One.org - Empathy

Emmy nomination

ONE.org, created by Bono, is a global, nonpartisan organization advocating for the investments needed to create economic opportunities and healthier lives in Africa. What the organization initially needed was a campaign that would establish the cause, create interest, and gather a following. Financing, it was believed, would come later and indeed it did. Perhaps the most important line in the commercial above was delivered by Tom Hanks. “We’re not asking for your money; we’re asking for your voice.” More than a million voices were heard in the form of signatories to the site during the spot’s first flight

Cannes Lion

With each new administration, PBS fights for its funding, and sometimes its existence. A fight that has only escalated with the second coming of the current administration. PBS’s best hope? To remind their viewers, and the government purse-keepers that PBS offers the sort of programming that commercial television has little or no interest in bringing forward. The two commercials above, winners of the Cannes Gold Lion, endeavored to do exactly that.

Clio: Best Travel

Club Med began as a tent village on the shores of Majorca, Spain in 1950, promising to provide its guests with a vacation from the very things that made them need a vacation in the first place: telephones, newspapers, clocks - all the intrusions of everyday life. Much has changed with the accommodations thank heaven, but not with the promise as indicated in the three commercials above. Cell phones, of course, still provide their own obstinate imposition.

Clio: Copywriting/Travel

Fact 1: There are more people of Irish descent in America than there are in Ireland. Fact 2: Despite that, the Irish Tourist Board had never run a single television commercial, opting for local radio and small space print ads instead of attempting to reach a mass market. It took a new director named Niall Millar to change their course. He arrived with the belief that no medium other than television would ever capture the essence of the country or the bearing of its people, and bet his budget and perhaps his job on that belief. The result? The television campaign elevated tourism by 34% in its first year, and garnered practically every major advertising award in the process. Sláinte to Niall!

There’s joy in creating a great campaign. Of equal value is the pride derived in sustaining an extraordinarily distinct and effective one like BMW - a privilege I enjoyed for six years and countless piece of advertising.

Alas, sometimes bad things happen to good campaigns. Revlon was thrilled to introduce a brand new fragrance called Trouble. We were thrilled to create an introductory campaign that featured a commercial that was sensuous to the extreme. But three months into the introduction, the AIDS epidemic arrived full force. Suddenly risqué was far too risky, and Trouble itself was in the sort of trouble even a Clio award couldn’t quell.