I’m trying to take on a Copywriting Internship at this other company which seems pretty perfect aside from the indentured servitude thing. I’ll update this again if I get that, and in the meantime I’m still plugging away at freelance - currently in talks for a pretty awesome viral campaign, which should be solid stuff if the proposal goes through. Exciting times. Excruciating sometimes, but exciting nonetheless.
“May you live in exciting times” - Chinese insult.
Gibson Robot Guitar [spec ad]
Whenever I show anyone this ad, I always get the same question: Is this a real product?
The answer is yes, and it is FABULOUS. A real Gibson quality guitar that can TUNE ITSELF.
If you couldn’t tell by my enthused response, I’m something of a guitar nerd. And yes, I will admit, with my spec work, I’m guilty of bringing in a lot of my personal interests and loves as fodder for my advertisements. But I don’t see this as a sin necessarily. It’s important to show diversity in spec work, but I also feel spec work is a place to really let your work show who you are in real life: Your interests, your passions, and your personality can all shine through in creative ways with good spec work.
As for this particular piece, I would say this is one of my favorites, if not the best one I’ve done, for a number of reasons.
Firstly, this is the first piece I attempted to art direct for myself. I will always say, I’m not an artist, but I am a very visual thinker. I’ve been teaching myself Adobe Photoshop in an ongoing attempt to improve my ability to communicate with art directors and graphic designers. I can’t take all the credit for this, because I was given some help by Dan Berkowitz on this one, but for the most part this was designed and constructed by me. It was an interesting experience, and I’m making a continuing effort to improve and refine my design skill.
Secondly, I just think it’s a clever concept. The moment I began thinking up concepts for a Robot guitar ad, the first things that popped into my head were the Terminator and HAL. From there, the ad just flowed naturally. It’s a guitar that senses tone, essentially hearing your strings. So “It’s listening” came immediately to me. From there, I took the guitar and realized, from a certain view, it has a kind of anthropomorphic structure. So I put it down in the corner, and it all clicked. It looked like a mischievous little robot eavesdropping. It’s a little creepy, but it’s almost like a humor time bomb; your first response is a little yelp, and then laughter. At least, that’s the intention. Take a look and tell me what you think.
Gravity Commerce
This project was brought to me by one of the graphic designers I was working on portfolio pieces with, Dan Berkowitz, when we were doing something entirely unrelated. He mentioned he and his friend Carl, an IT / coder, were launching a new e-commerce service. I started asking questions, and as it turned out, they had a solid concept, but no real direction yet. I started spitting ideas out, and Dan asked me to come on board officially and help with the launch as a freelance consultant.
We got back together and had a meeting with him and his partner the next weekend. I asked them a bunch of questions, and helped them lay out on paper exactly the type of business model they wanted. I helped them come up with both a company and a software name to brand them with, and helped them focus their target audience. After I gathered all the information from them I could, I went and wrote up this informational brochure for them, as both a point of internal reference to all the ideas we came up with, and as a pre-launch promotional tool for them to use to get potential customers interest up.
Gravity Commerce is currently in the final stages of launching. Keep an eye out for them if you have any small business needs, the stuff they’re doing is gonna be pretty great.
Just a quick FYI post…
This blog is currently not ready quite yet, I’ve yet to launch it officially. I was surprised to find people reading and commenting already, and pretty impressed. But I’m gonna ask you to bare with me for a day or two while I get my new resume in place, a slightly improved design together, and make a few slight changes.
Thanks for your interest though! If anyone has any business opportunities to discuss, my contact info is at the bottom of the page <3
Mini [Spec Ad]
One cool technique for writing well targeted advertising that I’ve found is to take a universal concept and figure out a way to narrow it to a specific demographic. Universal concepts are a given in advertising because it guarantees that your ad will speak to the most people, but there is an inherent danger in using these because they’re just so stupid and cliché more than anything else. Sometimes I read advertisements and I can’t for the life of me understand what the copywriter was thinking. Maybe I just haven’t been around long enough in this game to understand, maybe the client demanded it, maybe the copywriter just wasn’t getting paid enough to care. There’s lots of situations that can lead to bad advertising. Generally though, I’ve come to believe that the most common mistaken assumption amongst cliché advertising is that broader is better. It ain’t. Not always anyway.
The way I see it, narrowing and focusing an advertisement is more effective in the same way that speaking directly to someone is better than shouting into a crowd of strangers. It’s just less crazy sounding. It may speak to less people, but it will have a much larger impact on those it does speak to. “So then,” you may be angrily hollering into your computer screen right now, “what is an effective way to use universals in advertising?” It’s simple: Combine the universal with a specific. I feel it’s effective for a couple of reasons. First, your ad starts off with something that everyone can relate to, but second, it hits them with something that speaks directly to them. It sounds like common sense, but the one-two punch can really hammer your message into a person’s head. The universal gets you in immediately, and the specific makes the person reading think on some base level that your product now helps define them as a person.
For this ad, I wanted to try to brand a car (in this case, the Mini Cooper) as a hip product for younger buyers. I took my inspiration visually from the Honda Element animal ads a few years back, which I felt were just awesome. They were cute, funny, strangely clever, and spoke directly to the young audience that they were going for (I feel my art director captured the look I wanted perfectly). As for the universal / specific dynamic of the piece, I took the boring, cliché universal of the backseat driver, and combined it with a concept appealing directly to the 18-30 year old audience of the Element; video games. Anyone who’s played a video game with a friend could tell you that a backseat game player is just as annoying as a backseat driver. Finally, I made sure to have the video game in question be something very universal. I won’t say exactly what the game is to avoid copyright infringement, but let’s just call him “barrel throwing ape” for now.
This is one of my favorite pieces. It’s visually striking, it has a good sense of humor to grip the person reading, and the underlying one-two punch present in it makes it effective. It’s a little weird, but let’s be honest: The 18-30 year olds of the world are also pretty weird now. Just watch Adult Swim.
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