IDEAS DON’T LIVE IN BRIEFS
They live in the gap between what a client asks for and what the culture actually needs. My job is to close that gap, with a team behind me, a strategy in front of me, and a clear point of view about where the work has to go.
HOW I THINK…
I start with the tension.
Every brief has a conflict buried in it. What the brand wants to say versus what people actually want to hear. That gap is where the idea lives. Strategy is the map. Culture is the territory. I work the territory.
I've spent 30 years watching brands show up either early or late to cultural moments. The ones that show up early built a point of view before they needed one. That's the work I'm interested in.
I'm not chasing platforms. I'm chasing behavior. TikTok, Reels, YouTube Shorts, each one has its own grammar, its own pace, its own unspoken rules about what earns a second of attention. Ideas have to be built for those specifics. Not adapted. Built.
Creators hold trust that advertising has spent decades burning. The most credible voice for most brands right now is not the brand itself. My approach is to find the people who already live in a brand's space, brief them on the tension, not the tagline, and build content infrastructure around their voice, not ours.
AI has changed what's possible in production, concepting, and scale. It hasn't changed what makes an idea good. I use it to move faster, explore more directions, and unlock production volume that used to cost triple. The creative judgment still has to be human. The speed doesn't.
HOW I WORK…
The brief is the first piece of creative.
A bad brief produces a good brief. A good brief produces a great campaign. I treat the brief itself as creative work, something that should inspire, constrain, and provoke a team in equal measure.
Before concepting, I want to know: what's the real ask underneath the stated ask? What would make this client nervous? That nervous thing is usually the right direction.
I brief teams on the problem, not the solution. I want creatives to feel the tension before they start solving it. The best briefs make the room argue a little before anyone picks up a pen.
Every concept I greenlight gets pressure-tested against three questions: Does it travel across platforms without needing an explanation? Does it give creators somewhere to go with it? Does it say something only this brand could say?
I sell the thinking before I sell the work. A client who understands why an idea is right will fight for it internally. A client who only sees the execution will cave at the first piece of negative feedback.
In practice: On Coors Light, the brief asked for a summer promotion. The cultural audit showed that heat and humidity were the dominant emotional context for Canadians every summer…not celebration. So we stopped positioning the beer as the soundtrack to summer and started positioning it as the antidote to it. That reframe drove years of brand-building work and helped make Coors Light the #1 beer in Canada.
HOW I LEAD…
Build the team that builds the work.
Great creative leadership is mostly about creating conditions where good ideas can survive. That means protecting work from fear, building confidence in the people around you, and being the person in the room who's always more uncomfortable with mediocre work than with a difficult client conversation.
With creative teams: I give real latitude and defend the work in client rooms. I tell people what's not working, specifically, not vaguely. I make feedback useful, not just critical. I hire for point of view over polish.
With clients: I bring them into the thinking early, not just the execution. I frame creative decisions as business decisions, because they are. I share a challenging point of view when the work needs one. I've been told I'm a great partner who isn't afraid to say the hard thing. I take that as a compliment.
The best creative directors I've worked for made me feel like the idea was mine, and then made it better than anything I would have done alone. That's the standard I hold myself to.
WHERE I AM IN 2026…
The brands winning in 2025 have made a shift: from campaign-first to content ecosystem first. That requires a different kind of creative leadership, someone who understands platform behaviour, creator economics, performance feedback loops, and AI-assisted production without ever losing sight of what makes any of it matter in the first place.
I'm actively working at the intersection of:
Short-Form Video-First Strategy · Creator Partnerships & Co-Creation · AI-Augmented Production · Platform-Native Storytelling · Content At Scale · 360 Campaign Architecture · Brand Identity and Design Systems · Experiential & Activation · Entertainment Marketing
The 15-second idea is the hardest brief in advertising. It demands you earn attention before the audience decides to leave, which they will, in the first two seconds if you haven't given them a reason to stay. I build campaigns where the short-form version is the hero, not the afterthought.
LET’S TALK ABOUT THE WORK…
I'm looking for Creative Director and Senior Art Director roles at agencies operating at the intersection of brand, culture, and modern media. If you're building something that needs a creative leader who can run the room and make the work better, I want to hear about it.