“Management is doing things right;
leadership is doing the right things.”
  —Peter Drucker

Every business needs to figure out how to get its product to its consumer and every business needs to plan for its success. That’s strategy.

As a creative director, I’ve developed and supervised marketing campaigns for a variety of clients. My focus has been on creating communications that correctly set up expectations in the consumer’s mind so that they would first, take action and second, be satisfied with their spending. To do that, every business needs to identify whom they are talking to, who it is that would want their product. There are a number of ways of doing that, common sense is one of the best. If you’re selling home loans, you’re talking to people who want to buy a house. How old they are and where they live and how much they make is secondary. That has more to do with where you’re going to reach them. But identifying the target is the most crucial part of developing a strategy.

The most important rule for good copy is brevity.

Barra Financial Software

Visit the Design page to read more about the challenges presented by this campaign.

Recent Video Projects

Television Advertising

Television commercials do not need to be super-expensive spectacles to get the job done. Nor do they need to be frenetic and obnoxious, “buynow, buynow, BUYNOW!” offenses. This low-budget TV spot for JE Unlimited, advertising a long-distance phone plan, is case in point that, especially with today’s technology, good TV spots are within reach of any company. Of course, if the budget allows and the message calls for it, commercials with flashier production values are good too.

The key question is whether or not the commercial is persuasive in conveying the message. Conceptual TV spots—commercials that do more than just repeat the offer—are better solutions because they go further in dramatizing the value of the product.

On the other end of the budgetary spectrum was this spot for Round Table Pizza that was advertising their new Garden Pesto recipe pizza. How do you make pesto interesting — or controversial, as it turned out — and still get the point across? Create a conceptual bridge between the message and something people know is green.

Sometimes, despite the good work one puts in, a client chooses another concept or direction or the agency just plain doesn’t present it. That’s were a spec reel comes in. The YakBak 2 spec spot was done based on an actual freelance project and the Apollo Lager spots were done because it seemed like a great concept opportunity.

Filmmaking and Production

ROY’S HEART is a short film I wrote, directed and produced in 1997. It marks the real beginning of my directorial career, particularly since my first film, made in high school, was lost somehow. I wrote this script to use at the NYU School of Continuing Education’s 6-week Summer Film Intensive. It turned out not to be one of the final projects during the course, so I made it a few years later. But it was an exercise in several things, writing blind, not knowing what resources I would have in New York, while creating a compelling little drama that would unfold in twelve minutes, as well as showing what I’m capable of as a director, editor and writer—in addition to my thirteen completed feature-length screenplays.