Holding Court

There was a time when breakthrough creative really had nothing to do with “breaking through.” Rather, it was about being funny, emotional or dramatic within very rigid constructs, whether those be thirty seconds of airtime, a magazine spread or a bulletin billboard. Obviously, digital and mobile have changed all of this and most of the [...]

If you’ve read “A Whole New Mind” by Daniel Pink, you know that in a world of increasingly parity products, the intangibles are often what make the difference. Things like design and likeability and tone of voice. This got me thinking about the ways companies name themselves and their products. We’re all probably familiar with [...]

Here’s the first spot in this year’s campaign for College Gameday.

After fifteen years working on ESPN, sometimes you forget just how much damn fun this piece of business is. This shoot helped remind me. In addition to having three of college football’s premier coaches Nick Saban, Mack Brown and Chris Petersen, we had all the [...]

It’s been a long time since I’ve sat through a presentation where one of our creatives didn’t eagerly show an augmented reality extension of their idea. And my response is typically the same; sheer joy over the promise of doing something technologically immersive followed by confusion and mild depression over the prospect of consumers [...]

I’ve been in a lot of department store dressing rooms in my life. I’ve crawled under the doors. I’ve stuck the pins that were supposed to be put in the pin cushion into my finger. I’ve tried on underwear and subsequently decided to put it back in the package because it didn’t fit right. [...]

See those little balls of excess donut batter below. Those are called, “Dunkin’ Munchkins.” If you grew up in the Northeast, this knowledge is as common as where the Old North Church is located and what position Carlton Fisk played for the Red Sox. And it can all be traced back to one guy — [...]