Core Challenges
1. Finding ways to help an exceptional client stand out online
2. Getting a traditionally-focused agency excited about digital work
3. Maintaining sanity and creativity for myself and my team in an always-on work environment
Story
When I joined the Apple group at TBWA\Chiat\Day LA, we were 35 people scattered into a stadium-sized agency. With our client growing fast, and some big reveals coming up (*cough* iPhone), the days of maintaining secrecy by building foam-core desk forts and sprinting to communal print rooms came to an end. We split off to form Media Arts Lab, scaling past 350 people in seven countries, with core offices in Los Angeles, London and Tokyo. While Apple dominated our agenda, we were also proud to create great work for Pixar, Conservation International and more.
Operating first as a designer, animator, developer and editor, I grew to lead the digital creative team, helping build and manage an international team of artists and engineers. I partnered with creative and film directors, effects and editing houses to craft award-winning digital and television campaigns for the Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, and iTunes. We evolved a digital strategy to reflect our client's exceptional products, trading industry conventions and typical website clutter for site-bespoke executions that consistently engaged audiences at rates 5-10x higher than the norm. When Apple moved away from Flash—then the foundation of online advertising—we built our own animation engine and ad-serving framework, collaborating with and customizing nearly every publisher's site to ensure seamless and inventive user experiences.
I grew up at Media Arts Lab. As a communicator and manager, as a builder of diverse and multi-talented teams, and in realizing that effective leadership is more about support than command—that great culture results from serving both the work and the people creating it.
iPod Touch / Share the Fun
TV spots on websites are terrible! The more we considered the space, the clearer it became that shooting specifically for online led to a more fun experience, and the best creative. Here, we traded TV's cuts and tracking shots for one continuous scene, playing with whitespace to imply depth and form.
roles: digital concept, choreography, technical direction, compositing
iPod Touch / All Kinds of Fun
Bespoke creative for every site meant a lot of work, but it enabled us to include real site elements in the fun. Leading a pipeline of animators in applying a unified campaign concept on a fast deadline was the perpetual challenge.
roles: art direction, compositing, technical direction, ad assembly
iPod + iTunes / "Gamma"
We only ran TV concepts online when we could one-up them, but the question was often: Could we do more with less? For Silhouettes, laboriously vectorized dancers could pop out over the live site (thus preserving site navigation), minimize bandwidth usage, and resulted in campaigns the creative directors loved even more than the originals.
roles: animation, editing, image processing, flash development
iPhone / App Cloud
We loved the idea of giving viewers a rich experience without needing to leave the page. Here we enabled viewers to quickly explore the best new apps, while showcasing the power of our custom HTML5-based animation engine.
roles: concept, art direction, technical direction. key co-conspirators: Danny and Martijn
iAd / Kanye West
We worked with Apple's iAd group to explore the new platform's technical capabilities, creating ad concepts (like this over-the-top take for an over-the-top artist) to evangelize to and advise other agencies on the platform's potential.
roles: art and conceptual direction. Rhodney knocked this one out of the park.
iTunes / Music
On our time off from big brand campaigns, we created thousands of ads for new music, film and book releases. We used the artist-inspired animation at the center of each micro-campaign as an opportunity to make our custom HTML5 animation engine more powerful.
roles: creative and technical direction. shout out to the relentlessly great animator, Rhodney.
Mac / Booby Trap
In the US and UK, we custom-scripted and shot Get a Mac for digital. Working with the world's largest digital publishers, we consolidated ad placements to improve site experience, and often integrated specific site audiences and features into the script.
roles: design, technical direction on set, compositing, ad development