The work

The current whole sausage

Nobody wants to see how the sausage is made, but everybody wants it to have all the right stuff. In my work overseeing Microsoft marcomms for VML, I've chopped it all up and put it in place--emails, OOH, social, social videos, long form videos, keynotes, webpages, e-books, infographics, whitepapers, one-pagers. The whole shlamozzle. Of course there's an GCD above me, though I'm mostly given my head. In addition to leading an ever-changing group of junior creatives, I have become the oracle of Microsoft voice for my agency. Unfortunately Microsoft doesn't share with us metrics to describe how our work does in market, but I do know that work I've been hip deep in--mostly videos and keynotes--have been among the highest performing assets in their categories. Because I do not wish to violate my NDA with VML, I'm only including screenshots to provide a taste for the range of projects I work on.

All together now

Being a creative isn't as simple as coming up with the right line at the right time. It's fitting everything together, making it all make sense in a way that just hits home. I was part of the pitch team that won the Houlihan Lokey account, and part of the team that built out the work. An investment bank, Houlihan Lokey does more M&A transaction than Goldman, JPMorgan, Deutsche or any other bank in the world--but nobody knew their name. We're fixing that by centering a campaign on why they are different--their human touch, their deep expertise, their reality-based valuations. Their Net Promoter Score was off the charts for a financial institution, which means they tend to make their customers very happy with the results. The challenge, of course, is that their potential audience is small at any given moment. But we found them--at financial conferences and highly targeted ads, with geolocation and other techniques, and we made them the story. We started with a hall of heroes at the One Houlihan event in London, trying to elevate customers to heroic proportions, quite literally, with massive portraits of attendees. People would walk in and around the event and see themselves in giant portraiture . Here's that and some other ideas we had around why "different Matters" when you're dealing with Houlihan Lokey.

PR

Right out of college I thought PR would be a way for a guy with an English degree to make a living while he wrote the Great American Novel (more on that later). I've come back to it in recent times, executing PR campaigns for Volvo Trucks, The Abacos Islands, and Amferia, a medtech start-up based in Sweden, as well as multiple brands stateside.

Winning pitches

New business pitches bring stress-test everything a creative brings to the table--a grasp of strategy, big-picture thinking, the ability to identify immediate and longer term needs, the knack for creating things that all hang together, quippery, focus, and stamina. VML has won the last three pitches I was a part of, and my ideas were among those presented to the client each time.

Video

The Smash-proof guitar video was an attempt to raise the profile of Sandvik, one of the world's leading edge manufacturers. Located in Sweden, Sandvik wanted to leverage one of Sweden's most famous musicians--heavy metal virtuoso Yngvie Malmsteen, who is famous for smashing guitars--to showcase their 3D printing and fine tolerance milling capabilities. A second, longer video, went deeper into those techniques.It was a different, and very, very fun way to bring an industrial services to a broader audience.

Smashing Swedish guitars

Cutting edge health

Swedish health care Getinge blends high tech with compassion in their products and services. Formsan & Bodenfors asked me to help make some videos that captured that confluence. "Life-Defining Moments" features a woman who was born prematurely--and went on to become a neo-natal doctor specializing in premature births--using Getinge's patented respirator that helps premature babies breathe. "Life on Hold" speaks to hospital efficiency, and getting people the care they need when they need it. Both are clickable.

After months of getting questions approved, securing permissions, jockeying with internal politics, and, finally, filming, one of the principals in this video series left the company, so Microsoft killed the whole project. But it was good--videos asking Microsoft thought leaders what work would look like in five years, 2030. Here's the David Weston cut.

The revolution at work

Branded content

Long-form branded content feels like the perfect marriage of copywriting and journalism, using story technique to engage readers and build brand love. I've worked with the New York Times' T-Brand Studio, The Washington Post Brand Studio, The Players' Tribune, The Foundry (Meredith), Afar Media, Audubon and other content publishers, strategizing and creating digital and video executions. I worked with a wide range of clients that included Raytheon, BP, The American Association of Realtors, Hilton, the state of West Virginia, Chemours, US Bank, AT&T, the Islands of Tahiti, Microsoft, Wells Fargo, the state of Montana, and several others. Alas these executions are no longer clickable, so: screenshots. I'm happy to provide Word docs upon request, if you really want to read them.

One whole branded magazine

Montana: There's nothing here

US Bank + NYT

The cybersecurity talent gap

The Players' Tribune + Procter & Gamble

Olympian Gus Kenworthy's mom on her hero and his coming out

Microsoft Teams + NYT

Teamwork--from experts in it

Web works

Everything happens on the web. You gotta be able to write for it. Here are some websites.

(I'm just a writer. Don't hold design against me.)

Stance

Access Accelerated

Panasonic

(NGO/non-profit)

Scott's Miracle Gro

In addition to the homepage, I led a team that curated a 300-story library of gardening content

When Panasonic North America launched their first website independent of the parent corporation, I wrote it.

Gettry Marcus

Niche finance

Apex Mills

Manufacturing

Fun stuff

Podcasts

Programming

Display

Consumer

An effective creative sometimes has to leave their personal leanings at home. You have to give every project your best, regardless if it's one of your favorites. To me, this project represents my ability to take on prickly subjects and truly represent the POV of the client. In 2016, The Lincoln Project was not yet a disgraced, shambolic punchline; it was a real and powerful political movement with real and plentiful money pouring in. At one point, they wanted to create a TV channel. Because of my magazine background, they asked me to create programming ideas organized similar to magazine comment (short, bitsy, newsy pieces intermixed with longer features). This was the document I submitted. (The Lincoln Project exploded in scandal before any TV program was ever launched.)

Scripts for presentations or keynotes are part of every event --but so is the material that surrounds those moments--the collateral and digital presentations that immerse every event-goer in your brand. I've written all presentation and collateral for a three-day event launching the first new Volvo Truck in 20 years. I've written a highly focused keynote address that Microsoft's VP of Security delivered at their annual gathering of IT security professionals. Leave-behinds, landing pages, all the things. Here is the security keynote (I wrote the landing page and the blog post following it up). Microsoft said was one of the most downloaded presentations of the year.

Events

Les Miles was a highly successful college football coach and quite the character. The Players' Tribune was expanding formats and wanted to feature him in a podcast. So they called me in to help write and produce the show. It lasted for two seasons, until that character became character issues and Coach Miles lost his job. Unfortunately there are no episodes to link to, but it was a fun and well-received show for two years. Later I was involved in the early stages of Fireline, a podcast about wildfire in the West. I built the foundation of the show, identified the people we eventually interviewed, conducted several interviews and background research--then got a full time job and had to leave the show before it was complete. Fireline won a Murrow Award in 2022.

Sales text for Lenovo, banner ads for IntraLinks--I could choke a horse with all the display writing I've done. Here are a couple of quick tech examples.

Internal corporate comms

the explosion of flavors, from sriracha to sumac as a generation of foodies expanded their spicy horizons
a proliferation of probiotics
the menagerie of mashups like citrus hat, Doritos Locos tacos, ramen burgers, butter chicken poutine, and Whopperitos
the rising importance of craft and storytelling behind each ingredient
the popularity of home meal kits

Who says corporate comms can't be fun? One of my all-time favorite assignments was a report for the board of directors of PepsiCo on emerging food trends. I got to spend weeks researching the future of F&B. The report though never available for public consumption, managed to identify several interesting trends.

I also got to be, for a while, the internal voice of Annhueser-Busch Inbev, researching and writing their internal communique "The Pour," which went to their 30,000 marketing employees worldwide. And I helped Facebook craft their progress report toward the UN's 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, as well as many Microsoft corporate responsiblity reports over the years

Writing that gets the people excited about something

The Moorings

Chevrolet

Treaty Oak

Douglas Elliman

One whole really good idea

I was the lead writer on the Dell account for Young & Rubicam several years back. We came up with the "future-ready" campaign in 2015--a cliche by now, but the way we developed the campaign is noteworthy. We convened a group of experts for a round table at Harvard, where they ranked the future readiness of various cities around the country (and, in a second phase, around the world). We publicized those results and wrote stories and made videos around what makes a city future ready and what kind of businesses characterize the landscape of those cities. The earned media was phenomenal, as cities rushed to brag about where they had landed on the list. We expanded future readiness into medicine and film-making, among other sectors. The campaign provided a couple years worth of material. Because it was a while ago, these assets are no longer clickable, but you can get an idea of what we did.

Journalism

Being a journalist teaches you to get smart quick--by finding the smart people.

Before I came to copywriting, I had a successful career as a magazine journalist, publishing in dozens of national titles. Being a journalist is about finding the people who know the things you're curious about, asking the the right questions, then listening to what they say and what they don't say. That's where the good questions come from. It's no different than marketing. Any time I can talk to a client that's closer to making the bagels than a marketing person, I'm all in and all ears. These people have been thinking about the thing they're expert in for years--decades, sometimes. They know. My job was to listen for the things that would snag someone's attention, order them, and let them unfold--and that process translates to every kind of narrative there is. These are ust screenshots of a few of the stories I wrote, for a taste of variety.