Read…Widely?
Since strategy is about simple truths, here are mine:
A strategist should “read” widely—you’ll learn more from your least favorite sports newsletter, more from that only-okay YouTube essay or Oprah’s Bookclub Pick, than you will from the Harvard Business Review.
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Curiosity is easy, an open mind is harder, both are essential to great strategy.
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Insights demand empathy. If you don’t understand how your audience experiences the world, you can’t connect, let alone ask anything of them.
Brands exist in culture, and ignore their broader context at their own peril.
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A good insight poorly communicated might as well not exist.
Fandom and teenage girls run culture from the ground up, and should be appropriately feared and respected.
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SELECTED PROJECTS
TikTok #YouHavetoSeeIt
I haven’t seen Succession yet. I know, I know. I’m sure I would like it! But that’s a lot of TV.
We had data showing that TikTok inspires that same intense FOMO, but without the burden of a 57 minute run time. All it takes is giving into curiosity for one moment and you’re on platform and hooked.
For TikTok’s first major US Brand campaign, we took this insight and ran with it, celebrating (and recreating) the way that people actually get on TikTok: first your friend is asking if you’ve seen the one about the apartment, then your mom, then that stranger in the grocery store. And eventually, you just have to see it for yourself.
Over a series of vignettes we featured TikTok native creators and celebrity creators to showcase the breadth of content and users on the platform: it’s not just dance videos and teenagers, it’s that Canadian math PhD drag queen your friend, Martha Stewart, just won’t stop talking about.
And we did all of this without ever showing a TikTok.
(Though we did leave you a QR code, just in case you were inspired to finally see what all the fuss was about.)
#SportsOnTikTok
Community organizing functions on TikTok (hashtags, search, etc), while powerful, were being underutilized by users. At the same time, traditional sports media buys across the MLB and NBA were locked in. We saw an opportunity to show a pretty resistant audience that unique communities and content they care about it easy to find on TikTok.
There are a lot of ways to watch sports content. Instagram is where you go for game highlights. Twitter is for trade news and scores. Traditional media is for your aging uncle, and for watching the game itself.
Sports on TikTok? Sure it’s got trick shots and challenges, but that’s not what makes the community special. Sports on TikTok thrives on bloopers, memes, and BTS. It’s everything fun and human about sports that happens before, or after, the game whistle. All just a quick, easy hashtag away.
NBA Playoffs Edition
Evergreen Edition
This Must Be the Place
How many times have you heard someone say they “fell down a TikTok rabbit hole”? Or fallen down one yourself?
TikTok’s algorithm is one of its key points of differentiation: unlike on Twitter or YouTube, it’s going to stretch the boundaries of your interests, show you something new. How about ice sculpturing? Sand art? Now you’re on lesbian fashion TikTok, and the real question is how do you make sure you never leave?
We wanted to share that incredible, unique experience with a new audience, so we partnered with VICE to highlight all the unique, unexpected places and communities on TikTok where you might belong. And we featured one of TikTok’s most charming young stars to invite you along for the ride.
TikTok Moments
It’s the central prerogative of a tech company to explore emerging tech and cultural spaces, so of course, we toe-dipped into NFTs.
But we needed to do it in a way that was authentic both to web3 natives and TikTok users. What’s at the center of that venn diagram?
The answer is, of course, a gloriously irreverent, yet 100% earnest love of both memes and the creators who meme-d them.
TikTok Moments built, and yes, minted, bespoke pieces of 3d animated art that celebrated the likes of Brittany Broski (also known, once, as Kombucha Girl) and Curtis Roach (who was bored in the house, and in the house bored).
Believe it or not, I can’t just tell you what that is. But! I can tell you some of the questions and considerations at play (maybe you can spot some answers in the brand campaign).
What is TikTok, if only a vanishingly small percentage of people actually post? How is TikTok social, and how is it something else?
What does “The algorithm” actually mean as an RTB?
Who are the true competitors, and what can’t they recreate?
These answers (and more) were globally published in TikTok’s first brand book.
TikTok Brand Positioning
Hulu DEI + Cultural Brand Strategy
It was an impossible task: create a single strategy meant to inform activations across Hulu’s cultural calendar.
A calendar that, as fellow marketers might imagine, covered everything from Black History Month to “Huluween.”
We couldn’t write one brief. But we could build an approach: a set of questions, concerns, and deep convictions about how a brand weighs into the conversations that exist outside of itself, yet inform everything it does. Specificity, listening, and action informed every brief. Yes, even Huluween. See examples below.
This is some of the work I’m proudest of, and where a lot of my conviction as a strategist comes from.
Your Attention Please
This was a multi-step insight that informed years of creative, including a Hulu Original documentary series, a podcast, a Hub for Black content on Hulu, and more.
First: Hulu was the original the home of Live TV in streaming, uniquely positioned to speak to the now, the “Live” reality of Black History. But that felt…surface. Easy. We’d seen Black History Now campaigns.
Second: we looked around at who was actually making Black History Now, and noticed a pattern in who brands found marketable. We asked ourselves: where were the nerds? The sci-fi writers? The interior designers? The scientists? The film directors? Hello?
Well, I guess that’s Hulu now. Your Attention Please, for the up and coming creators of Black History.
Hulu PrideFest
Everyone’s got a piece of Covid Creative that they’re especially proud of, and this was ours.
Amidst all the online concerts and Among Us games, it felt like nothing had actually captured the tender moments of togetherness that lockdown robbed us of. The parts of Pride that don’t make your Instagram reel: the moments of reflection, holding your partner’s hand, a smile from the right old lesbian at the right time.
So while PrideFest had a concert, and cool costumes for your little avatar, it also had a garden of flowers for people from all over to leave notes of support, commiseration, and love for each other.
And I’m still really proud of that.
Made By Her
The cool part about working at a brand like Hulu is that the content and the brand are never far apart from each other, and what started as a Handmaid’s Tale partnership grew into an initiative built as a lasting reminder of who exactly made all of… this.
The insight was simple: the roles of women on screen have grown, but behind the camera, lag tremendously. Hulu was uniquely positioned as a leader in this conversation: our biggest Originals were written and produced by women. How could we spread the love and leadership?
Made By Her consists of several initiatives, including a partnership with ReFrame that highlighted the women who produced Hulu’s Originals, the Made By Her Hub for watching shows and movies made by women (American Psycho!), and the Monuments Project, where Hulu worked with three American municipalities to put up permanent statues of the women who helped build them.
And I’m proud to tell you, all of those initiatives? Made by Her.
From Many, One
The US Golf Association, hosts of the US Open, were losing market share and brand equity to the other majors. What was unique to the USGA?
The answer turned out to be obvious. Over and over again, we found in research that the US Open was hard. Every year the game’s greatest athletes, and the thousands of amateurs hoping to qualify, soldier through rookie mistakes, punishing courses, and humiliating scores.
For the USGA, this was a weakness. Fans and athletes were starting to think that the US Open, and the USGA by extension, were unfairly punishing.
We chose to lean in. We found a quality that could only be uncovered in hardship, that felt uniquely and proudly American: grit. And we made a campaign celebrating the USGA as the true arbiters of greatness: not just of skill, or pedigree, but of drive, perseverance, and the obsessive, bloody focus on being at the top.
Venmo
Venmo was a brand in transition. Its ambitions lay far beyond “app you pay your roommate rent with,” but its users remained stubbornly immune to new behaviors, and unaware of impending product launches.
Our strategy was to start from Venmo’s known quantities—ie. friendship and food—and grow our new behaviors and product launches from there.
If you’re going to split a pizza on Venmo, why not pay for it there? If you’re going to amass “funny money” in your account, why not get a card to spend it with?
This project included full brand guidelines, a social media playbook, and lots and lots (and lots) of small digital buys.
Sorta-Fit Spokesguy
Sports drinks in the mid 2010s were prettty sure you were training for the Olympics, or at least a marathon. What? Is that not why you were drinking Gatorade?
Our strategy was more honest: most of us aren’t going to run an Iron Man tomorrow. And that’s okay! You should still get to enjoy a delicious boost of electrolytes, right?? But if Gatorade and Powerade and Under Armor were for the pros, what was the sports drink for the rest of us? For most of us?
And who was that sports drink’s spokesperson?
Different, All Together
Why is this at the end? Because we never made it. There were business acquisitions involved. But the strategy and creative was so good, it lives on in my heart, and in this portfolio.
VRV is, simply put, a streaming platform for nerds. At the time, it hosed content from Crunchyroll, Funimation, Rooster Teeth, and Shudder. Its marquee original was the McElroy Brothers TV show. If you know nerd culture, these things are obviously connected, but…how?
We embarked on a journey to define the emotional experience of true nerd-dom, and we arrived at a simple truth: it’s just different. The joy, the satisfaction, the red thread that binds these fandoms is being a part of something that is apart from mainstream culture. Something specific, and yours. The last of the true subcultures thrived on VRV.
But they were also on Crunchyroll and Shudder. What was unique about VRV was that it didn’t just know what nerd culture was, it brought it all together. And like that, the insight snapped into place.
Our creative, inspired by the subcultural “spaces” on forums, at cons, and later Discord, built “worlds” of content around each type of fandom, and invited nerds to come explore.
Join a D&D oneshot, pitch your pilot, register a complaint—or even hire me!
I love to talk about new ideas, no requirement that they be Big.
Let’s ask some questions together.