AICP and SHORTY Awards Winner!

In 2023 I did another nice long stint with the eBay team with AJ Rivvers and all the lovely people at The Many. I was brought in to lead the edit of my first ever long form content series (episodes around 10 min each) - the second season of the popular Between Two Rides series for eBay Motors’ Youtube Channel. Our second season amped the whole concept up, bringing in top-notch car influencer talent to race stock cars vs. their modded counterparts (all parts from eBay Motors of course) with our charismatic host with the most, Emelia Hartford. Each episode was accompanied by teasers, trailers, and social content to excite and inform our audience as to the challenges we were taking on this year. The whole thing was a great learning experience in pacing a story over a much longer edit length than I had done in the past and the results confirmed that we nailed it.

Each of our episodes had views than any episode from the first season, the most popular hitting 5.3 million views, almost double the most popular episode from season 1. Overall, our 5 episodes and a BTS 6th episode racked up over 18 MILLION views and increased eBay Motors’ channel subscribers to 500,000 - absolutely CRUSHING our success metrics. I’ve embedded my favorite two episodes here, but please check out the whole series on Youtube!

As B2R was winding down, I hopped onto another motors project that was more rooted in social native content. KYRODA (Keep Your Ride or Die Alive) is the main eBay motors campaign, championed by some amazing hero films by Joan, and we were tasked with making some matching luggage social content both in-house and in partnership with influencers making their own content that drafts off our concepts.

Our approach was to re-contextualize social media trends in other verticals for motors, making for some fun appropriation of filming, edit and content styles. We did a Fit Check style video focusing on how eBay’s Guaranteed Fit will always make sure you’re showing up in style. A Haul video showing how easy it is to get the parts you want from eBay Motors, and finally, a Vibe Shift, utilizing social native edit techniques to stop the scroll and make content that felt native to the platform.

Once we got our edits together, we reached out to content creators in the space to make their own versions, guiding them to a successful end product while allowing them to take the reigns and make videos that felt native to their own styles and that would appeal to their own audiences.

Shoutouts to Jules Fox, AJ Rivvers, Mike Regan, AZ, Diego Saramiento, Kathryn Nicolai, Bryan Wong, and the incomparable Martin Van Der Valk

I stepped out into the freelance world and immediately fell into an almost 9 month long gig working with Intel's Agency Inside. They needed someone with a history and passion for video games so it was kind of a match made in heaven. 

From concept to completion we worked on the "Watch This" campaign for 7 months, shooting 5 commercials between Slovenia and Shanghai. We rolled out a fairly complete 360 campaign with print and booth graphics, film that ran at events, online and on TV as well as a robust selection of gifs to be used on various platforms from Twitch to Instagram, all hosted on Intel's first ever publicly branded Giphy channel (200 million + views and rising, all for free!). 

Shorty Awards Winner!

The VR Vault is another eBay social project The Many brought me on to lead over the finish line. I had briefly worked on the initial version of the game in the Spring of 2023, ironing out some aesthetic and gameplay decisions early in the process. That first version of the game was well received, but had some issues both in the visuals and in the gameplay. Luckily eBay, being the amazing client that they are, saw the value in taking another at bat on the game and we got a second try with a new production partner to really make the Vault Trials the experience we knew it could be.

For the second round, we simplified the game and scoring, making sure it was understandable and fair, as well as easy to play for someone who maybe had never even tried VR before. The biggest overhaul, however, was in the visual wrapper of the gameplay. The clients really wanted to feel the scale of their Collectibles Vault, a real world location where collectors could stash their highest value cards etc safe from hand oils and light damage. However, the real vault is more like a storage facility in Maryland - not very exciting. So they gave us free reign to romanticize how technologically safe advanced their storage facility really was.

We decided the version of a facility that felt the most tech-safe and really took advantage of being experienced in VR was a storage facility on the edge of the atmosphere, accessibly by space elevators. The elevator gave us a simple way of escorting the player through levels that both became more visually impressive as you went through the game without making the player have to walk or move around in VR space. The facility at the edge of the atmosphere allowed us to have consistently expanding epic views as you go from level to level, culminating in a breathtaking view seeing the rounded horizon of the edge of the earth, making sure no one forgets their VR Vault experience.

Shoutout to Juan Delgado, John Duchy Duch, AJ Rivvers, Joe Robbins, and the talented people at both Buck and X-Studios

In Spring 2021 I ended up working for both TRX and Tempo as a freelance ACD, helping push out marketing materials and design work for both. I got to design a bunch of sub brand logo work and merch designs for TRX, which, I have to say, came out really cool! I also designed emails, banners, collateral, all sorts of good stuff, but the logo explorations were definitely my favorite. Tempo proved to be more of a challenge than expected as my CD was let go one day into our shoot and I ended up running not only shoot but the duration of the project and asset delivery. TRX was much smoother sailing and a lovely group of people who I have continued to work with here and there! I’m a bit of a gym rat, so working on this stuff not only was a blast, but great motivation to keep lifting and working out!

There are tons of awesome things about StubHub.

The problem is, nobody’s really thinking about those things, because, well, nobody cares about anything anymore and the world is crumbling before our eyes (#amirite?).

To remind people why StubHub totally rules, we created a literal SLEW of short-form pre-roll spots from 0:06-0:15 seconds in length and in every size - 16:9, 1:1 and of course the dreaded 9:16.

I was brought in under ECD Justin Hooper to work with the illustrious Ms. Kacey Coburn on this campaign. We literally wrote all of the spots in a span of 3-4 days, and, with the magic of being internal and your boss also being your client, got to shooting them almost immediately. We shot in Toronto with the awesomely Irish directorial duo D.A.D.D.Y. and by the end, outputted almost 100 versions of the 20 scripts we went forward with. All, from concept to air, within a span of about three months.

So, the next time you think to yourself, “Hey, ‘sup with StubHub?” you can be like, “Oh, 20 different ads just told me on all my favorite social and streaming channels!” You’re welcome.

I joined up with the amazing Francisco Puppio, CD, and Nathalie Warther, CW, on a project that started with the brief “we need to make a rap music video about Cheese for National Cheddar Day.” With a prompt like that, how could I say no? And while we started with that brief, and the intention to make a rap video, where we got was a celebration of all things cheddar that both and wasn’t superbowl adjacent (national cheddar day is the day before the superbowl). Super proud of getting this all done, the quality and art of the final product really show the love we put into it!

After my tillamook time (tillatime (TM)) I moved over to Carl’s Jr to crank out some retail focused spots as well as pitch some bigger ideas, films and actions for the brand with the hilarious Joshua Lampey. Hopefully I will be updating this page soon as some of those come to life!

The swan song project of Intel’s Agency Inside, I worked with AJ Musial (CD/CW) to develop this idea of “Courtside from Anywhere,” a simple explanation of the NBAonTNT’s oculus app powered by Intel technologies. With the app, you can put on your Oculus and feel like you’re sitting courtside at a NBA game, no matter where you are.

We are also coming out with a second iteration of the spots for March Madness later in the year.

My good buddy AJ Rivvers hollered at me from over at the many that they could use another sneakerhead on eBay sneakers. Being the nike coveting, jordan loving, often deep cut new balance wearing sneaker lover I am, I jumped at the opportunity! Plus the projects were for their Artist Series, where they partner with awesome young artists to make unique, sneaker adjacent auctions for charity.

-2022-

Together we got their Blue the Great artist series over the finish line, no small feat including a party, a film campaign (teaser and animated unveil film) and a social/influencer contest. We even made a charitable component, auctioning off 5 unique, one-of-one, custom sneaker stands to generate funds for young artists at Blue’s alma mater high school in Texas, and made content around that auction and effort.

We also took a tiny little brief about wild artist named Neckface and his SB Dunk Lows and made some of the craziest stuff he, I or eBay has ever slapped our names on! What could have been a talking head piece about making skateable art becaume a faux-90s cartoon style, adult swim on acid social content series about Neckface: Demon Hunter, with hundreds of thousands of views. That auction, which was much smaller an effort than the Blue the Great one, ended up making even more money!

-2023-

I was tapped again along with the delightful Diego Saramiento (CD/CW) to lead the charge for eBay Sneakers’ Black Friday / Q4 social campaign. We knew we wanted to give away sneakers in a fun way that would surround the Black Friday time period without directly competing with it. The concept started as the Ghost of Kicksmas Past, a dickensian streetwear and sneaker loving spirit here to give you a second chance on the grailed sneakers you coveted most. Through rounds and teams adding to the idea (shout out to Katie and Juan!) we landed on the Grail Ghost, a character of our own creation bringing your favorite sneakers of the year back from the dead. And even better, we got the always stylish Trinidad James to become our Ghost and really take the whole effort to the next level. After our initial announcement hero video, we had five influencers try and summon the ghost on their own channels. On those channels as well as the main eBay sneakers account, fans could comment their biggest L of the year in hopes that the ghost would see it and respond to them, giving them the sneakers they missed out on. The whole thing was super successful, got a TON of engagement and love from the community and was another weird entry into the eBay Sneakers books!

Shoutout to Jules Fox AD/ACD, Joe Hagel ACD/CW, Diego Saramiento, Katie Braverman, Andrea Stoll, Prod and everyone else who helped bring all of this to life over long nights and busy weekends!!

Deutsch won Sprint on Christmas Eve of 2014. We started working on it in January of 2015 and were fortunate enough to make a campaign of "Too Rich" TV commercials for them among other work. 

What can I say? I’m a people person. So, I wanted to do a design challenge for myself at the beginning of 2021. I love that each person is different, with their own unique style, colors, aesthetic, and thought; wouldn’t it be cool to design the word HUMAN to fit all the different humans out there? A version of the word that each person could identify with? What came out of that thought was a project I called Oh, The Humanity, a design challenge to make as diverse a collection of designs of the word human as their are humans out there. For over two months I posted one per day on my instagram, gaining followers and fans all while flexing my design muscles and having fun in the process!

I went to Ubisoft about two months before the pandemic really hit hard. We made everything from tiles for the various digital stores to social posts to brand books and logos for the different games. I had a small team working under me and a large, killer production studio that always had our backs. During my time there I ran all the marketing design for Just Dance 2021 (as well as the ongoing social efforts for JD2020), the launch of a new arena shooter, Hyperscape, the reissues of Scott Pilgrim’s classic brawler and the timeless Prince of Persia, Sands of Time. I helped concept and launch the design for the upcoming Riders Republic extreme sports game, making over 60 different logos during our exploration. I also ran a lot of the smaller games such as Anno, Uno, Monopoly, and other “family games” that had a constant stream of assets needed for various online platforms and social.

As a lifelong gamer it was a dream come true to work for an actual game company in-house. I had worked on some Playstation work, Nintendo campaigns and had tried to Gamify just about every digital project I was ever assigned, but to actually be at ground zero was such a special moment to me and one I hope to return to!

I’m always drawing, doodling and sketching. I’ve been creating art my whole life and as I transitioned into more digital media that art has come with me. This is just a small sample of illustration work i’ve done.

My second project at Argonaut, we won a fun piece of business building the global branding for Infiniti. While Infiniti is certainly a well known car company, their brand really didn't stand for much and that was a large part of what was keeping them so low in the luxury car rankings. The badge value of an Infiniti just didn't stack up to what owning a Mercedes or BMW did for people. So, we came up with a global platform for the brand and launch content to help that idea come to life. The idea that Infiniti is the endless pursuit of going beyond - embodied in everything they do from their design down to their logo - was the perfect connection point between the brand's beliefs and the progressive challenger consumer they hoped to inspire.

This is the final global campaign that ran in over 14 countries across the world including their key markets in China, Dubai and across Europe.

We made :60s and :30s of two brand statement, higher concept videos as well as accompanying social videos for the amazing people across the globe we featured in the spots.

All in all with localization, cut downs, social 1:1 ratio edits and translations, we made over 100 pieces of content.

password for any locked videos is maxhendren

After the killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and so many more, donating money didn’t seem like enough and protesting in the streets seemed too much of a risk with the pandemic. So, I wanted to find a way to contribute and make my voice heard. I’ve always been someone who doodles their way through their thought process, so I figured I would take those doodles and design them out more. It helped me wrap my head around the situation as well as gave me a creative outlet to share those thoughts. I’ve offered all of these designs for free to anyone who wants to print them to raise money for the cause, not to profit from them. This is just a sample but there are more on my instagram, @HEROSTATUS.

Nintendo tapped Deutsch to do their live action Holiday 2014 commercial. Adam Aceino and I, working with Matt O’Rourke as our CD came up with this fun concept about competition gone wrong within a family. We shot this fun montage of a Dad betting on Mario Kart with his kids with Dave Laden from Hungryman.

The spot was super well received, lauded as one of the most effective holiday commercials of the year. Some press on our Nintendo Holiday spot:
http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/watch-holiday-season-s-effective-ads/296340/
https://blogs.wsj.com/cmo/2014/11/24/in-holiday-ad-race-nintendo-winning-so-far/ 

The 2017 campaign Lane Karczewski (CW) and I made brought the characters out from the green screen world and into the real world. While they didn't talk, it was a crucial step in the right direction that eventually would evolve our lovable critters into fully fleshed out characters. 

I think my love of lettering started with a love of band posters. I interned at Live Nation in London during my semester abroad and ever since then have had a love of interesting letter forms. I started drawing custom fonts and script and find it a great way to take a break while staying creative and pushing myself.

At Modernista I was lucky enough to work on a piece of gaming / entertainment content to tie over Dexter fans from season four to five. We developed an 8 week alternate reality gaming experience that allowed fans to enter the world of Dexter and help catch a serial killer known as the Infinity Killer. The game involved a plethora of websites puzzles and codes to solve as well as real world locations, meet ups, video and audio content. We used almost every single media outlet on the internet from youtube to ebay to livestreams to chat clients to interact with our players as they fought against time to try and stop our serial killer. It was a very successful ARG and a lot of fun to make. Though only an intern at the time, I became responsable for creating the gameplay for almost every week of the game, creating a majority of the puzzles and codes that made up a bulk of what our players interacted with. 

Our efforts were rewarded:
63rd Emmy Awards Nominee
Webby Award Winner - 2011 People's Voice Award
One Show Interactive Finalist: DEXTER Game On

SXSW Interactive Finalist: DEXTER ARG Kill Room
 

My last project on VW was a collaboration with Funny or Die, Volkswagen and Target - two of our clients at Deutsch at the time. The outcome was this video short, titled "The Way to Helpful Neighbor" that was concepted by Adam and I and co-written by us and the writing staff at Funny Or DIe. 

It stars Rob Huebel, from Children's Hospital among many other roles, as a borderline creepy neighbor with a passion for low cost interior design. 

The other big part of this campaign we were involved in was a big and involved OOH campaign. The concept for Golf was that it was the perfect city car, so we hired four different artists (Jeff Soto, Jeremy Fish, Jeremyville, Andrew Bannecker and Cody Hudson) from the four biggest markets (Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Washington D.C. and Chicago, respectively) to create art that summed up their cities in the shape of a golf. The experience continued online and through social media with posts from VW and the artists themselves on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Finally, we released templates for papercraft Golf's that people could build with the artists designs and blank templates so that they could design their own. 

We had several artists in cities that were not chosen contact us asking for the template to make their own version of the Golf for their cities and the overall social response was extremely positive. In short, people loved the art and the concept behind it.

One of the first clients Adam Aceino and I worked on at SUPERMOON was CustomInk. They were a VA based company that was the largest producer of custom designed products. From T-Shirts to Koozies to even Headphones, CustomInk can put your logo or design on pretty much anything. 

On TV, their messaging was more focused on the concept that CustomInk has products for any and All of Life's Events. 

Our second VW / CBS fantasy football collaboration was a little simpler but no less ambitious. We wanted to make the best online paper football game. So we made a rich media banner with a full working 3D engine, variable weather and game conditions and bonus rounds. To tie it all back to your league you could smack talk your friends through the banner and see who flicked best on the leaderboard. 

My first year working with CBS fantasy football on their VW partnership we made a secondary matchup for fantasy football. So while you played your league each week, each player took on different CBS sports personalities to determine who was the better coach. This rich media banner experience basically functioned as a full microsite, pulling in CBS sports API information and using it in a variety of ways to give you coaching tips and put you up head to head with the likes of Bill Cowher.

2018 brought a big change to Cricketland. The characters could finally talk! We shifted from a land of happy, dancing, smiling faces to a behind the scenes view into the cutthroat world of commercial acting. To launch, we released a series of our characters' first auditions for speaking roles. 

Also as a bonus Cricket spot, we made this fun one for an Alcatel phone that is exclusive to Cricket only. Its not the best phone, and didn’t have a lot going for it so we really had to make something fun to keep engagement high and viewer interest piqued.

While at Deutsch, Adam Aceino and I were the team in charge of their Nintendo work. While we didn’t have the big title Nintendo projects, a lot of their second tier games and the games for their hand-held 3DS would come to us for campaigns. We would edit game trailers, create banners and key art for the games. It was a lot of fun and a great way to first dip a toe into the world of video game advertising.

For digital content with CustomInk, we went in a different direction than TV. They needed a spokesperson to help answer questions and guide people through the online purchasing and design customization experiences.

Their logo, the lovable octopus Inky, is very central to the company's brand and beliefs. So we decided to create a character, Steve The Spokestopus (possibly Inky's cousin) to help interact with people in social platforms.  We worked with the amazing team at House Special in Portland to bring Steve to life through stop motion.

For the Jetta Turbo Hybrid we channeled our inner 80's kid into an 8 bit game in the vein of the classic Spy Hunter. We thought the game play fit perfectly with the current tv spot about passing slower cars in your turbo hybrid. The result was a game that people played and replayed and had a blast interacting with.