For over 15 years, I’ve created headline-making, internet-breaking strategies, Big Ideas, and social content for blue chip brands including Netflix, Google, Disney, Nintendo, LucasFilm, Paramount, and more.

Here are some of my favorites.

Netflix Geeked Week is a celebration of the myriad content the streamer puts out for genre fans— but it was time to put fans in the spotlight. I worked with the Netflix marketing team to create the first Fandom Hall of Fame to reward the fans that cared the most by showing them Netflix cares about them, too. A series of live and digital activations showcased fandom in all its forms, and drove higher engagement in a single day than the entirety of Geeked Week 2023.

Disney was releasing a new Pirates movie after a long, 6-year hiatus. Amid a boatload of distractions, they needed to remind audiences why they loved the franchise in the first place. So we put Johnny Depp on the ride that launched a thousand pirate ships and, before we’d even finished editing our video, it was the #1 trending topic on Facebook, all over international news, and drawing such a large crowd at Disney Land we nearly had to shut it down. 50 million views went a long way to show just how many hearts Jack Sparrow still had stolen. And it holds my personal highest-view count record.

I was lucky enough to work with HSTL Productions to bring AppleTV+ fans their first doses of the high concept sci fi show, DARK MATTER. A show about rooted in atomic superposition and the profound questions of “what could have been?” is like Schrodinger’s catnip to me, but to appeal to an audience scrolling through a million things on Instagram, we needed to find ways to make the show relatable, understandable, and positioned alongside what they already love. The result was great engagement and a show that hit fans in the sweet spot between sci fi wizardry and human interest.

My Role: CD, Creative

One of the most Denizen-defining pitches we ever won was NX, Netflix’s genre channel. We started with fewer than 300k followers. But by revamping tactics, pushing innovative creative that encouraged more engagement, fused experiences and series’ premieres with content strategy, and celebrated genre the way only true fans could, we built more than an Instagram page, we built a community, and pushed that audience over 1MM followers.

This growth, in turn, allowed NX to become the entire campaign platform for high-profile shows like V-Wars and more. Take care of your audience, and they’ll take care of you.

We’d been having a rough time at Denizen, pitching ideas that we believed in but simply weren’t selling. We were thinking about throwing in the towel. But before we closed up shop, we decided to go out towels blazing. So we spent the last of our cash to produce an idea that had been rejected more than once: A tiny hamster eating a tiny burrito. And that’s it. 10 episodes, 25 million views, a children’s book, a cultural phenomenon, (and a congratulatory email from one of the clients who’d passed on it) later, it’s still my favorite. It got Denizen back in business. And just about every other piece of work below came after. You can see more on the HelloDenizen YouTube channel.

We’d been pushing the idea that Experiential should be seen as content for a while. And when Disney asked us to pitch innovative approaches to Star Wars’ presence at Comic Con, we jumped at the chance to transform a booth into a video set. We secretly photographed everybody who entered and used hidden cameras to capture reactions when the First Order sent Storm Troopers in to “capture” wanted rebels— fans — only to be foiled by a dramatic exit with the aid of rebels and BB8. The point was, and will always be: why get the attention of a few hundred physical attendees when you can use video to get the attention of a few MILLION online viewers. This video pulled about 4 million views, dwarfing the few thousand Comic Con attendees that were able to pass through in person. All experiences can do this if they know how to make it pop.

Disney was taking Alice back to Wonderland, so Google brought us in to make The original film minted iconic characters and Disney wanted to promise more where that came from to audiences who may be skeptical about a franchising the original. We realized they needed more than just characters to convince people, they needed madness. We decided to take the sorts of OOH marketing ephemera people expect— movie posters— and add a little madness. We built a custom poster rig with a very elaborate livestreaming element to turn what looked like a normal poster into a living, breathing, actual Johnny Depp who could surprise, delight, interact with, and even blow bubbles at fans. The video generated over 7 million views.

This is my most “case study-y” piece. If you click through to the YouTube post, you’ll see this has 12MM views. The vast majority of those are bought. This is not my most organically viewed video. As a dyed-in-the-wool view-junky, it took me a long time to learn that that’s okay— if it’s getting engaged properly. This campaign happened because Nintendo went to Google and said “hey, we’re interested in trying new approaches to content” and Google said “great, let’s bring Denizen in to work with us all.” I include this piece of work because, though it enjoyed a pretty big media buy, the engagement rates blew Google’s own standard benchmarks for branded view completion and click-throughs out of the water. This was more than a success for Nintendo, it was a best-in-class piece of content and an exemplar of the value within media buys if we actually try to achieve it.

This one holds a special place in my heart because Tom Cruise himself liked it so much that he screened it at the World Premiere of Mission Impossible Fallout in Paris. It was crazy. But, perhaps more importantly, this is essentially a super traditional ad that used a simple, true brand insight to create a piece that online viewers loved. Generating over 5MM views, it broke all benchmarks Uber was used to seeing for online content without needing to pretend it was anything other than an ad. This is important to remember in a world where ads are laced with irony to shrug off their “ad-ness” but, ironically more ironically, just feel like worse ads.

Yes, this video generated 5MM views for Netflix, all organic, but I still feel like it’s self-indulgent for me to post a video that required Aaron Paul to work from a script I wrote as long and full of pretentious language as this.

Disney asked us to create an attention-grabbing experience for Ant-Man’s routine press day— so we built an Ames Room, creating the illusion of super-shrinking celebrities practically. It became the most engaged post Marvel had enjoyed up to that point.

I know I’ve already posted Tiny Hamster, but this one holds a special place in my heart because I’ve long admired the titanic creative achievements of Walt Disney, and to see Mickey Mouse give our little hamster a nod is one of my favorite accomplishments. And, for sake of resume-building, this did pull 3MM views for the parks.

One of the craziest things we ever did was pitch an idea like “we’ll do Matrix-style bullet-time but with just smartphones… in real time” before we knew how we’d actually do it. But after many sleepless nights, we did. We daisy-chained 140 HTC smartphones together, wrote new software, and invented new technology. I’m absurdly proud of this, and also happy to have survived it. 6MM views and a stress-test at a live press event— I’ve rarely felt more alive (nearly dead).

This one is special because it was the first “Denizen” campaign we did and it hit like crazy, generating over 1MM views in a week and winning a Clio Bronze.

This one almost got my eventual Denizen co-founders and I fired from our first agency job. But, nabbing over 5MM views, it was the first big viral smash I’d ever had and, let me tell you, I’ll never recapture that feeling of ecstasy. But, every now and then a gif from this will pop up on Reddit and I still get goosebumps.

This one I have to include because the GOAT of competitive eating, Kobayashi, was a good enough sport to answer my COLD EMAL ASKING HIM TO BE IN EPISODE 3 OF TINY HAMSTER and he said YES. Thank god. This episode pulled over 5MM views and was featured on the likes of ESPN.