Holding Court

I’ve known a lot of creative directors in my time. And the one thing we all have in common, is that at one time in our career, we were certain that our value was tied to our ability to sift through a mound of ideas, identify the ones with potential and help turn them into [...]

‘Tis the season and ‘tis the profession to look forward. To let old acquaintances be forgot along with technology that’s more than 15 minutes old and ideas that got 3 million hits on YouTube last month. Let’s face it, this time of year fits well with the mindset of our industry. One that’s driven by [...]

Here is the latest Crandall family holiday card installment in a tradition that started 19 years ago.

And here is the backup. By the way, those are Depends™ we’re rocking even though they look like my grandmother’s panties. Not that I’ve, you know, seen my grandmother’s panties.

Which card do you prefer?

I was going through some old work this week for one of our new pitches and I came across a spot I hadn’t watched in a while. It was for the California Department of Health Services anti-tobacco initiative. And it was inauspiciously named, “Bubbles 2.”
Of all the spots I’ve been part of, this is maybe [...]

On March 9, Agency Spy ran a piece announcing that I was undertaking a charity/documentary project called, “Free Throw.”  The comment in the thread below the article which had the most “likes,” (11) started with the words, “How utterly horrendous.” Four months later, on Monday, July 11, I appeared on CNN with one of the [...]

I live in a house where my 12-year-old fixes my computer, my 15-year-old tells me which songs to put on my iPod and my wife regularly tells me to turn on the Red Sox game in my office so she can watch “Gossip Girl” in the bedroom.
More than any time in history, we have become [...]

I’ve never been much of a conspiracy theorist: Roswell, black helicopters, the JFK assassination. Not really buying into it, until yesterday, when I exposed the grand daddy of them all — The Supercuts Cover Up. To understand the significance of what I revealed, you must go back a ways … to my birth. Unlike the [...]

Like any good creative person, somewhere in my early twenties, I read “The Fountainhead” by Ayn Rand. As most of you probably know, the novel’s protagonist, Howard Roark, believes that all architecture and design should flow naturally from an object’s central purpose. In other words, form follows function.
Unfortunately, this discipline seems to have been completely [...]

This is probably the longest running campaign I’ve ever been a part of. It started just after my wife, Denise, and I got married in 1992. I had been in California for two years and wanted a way to punk my friends back in Boston. So, for our first Christmas together, we sent out a [...]

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 [...]