I was the Creative Director on the iconic Volkswagen brand for four rewarding years. We used human stories to highlight product attributes. The approach delivered creative and sales success.
FEELIN’ CAREFREE
How do you make "No Charge Scheduled Maintenance" exciting? You enlist the help of A-Ha. (btw- I like to think I gave Coach Beard his big break)
AWARDS (CANNES, ONE SHOW)
BABY
If your life flashes before your eyes, make sure you’re in a VW Jetta.
AWARDS (CANNES, ONE SHOW)
TOSS
If you can’t pass down athletic genes, at least pass down a nice car.
AWARDS (ONE SHOW)
THE DOG STRIKES BACK
How do you follow up on the success of “Little Darth?” You can’t. So we write an awesome and completely different spot launching the new Beetle, and then we make fun of ourselves for not re-visiting Vader. The idea was to create a “meta-moment” where our commercial was having the same conversation that many around the country would be having at that very time… “Hey, where’s the Vader Kid?”
Over 18 million views. Good, but no Darth.
The team also piqued public interest by creating the first “teaser” for a Super Bowl commercial. A great combination of the two themes in our Super Bowl commercial: dogs and Star Wars. The teaser had over 8 million views before the game.
AWARDS (ONE SHOW)
GOOOOOLF
As part of the Golf GTI launch, we created various custom goal celebration videos for every single team in the world cup. A custom goal celebration would be instantaneously released on Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube the moment a team scored. For the final, we prepared a customized :30 sec commercial that ran immediately after the match to celebrate the winner. Fortunately for us, it happened to be the Germans. The video had over 250k facebook views within the first 24 hrs.
Ultimately, we found a clever way to allow fans everywhere to follow and celebrate every goal of the World Cup, in real time, while also promoting the new Golf. Gooooolf!
AWARDS (ONE SHOW)
LUCKY MAN
Safety starts where luck ends.
GET HAPPY
After a contentious election year, we wanted to remind people to chill out and have a bit of fun. The Volkswagen Beetle and Beetle convertible were just the vehicles to do so. We enlisted the help of Jimmy Cliff to re-record the feel-good anthem “Come on Get Happy” and then made a music video of the song featuring people from famous youtube “freakout” clips. The formerly freaked youtube stars join Jimmy and are thankfully transformed. Over 12 million views on Youtube.
We followed up the effort with an attention-getting spot about a guy from Minnesota that is feeling irie vibrations thanks to his Beetle. The spot was one of the ten most watched commercials on youtube that year and we received thank you notes from the Jamaican government (I framed it).
TREE
The solid thunk of German engineering.
PASSING LANE
There are Hybrids and there are Turbo Hybrids.
THE 4TH OF HALLOWMAS
Anything in the garage needs to make way for your new Passat.
IT’S PRACTICALLY YOURS
At the Volkswagen Sign Then Drive Event it’s incredibly easy to get in the VW you’ve always wanted. So easy, you might forget you're on a test drive.
We created this insight for the brand and it has proven to their most successful sales event.