Media: short film; integrated brand & press campaign; events world tour
Credits: Executive Producer & Global Head of Content
Awards: 2x Clios; Cannes Lions shortlist; accepted to 4 Academy Award-qualifying film festivals; featured in the US State Department's American Film Showcase
Production Company: Breakwater Studios
In partnership with Publicis Sapient’s CMO and CEO, I developed and produced a series of three 15-minute films that show the human impact of the company’s work. Forgiving Johnny is the second film in that series.
This film tells the story of one of the first successful diversion applications in Los Angeles history. Even though state law permits the diversion of disabled defendants to treatment instead of prison, it turns out that almost nobody was actually being diverted. Why? The process of applying for diversion would require a lawyer to manually track down reams of physical paperwork. For court-appointed public defenders who are already stretched far beyond their limits, the process was too labyrinthine to even pursue...that is, until Publicis Sapient digitized all 600 million records at the Los Angeles County Public Defender's Office. Johnny, the developmentally disabled man at the center of this film, is hopefully the first of many LACPDO defendants to benefit from this digital transformation.
No Publicis Sapient branding appears anywhere in Forgiving Johnny. Instead, we used the film as a door-opener to start conversations we never would have had access to otherwise. And it worked:
--- Forgiving Johnny led to 47 media placements, the most for any initiative in our company's history, totaling nearly $10 million in earned media value. Some highlights include NBC, Mashable, Tech Brew, Variety, and Fast Company.
--- Working with Oscar-winning director Ben Proudfoot, we sold the film to TIME magazine, which partially offset the cost of production. Not only did this massively increase the film's exposure, but it also provided an example of marketing actually helping to pay for itself.
--- NBA All Star and social justice advocate Karl-Anthony Towns agreed to sign on as an executive producer to the film, which was a major factor cited by the NBA in its decision to award him its 2023-2034 Social Justice Champion award.
Forgiving Johnny became our company's top talking point with prospective clients, recruits, and analysts. And so even though 2023 was full of milestones, including Sapient helping Publicis Groupe become the most valuable holding company in the world, our CEO Nigel Vaz still called this film his top highlight of the year.
This goes to show the power of what brand filmmaking can accomplish, not just for a marketing department, but for an entire company.
As the head of Publicis Sapient's innovation incubator, I led the creation of a first-of-its-kind generative AI assistant for our website to answer questions about digital business transformation (DBT).
Most chatbots are deterministic, which means that they're basically just an expensive version of a website's FAQ section. And so by instead using RAG to build our assistant on an LLM, we were able to deploy a much more powerful solution, much more quickly, for a fraction of the cost.
I'm currently working with our web team to build even more functionality into this bot, including some experimental features we haven't seen before. Stay tuned.
Media: 15-minute film; integrated brand & press campaign; events world tour
Credits: Executive Producer & Global Head of Content
Awards: Clio winner; LIA winner
Production Company: Breakwater Studios
In partnership with Publicis Sapient’s CMO and CEO, I developed and produced a series of three 15-minute films that show the human impact of the company’s work. Never Done is the first in that series.
The film tells the story of a woman named Kersten who was set to be evicted on Christmas 2020. Although Congress had passed a historic Emergency Rental Assistance bill, it was up to states, municipalities, and local nonprofits to get those funds distributed to renters in time to avoid their eviction. Publicis Sapient helped a Charlotte-based organization called DreamKey Partners digitize their operations so that they could effectively distribute congressional funds to citizens like Kersten and her family.
This was an experiment in unbranded entertainment— no company branding appears anywhere in the film— and it paid off. I hired Ben Proudfoot to direct — when he later went on to win an Oscar, it turbocharged our press campaign, leading to a half-hour segment about Publicis Sapient on CNBC, plus over 15 articles in outlets such as Adweek and Variety. I introduced the film onstage at its premiere at The New Yorker Festival, and when The New Yorker’s editorial team later posted our trailer on Instagram, it received over 250k views and 3k likes. In total, we received over $5m in earned media, which was well over 20x what it cost to make the film.
We also used the film more tactically as a way to reach industry analysts, who are the most important influencers in the B2B buying community. Some of the top analyst firms in the world, such as IDC, Constellation Research, and HFS, published reports and recommendations for Publicis Sapient based on what they saw in this film, including a #1 ranking in IDC’s MarketScape.
But perhaps most impressive is the impact that this film had on our internal audience of 20k global employees. In 28 screenings across 4 continents, we brought thousands of people together for the first time post-Covid. Seeing the impact of their work on screen in such a unique format brought many of them to tears. This made us realize that we’ve discovered something special with this film — and so we’re now undergoing an effort to redefine our company platform, using “impact” as the key element of Publicis Sapient’s branding moving forward.
In 2022, The New Yorker commissioned three documentaries from three filmmakers around the world. I was one of those three, and Dear Max is the result of a collaboration with The New Yorker's incredible in-house team.
Across platforms, Dear Max received close to 1m views and over 30k likes in its first week alone. After a successful festival run, including a win for Best Mini-Doc at Sebastopol Documentary Film Festival, Dear Max became one of the 114 films that competed for the 2024 Academy Award® for Best Documentary - Short Subject.
It goes without saying that, of all the films I’ve created, this is the most personal and important to me and my family.
Media: Video, web design, social quizzes, and print spread
Credits: Executive Creative Director
Awards: Clio winner; Webby winner;The One Show (shortlist); Cannes Lions (finalist); MediaPost Award winner
Production Company: Brother
This 11 minute documentary was live for only four weeks, but in that time received 1.5m+ views and 40k+ engagements—the most views per day, engagements, and watch time of any brand content in Condé Nast history.
Our custom website, social series, and print feature also drove record engagement and brand lift for Porsche.
In addition to pitching this work and overseeing this program as ECD at Brand Lab, I also directed all of the interviews in the film.
Media: Video, event, article
Credits: Supervising Producer
Awards: Clio winner
To promote Free People’s autumn collection, we interviewed actual coat check attendants and re-enacted their stories, dubbing their voices over Hailey Gate's performance.
The How Channel is Publicis Sapient's award-winning video portal for thought leadership. As Global Head of Content, I led the team that drove:
— 2x organic visitors, completion rate, and total time spent
— 8x engagements and social shares
— 5x The How Channel's marketing-influenced pipeline. By 2023, the majority of pipeline brought in by Sapient's marketing team was influenced by The How Channel.
Media: Comedy short, event, documentary short, website
Credits: Strategy Lead, Executive Producer, Creative Director, Co-Writer
Awards: Webby Honoree; Telly Award
When I pitched a comedy about climate change, everyone thought I was crazy. They were probably right...but we did come away with over 1 million views, a Telly Award, and were selected as a Webby Honoree.
Western Digital, one of the world’s leading hard drive companies, asked for a strategy brief on the most effective way to get people to care about data. After analyzing consumer trends, I recommended 1) focusing on a narrow topic, preferably a corporate social responsibility initiative, and 2) creating an ecosystem of assets, including longform content, stunts, social teasers, and influencer content.
“What Would Happen in a 4C World” featured comedian Aparna Nancherla and allowed me to wear many different hats, including academic researcher, comedy writer, and reality TV producer. Plus, it helped bring a fresh perspective to one of the most pressing issues facing our planet.
Media: Video
Credits: Executive Producer, Creative Director, Editor
Awards: The Drum B2B “Chair’s Award”; Shorty For Social Good
A short film about a unique program to increase hiring of individuals on the autism spectrum.
In addition to pitching this work and overseeing Brand Lab's client relationship with IBM, I was also the editor of this film.
Media: editorial feature film, branded short film
Credits: Strategist, Executive Producer
Recognition: Premiere at Cannes Lions
McCann asked Brand Lab to help introduce their artificial intelligence consultancy to potential clients. I proposed a two-pronged approach: McCann would sponsor an editorial documentary about artificial intelligence, and pair it with a branded film about McCann’s successes in using AI on behalf of their clients.
This year-long project was filmed in Japan, France, and around the US, and gave me the chance to work alongside some of the smartest creatives and strategists in the business. Our 40 minute documentary features the leading voices in AI, and has received over 1.5m views and 25k likes.
The films premiered at the Cannes Festival of Creativity, and helped McCann win Campaign’s “Advertising Network of the Year”.
As executive director of Brand Lab, my goal was to harness our editorial teams to redefine the potential of branded content as something people actually want to watch. Scroll down for some examples of products I rolled out for clients:
Warner Brothers: on one end of the spectrum, branded content can look like product placement. On the other end, it can look like an informercial. I created a third way called “Lookalikes"—leveraging editorial insights to make content that’s more brand-heavy than product placement, yet engages audiences for much longer dwell times than an ad. For Warner Brothers, we produced two videos using data insights from editorial series such as Technique Critique, Each and Every, and Truth or Dare, which went on to become the most-watched branded videos ever on Wired and Teen Vogue.
Belvedere: this is an example of a product I created called "Custom Preroll". The idea is to supplement CPM monetization by producing simple thematic alignments with popular editorial content. This example ran next to Vanity Fair’s popular editorial series Slang School, and outperformed Belvedere’s brand-produced preroll in A/B tests.
Novartis: as part of my initial strategy review for Wired and The New Yorker, I saw that branded content underperformed when it deviated from brand voice. In response, I created standardized buckets of creative production templates to ensure that all content remained on-brand. This is an example of the “Reports” bucket I created, which went on to win Gold at the MM&M Awards.
Media: fourteen documentary shorts
Credits: Video lead
As head of enterprise video at The Foundry, I produced TIME’s editorial feature “American Voices: One Nation, In Progress”. This year-long project took us around the country to interview some of the most inspirational people I’ve ever met. A reminder that America is an idea, one that we owe to immigrants, women, and people of color.
Media: 4-part series, interactive website
Credits: Executive Producer, Creative Director
Awards: Silver Telly
I was the first hire at Condé Nast Entertainment Branded Content, where I helped hire 30 employees and generate over $40m in new revenue. As executive producer, I was the creative, logistics, and client-facing lead for our award-winning content campaigns.
This series for DXC Technology was one of my first. “Tech Today and Tomorrow” explores four parts of the economy where technology is having the biggest impact, to predict where we might be going next.
Watch the full series here.
Media: video
Credits: Executive Director of Brand Lab
Short docu-style videos featuring Pusha T.
Media: documentary and article series
Credits: Executive Producer
At Vanity Fair, we partnered with Lena Waithe and the AT&T Hello Lab Mentorship Program, whose goal is to ensure that the voices of more women, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ+ communities are heard.
Featuring interviews with filmmakers such as Dee Rees, Jill Soloway, and Reed Morano, our videos and articles explored what diversity looks like through the lens of three Hollywood roles: writers, producers, and directors.
Watch the videos here.
I spent two months as interim head of editorial video at InStyle. In that time I developed new series; directed celebrity interviews; and oversaw production of day-to-day web shows. I also helped compile a video style guide and competitive analysis to help with future programming.
Credits: Creative development; Director
I developed the “Expertly Tested” series for Wall Street Journal, which is a new twist on a publisher tech review: getting trusted third-party experts to try out new tech products in the field.
We shot this pilot in Barcelona, although sadly I was directing remotely via Zoom.
Media: sound experiment; video; article
Credits: Executive Producer
Lexus knew they had developed an amazing sound system for their new ES model. They came to us to help prove it. We designed an experiment to compare the vehicle’s key sound qualities to the highly attuned acoustics at the world famous Santa Fe Opera House. Check out the full article here.
Media: video
Credits: Executive Producer
Short docu-style video featuring Mo Bamba from the Orlando Magic.
Media: two-season web series, web design
Credits: Executive Producer, Creative Director
Award: Best Brand Film, 2021 Innovation SABRE Awards
The Macallan’s “World’s Best Scotch Experiences” program invites tastemakers from around the world to create experiences—cocktails, tasting menus, or art projects—based on inspiration from Macallan ingredients.
We created an interactive hub to live on Condé Nast Traveler, where users can explore these experiences and book reservations directly through the platform.
In addition to my work for Condé Nast Traveler, I developed a series template and set of video best practices to help Macallan’s agency, M Booth, continue to produce this series on their own.
Media: three web series
Credits: Senior Producer
I developed and produced three YouTube shows for Visit California: “5 Amazing Things”, “Parks and Beaches”, and a hosted travel series called “California Road Trips”.
California 101 consists of 55 videos, filmed in 175 locations across California. Each video includes a clickable map, which viewers can use to book their own itineraries.
The videos have over 17 million lifetime views, and provided Visit California with hundreds of hours of evergreen footage to use in future programs.
