Roadster. Reinvented. Resurrected.

This piece has been a part of my body of work for years now and it still feels fresh. I just never had a way to showcase it very well. It's a vehicle brochure we did for the redesigned Boxster back in 2005. The amount of real estate we were allowed to dedicate to imagery was a bit of a coup considering their typical brochure at the time. These images came from a friend's site. I was the writer and ACD on it while at Carmichael Lynch. Unfortunately, these snaps just give you a flavor for the book and don't showcase my unparalleled command of the English language. I'm kidding. Okay, the writing's decent. Wish you could see it in person. It also included a CD-ROM in the back. I'll post some stuff from that as well.

Holiday Wrap Up

This past holiday season, Qwest asked us to quick come up with a little online thing they could promote in their offline catalog. And we had about 15 minutes to tell them what we would create. Without thinking we blurted out "custom gift tags". Anyone giving a gift generally likes to wrap it. And everyone hates shelling out for gift tags. I'm cheap so I usually cut a piece of scrap wrapping paper, fold it into a mini card, write the "to-from" in it and then tape it to the gift. So we thought other cheapos would appreciate being able to customize and print their own fancy schmancy gift tags for free. The application lets you choose a style, customize it with an uploaded photo, and then download a pdf of your tags set up to print on sticky labels or on plain paper. Once downloaded you can print as many as you like. The response was phenomenal. Where's the branding you ask? It was embedded in a Qwest.com page.

The Value of Reliable Information

You wouldn't consent to surgery without having as much good up-to-date information as possible. Hell, they put "born on" dates on beer so we know if we're getting the freshest frost-brewed buzz. So why rely on stock pricing info that's 20 minutes old when making investment decisions? This online campaign for NASDAQ's Last Sale product tries to drive home the importance of good real time info. We ran video banners featuring a confused financial report as well as banners that looked like confused stock tickers (not shown yet). They lead users to a landing page where they could link to sites featuring NASDAQ Last Sale quotes and even try them on their mobile right there.

Mythbusting Myths

If I told you that you can make money when the market goes down, you'd think I was full of it, right? The truth is you can. As long as you know how to pull off a short sell. Or if you have ProShares short funds in your portfolio. To introduce people to this concept and the ProShares short fund product, we enlisted the help of some legendary mythological creatures. What you see here are three banners and a landing page. Now, only if I had invested in ProShares about a year ago.

New McKinney.com

Last week we officially launched our new agency website, mckinney.com. The soft launch came a few weeks earlier. It's received some good reviews. It is a representation of our commitment to deepening the "conversation" with current and prospective clients, potential recruits, and industry folk. The back end is pretty cool (3D, papervision, flash, and AI). Content is dynamic and the site allows for deep-linking. The use of freesites enables us to create customized experiences for certain visitors without digging into the core site architecture. The conversation engine lets visitors find content via a sort of natural language search. Questions we can't answer are logged and the info is posted at a later date. So the conversation can evolve. Oh and when viewing work, the site offers visitors HD video and imagery. The PR push was simple. Send an e-mail with a keyword and a link to the site. When the user entered the keyword, they were taken to a customized freesite with a special video welcome from our chief officers.

Bimmerworld Part Zwei

Here are the Bimmerworld print ads that ran in various auto rags. They ran against the grain so you had to turn the magazine to view it properly. For no other reason than to stop people in their tracks. The client had a ton of requests for posters of the ads. So we made those too. Not bad. Not bad at all.

Statute of Limitations: Flat 6 Fanatic

I'm going on a limb here and posting a project I did for Porsche to help launch the 2005 911. Since it dropped in 2004, I think enough time has passed to talk openly. Knowing Porsche enthusiasts are an insatiable and talkative bunch, we created an underground campaign to get them to help us spread "spy" footage of the new 911. We chatted it up on forums, leaving our URL in posts. The links led to an online shrine to the 911. We also maintained an active e-mail box. Next, we launched version 2.0 (see the video links at the top) and went back on the forums to reveal "spy" videos of the 911 hoping people would pass them around. We helped make this easy by deliberately using unsophisticated code. But the enthusiasts beat us to it, posting our videos on the forums, including some we never visited. If I can find them, I'll post the videos here. In the meantime here is the site design.

Operation Chambord Training Site

The first work out of the gates for my Chambord team was a distributor education...ZZZZZ. On the surface, not a creative opportunity. In fact, the client was expecting an experience with all the zazz of Microsoft Word circa 1992. Our audience was approximately 80% male, 20% female. So instead of the expected, we created a spy-in-training adventure complete with gadgets, mysterious femme fatales, karate fights and, of course cocktails. Participants entered a secret password, chose the gender of their agent and then set off to complete 4 missions plus a final exam. We generated a near 100% completion rate. (Well above expectations.) And some participants even came back and did it more than once, just for fun. Not bad, huh?