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Canada Post The Phygital Road Show

Canada Post’s direct mail business continues to decline as marketers increase their spend in digital channels. To put direct mail on their consideration list, we needed to deliver something disruptive that was fresh and intriguing.

Envisioned as a kind of travelling science expo, the Phygital Road Show positioned the integration of physical and digital media as the “future of marketing.” 

Hosted over the course of three days in three agency-rich locations in downtown Toronto, these pop-up events demonstrated just how effective direct mail can be through a range of exciting, hands-on experiences.

Attendance exceeded expectations by 180% and requests for a sales follow-up exceeded the objective by an astonishing 360%.

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Canada Post Free Shipping Tuesdays 2019

There are a lot of things that induce a strong sense of FOMO. Free shipping is definitely one of them.

We wanted to show how missing out on our promo ranks right up there with all the usual suspects in your social feed like fancy brunches, dreamy vacations or awesome concerts.

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Canada Post Free Shipping Tuesdays 2018

For the third year of this very popular small business promotion, we were challenged to outdo the previous year’s campaign promise of “It’s back and bigger than ever.” 

So we created a campaign of “Epic” proportions to show just how excited customers get about this promo.  

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Canada Post Online Shopper Loyalty Report

Canada Post conducted a survey of 5,000 online shoppers and packaged the insights in a thought leadership report.

To promote downloads of the report in social and digital, we conducted on-camera interviews with real people giving unscripted answers to support the report findings. Then we summarized the takeaways in an easy-to-understand video format.

By giving voice to consumer opinions, these videos made the facts of the report both more credible and more compelling.

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Canada Post Postal Code Targeting

Vast amounts of consumer data are indexed to the postal code. And with the launch of Postal Code Targeting, marketers could finally use that data to not only target their desired customers, but to also reach them through direct mail.

The benefits of this innovation were complex. In social channels, we broke it down in a succinct “listicle” video and also used social metaphors to communicate the product’s overall benefit.

In digital and out-of-home, we took one aspect of the product – the ability to find lookalike customers – and made that the hero. 

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Canada Post Smartmail Marketing: The Sessions

In an ever-changing media landscape, marketers seek guidance on where to put their efforts. But they rarely choose direct mail.

Since marketers often look to peers in the industry for new perspectives to solve marketing problems, we developed “The Sessions” as a flexible advocate platform where third-party experts could discuss the virtues of direct mail.

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Canada Post Picture Yourself In Cannes

Canada Post wanted to show that direct mail is still a relevant channel for modern marketers. To get their attention, we gave them something they coveted: awards.

A select audience of ad agency folks were sent a premium direct mail package containing AR markers representing Cannes Lions awards plus a stunning backdrop of two glamorous locations in Cannes.

By submitting selfies of their award-winning poses through our contest app, they were entered for a chance to win an all-expenses paid trip to the Cannes Festival.

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Levi's Levi.com

An iconic brand in need of a digital update. That was the challenge for redesigning this e-comm website for Levi’s. 

The amount of work I do on these types of large platform projects is usually astronomical. Yet the copy output appears meagre because so much effort goes unseen.

While it may be easy to appreciate the savvy online voice, it’s much harder to recognize the strategies for content I devised to scale across a highly templated site structure.

With that said, I offer up a small section of the site here as a tribute to all the behind-the-scenes wrangling it took for this diverse and dedicated team to create something so elegant, on brand, and ultra functional.

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BACARDI 150th Anniversary Challenge

I work with a lot of dudes and I like writing for dudes. And a lot of young dudes like BACARDI. The brand has a pretty rabid fan base among males in their early 20s – especially when there is free swag to be had.

To celebrate BACARDI's 150th Anniversary, the brand decided to give away a bunch of limited edition T-shirts. In order to win one of these coveted tees, entrants had to follow a trail of clues to answer a trivia question about the brand's history. The trail started with a video on the contest's Facebook tab and led to other digital BACARDI properties including the brand's website and Twitter feed.

It goes without saying, this contest was hugely popular and there was no shortage of entries to win the shirts.

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NIVEA Canada Creme Valentine Giveaway

NIVEA launched its Canadian presence on Facebook with this campaign at the start of 2012. The global brand had just created limited edition 10ml tins of its iconic Creme product with a new set of illustrations depicting two lovers.

Our idea made use of both the illustrations and the products in a campaign that embodied the brand ideals of caring and sharing. We reframed the illustrations as themed Valentine's Day cards that NIVEA Canada fans could choose to send to their friends on Facebook. With every card came the chance for the recipient to win one of the mini Creme tins, if they registered for our giveaway. Senders also had the option to register for a chance to win. So it was a feel-good, win-win, awesome-awesome kind of situation for everyone.

The response was fantastic. Those blue tins were a big hit and this campaign got the brand off to a great start on Facebook. The client was very, very pleased with the results.

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lululemon Weekly Website Campaigns

Every week, lululemon refreshes its website with an original campaign in its main feature carousel. This takes mucho sweat and mondo hustle, as I discovered working on a series of these campaigns back to back.

My team produced a new campaign every two weeks while another team did the same on a staggered schedule. Each product cycle started with a couple days of ideation, the presentation of 2-3 concepts, a photoshoot and interviews with brand ambassadors.

The finished stories were a blend of aspirational insights from our featured influencers and detailed product education relayed in the playful voice of the brand.

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Starbucks Starbucks.com

There are never as many opportunities to "tell stories" as I would like in this business. So I was really thrilled when asked to create unique and engaging long-form product stories for Starbucks.com.

I wrote for various food and beverages, but my best work overall was the stuff I wrote for the Whole Bean Coffees section. I put a lot of research into each story to make it sing with rich detail. Then I crafted and polished until it was word-perfect. 

I got a lot of personal kudos from my main client contact at Starbucks, himself an accomplished writer, so this goes down as one of my most satisfying writing projects ever.

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Starbucks Starbucks VIA™ Ready Brew

When Starbucks was ready to launch VIA, its first-ever instant coffee product, it wanted to not only create social buzz around the launch, but also educate customers on occasions for product usage.

We devised a social campaign that asked customers to share their experience of the product for a chance to win great prizes. Each week featured a different usage occasion for participants to respond to. Submissions of any kind, from a tweet to a video, were accepted.

I wrote all the copy for the contest microsite, including the intro video, as well as all the copy on the VIA product pages of Starbucks.com.

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Starbucks (Starbucks) RED

For the global launch of their partnership with Product (RED), Starbucks invited coffee drinkers to “do something good every day.” By making purchases with a special edition (Starbucks) RED card, customers would also be donating to the Global Fund to fight HIV/AIDS in Africa.

We created a dedicated microsite where customers could register a pledge to meet a donation goal of their choosing. The site acted as a participation counter, aggregating cumulative donation stats and showing profile pics of donors. This helped to create a sense of community momentum behind the campaign as more and more people added their faces, pledges and comments to the site.

At the time it launched, (Starbucks) RED was the most virally successful campaign Facebook had ever seen. User engagement spawned a record-breaking 320 million organic impressions.

I’m very proud of my work on this campaign. Not only because I think the writing was solid, but because of how greatly people responded. Our little microsite captured 76,000 pledges and 885,000 video views. And all for an absolutely excellent cause.

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Regence Healthy Heights Game

Health insurance is not a sector you think of as big into gaming. But a game is exactly what Regence asked us to build. Writing for a game can be quite technical. The challenge is in making all the parts flow together and feel fun.

In this case, the game mechanics had already been established and I had to come up with a consistent narrative that could tie all the disparate bits of interaction together into a seamless story for the player.

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EA Hasbro NERF N-Strike

This microsite for EA's NERF N-Strike game was my chance to talk like a robot superspy. Super fun!

Based on very scant character info, I was able to conjure up some more defining characteristics and personality traits for the N-Strike crew.

Making something outta nothing is one of my super skills.

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BMW Canada Diesel Detours

Diesel fuel is not the dirty fuel of days past. In fact, BMW Advanced Diesel is a heck of a lot cleaner and more efficient than gasoline. And this little microsite is happy to tell you all about it, plus help you calculate the fuel you'll save.