Every Marvel film is full of heroes. They're also full of innocent bystanders covered in dirt, slime, and debris — people just trying to get to work while the Avengers level their city block.

For the launch of Tide's most powerful detergent, we partnered with Marvel to shift the camera off the heroes and onto the people stuck dealing with the wreckage they leave behind. We watched seventeen years of the MCU — every film, every episode — cataloged every collateral stain in Marvel history, then tracked down the actual background actors from those scenes. From London to Atlanta, Vancouver to the mountains of Spain, we flew them to LA and made them the faces of the campaign.

The background actors starred in OLV, social, and digital outdoor. We turned them into a line of Collateral Stain action figures. We sent them — stained, of course — to the red carpet premiere in Los Angeles, the first time a brand had ever shown up on a Marvel red carpet. And to bring the full sensory chaos of the Marvel Universe to life, we built a custom cinema in a Brooklyn warehouse surrounded by 18 pneumatic stain cannons synced to the messiest moments in the film — the first ever 5D screening experience.

Within 24 hours of launch, Tide sold out at Walmart. Then Amazon. The campaign generated 1.6 billion earned media impressions and 417 million engagements — the most talked-about social campaign in Tide's history.

FTX came to us with a straightforward brief: use the Super Bowl to get Americans off the sidelines and into crypto. To do that, we went straight at America's skepticism — by hiring America's foremost skeptic.

The spot featured Larry David traveling through history, dismissing every great invention of human civilization before turning his nose up at crypto. It was a bet that leaning into doubt was more persuasive than promising the moon. It turned out to be right, for reasons none of us anticipated.

By the end of the night, FTX was the most retweeted brand in the game and the most talked-about brand on Twitter after Pepsi's halftime show. All four major broadcast morning shows covered it the next day. By year's end, FTX profits were up 1000%.

Then, nine months later, FTX collapsed in one of the most spectacular corporate frauds in American history — which made Larry's skepticism feel prophetic and made the commercial relevant all over again. In the years since, Larry David publicly credited the commercial as the inspiration for his new HBO series, Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, debuting summer 2026.

It's the best-performing ad I have ever made, for a company that no longer exists, that inspired a television show. Which is either the strangest creative legacy in Super Bowl history, or proof that a great idea has no expiration date.

In 2021, Subway revamped nearly every single item on their menu simultaneously. New recipes, new ingredients, new preparation, new delivery. The most ambitious brand refresh in the company's history.

The problem was also the insight. There was simply too much new to fit in any single piece of advertising. So we made that the campaign.

We started with three anthem spots, because one couldn't contain it. Then nine ingredient-focused ads, which still didn't cover everything. We tried fitting it all on the tallest billboard in the world. Then we bought time inside other brands' commercials. Then inside show promos on Adult Swim, iCarly, Univision, and MTV. Then inside influencer videos. Then inside weather reports on Gas Station TVs nationwide. Then inside podcasts.

Every time we thought we'd covered it all, there was more new to talk about. The media strategy became an embodiment of the brief.

Subway became the 9th most talked-about topic on Twitter within minutes of launch — without a dollar of paid social support. Campaign awareness hit nearly 80%. And store sales rose to levels unseen in almost a decade — 10% above pre-pandemic numbers, putting Subway on track to exceed their original sales target by more than a billion dollars.

That's billion with a B.

Downy had a brand awareness problem that most marketers would consider unsolvable. A 65-year-old fabric softener with near-zero relevance among the consumers who mattered most — modern moms who had simply never been given a reason to care.

The insight wasn't about the product. It was about the audience. They were consuming romantasy content at a staggering rate, and no brand had shown up there yet.

So instead of making an ad, we made a show. Four serialized romance stories — written by adult erotic authors, read by Hollywood heartthrob Henry Golding — launched directly on BookTok and Spotify where the audience already lived.

Within weeks it became one of the most popular new shows on Spotify, landing in the top 1% of most shared content on the platform. Thirty percent of listeners stayed for the full eighteen minutes — in an era when most ads fight for three seconds. Ten influencers then turned four stories into an ongoing content universe that kept the brand in conversation long after launch.

Downy didn't just reach a new audience. It became relevant to one.

Some campaigns become platforms. You're Not You When You're Hungry is one of the handful that became a genuine piece of global culture — running in 54 countries, recovering market share equivalent to over $376 million worldwide, and winning multiple Effectiveness Lions at Cannes, IPA Gold, and global Effie Awards since its launch in 2010.

The platform was already iconic when I joined it. What we brought was new ways to extend it without diluting it — expanding the campaign's comic logic to characters like Godzilla and the Headless Horseman, and helping develop the print and OOH work that carried it into international markets.

Years after one of my Halloween spots aired, Calvin Harris remixed it. An unsolicited act of cultural appreciation that said more about the work's staying power than any award could.

Working inside a great platform isn't the same as building one from scratch. It requires a different discipline — knowing which ideas honor the original thinking and which ones only seem to.

Manhattan Mini Storage had earned their place in New York culture through decades of bold, boundary-pushing outdoor advertising that New Yorkers actually noticed. The problem was that boldness had never been codified. No consistent voice, no distinctive visual system, no brand assets that could scale. Just a reputation built on instinct.

We won the business on a pitch to fix that.

The insight was simple: New York City's character comes from its characters. The city has room for everyone — every gender, ethnicity, belief system, and unique personal quirk — even if nobody's apartment does. We crystallized that tension into a single line: Space for All.

From that platform we built the Manhattan Minis — a cast of 17 animated New York characters as eclectic and specific as the city itself. Brash, strange, funny, and immediately recognizable across MMS's extensive outdoor inventory.

The campaign ran for five years, outlasting the agency that created it. When Manhattan Mini Storage sold for $3 billion, news coverage specifically cited the advertising as a driver of the brand's value. Space for All is still their tagline today.

In 2020, Audible shifted from a credit-based service to an unlimited streaming platform — expanding their catalog to include original series, podcasts, meditations, sleep stories, news, and more. The question wasn't what to advertise. It was explaining what Audible had become.

The answer was clear: Audible wasn't an app anymore. It was the world's most fascinating place.

We launched the platform with Kevin Hart and Malcolm Gladwell — two voices, two worlds, one destination — chosen specifically because no single person or content type could contain what Audible had become.

But we had already proved that insight a few months earlier, in a single afternoon on Twitter.

It was World Storytelling Day, a week into lockdown. Tiger King had been watched. The Sopranos rewatches had been rewatched. People were craving something new. So we launched Audimojis — tweet us any two emojis describing your mood, and we'd tweet back your perfect story. A line and a star? Wishful Drinking. Taco and paint palette? The Hunger Games.

Over the course of the day we responded to 1,300 people and brands, generating 37,000 engagements and 11 million impressions with zero paid media.

Two campaigns. One insight. A brand that had outgrown what anyone thought it was.

Foot Locker had a positioning problem. They weren't bigger than Amazon or Zappos, and they weren't cheaper either. Competing on selection or price was a war they couldn't win.

So we didn't fight it.

Instead we repositioned Foot Locker as the authority. Not the biggest retailer — the most discerning. The insight was simple: in a world of infinite choice, curation is its own kind of power. We launched the Approved platform with a roster of athletic talent that sent one message: if the greatest athletes in the world trust Foot Locker's judgment, you can too.

Approved ran for eleven years — surviving client turnover, agency changes, cultural shifts, and a pandemic. Along the way it generated the Week of Greatness, a star-studded annual sales event that became a cultural moment in its own right.

The first Week of Greatness film accumulated three million YouTube views in days without traditional media. NBA players retweeted it unprompted — and then something shifted. Instead of Foot Locker reaching out to athletes to appear in their ads, athletes started reaching out to Foot Locker asking to be in the next one.

That's not a media metric. That's a brand equity shift.

The follow-up film, All Is Right, crossed over immediately — covered by the Today Show, CNN, and ABC News, landing on the front page of Mashable and New York Magazine's Approval Matrix, finishing first on TBS's Funniest Commercials of the Year.

That's what it looks like when a tagline becomes a brand platform — and a brand platform becomes a cultural institution.