Redesigning the American flag. Reenergizing sales.

One career highlight for me so far has been pitching and winning AOR for Sun-Maid against agencies you’ve heard of while I was working at one you probably haven’t. As I led the creative teams and developed our creative approach, I also helped develop the brand and overall comms strategy for the pitch. A lot of great work was produced in a short amount of time by a lot of great people with the hope of winning a classic American brand.

When we got the call that we’d won the business, the agency erupted in celebration. Champagne and booze and pigs in a blanket flowed as we congratulated one another while letting out a collective sigh of relief. All of the late nights and teeth gnashing and hair pulling paid off. It was incredible news. It was pure joy.

And then a couple weeks later we got some bad news: Sun-Maid was putting it’s branding and packaging up for a separate review. Not because they didn’t think we could do it, they knew our design capabilities, but they were worried with all the other Sun-Maid work already on our plate that we wouldn’t have time to do it. I asked the client to be included in the pitch and they gave us a shot. Against design agencies you’ve heard of. And we won that work, too.

“If you redesign that little red box it’s like redesigning the American flag. Better be careful.”

Prior to jumping into designs, we conducted focus groups across the country asking people what they thought of the current branding and packaging and how Sun-Maid could change them to resonate better for millennial consumers. We heard all kinds of crazy stuff, as you typically do in focus groups, but that quote about the American flag stuck with me.

I remember sitting in the Sun-Maid war room in the agency one night, looking at hundreds of designs taped to the wall, and thinking about that quote. As I began the process of whittling down the options and preparing feedback for the ones moving forward, I couldn’t help but feel humility and gratitude. It’s not often you get asked to lead the redesign of a true American icon. And I knew that our approach needed to be evolutionary, not revolutionary.

Not only were the redesigns embraced by the design community, consumers embraced them, along with a new brand campaign, too. And for the first time in years, Sun-Maid saw positive sales in the raisin category.

Not bad work for a guy you’ve probably never heard of. Right?

In praise of the one-off.

Print is dead. It’s been replaced by digital content, social content, liquid content, native content, paid content, endorsed content, influencer content, search content and any other NEW medium that houses content that our industry believes will make Millennials content to give up their virtual and real dollar bills. Or likes. Or shares. Or hearts. And if our content goes viral, even better.

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Don’t get me wrong — I love that we get to play with a bigger box of crayons. In fact, over the past few years I’ve done more digital than traditional advertising. And, being the tech nerd I am, I’ve loved every minute of it. Which is why, when something like a single print ad comes across my desk, I love working on that even more.

Print is personal. You don’t just download a template off the World Wide Web Super Information Highway, swap out a logo and a few photos, slug in some SEO-friendly copy and then call it a day. Creating a print ad is a much more intimate experience. At least, it is for me.

It reminds me that I don’t have a job; I have a craft. It reinforces my love for a well-written headline over a tweet. And it refuels my drive to make it back into the CA print annual.

Remember when getting in CA was a big deal?

For this Sauder’s Eggs print ad, I didn’t work with a partner. I was the writer, art director and designer. But not by choice. This ad was a freebie for a client quench was hoping to woo into a long-term relationship. It had to be done quickly and on the cheap. There wasn’t even a brief. And I loved every millisecond of the assignment.

More important, the prospective client loved the ad as presented. Not a single change was recommended or made. And I’m grateful to say, Sauder’s Eggs is no longer a prospective quench client. They’re a client. In part because of a one-off print ad that ran on the back cover of a B2B pub with less than 5,000 readers.

A print ad that also happened to take Gold in the 2016 Philadelphia Addy Awards.

So now we’re auditing Sauder’s current website, monitoring their social media channels, and developing their brand strategy that’ll soon inform their content strategy.

Not too shabby for the walking dead, huh?