Speaking Topics

No matter how accomplished an company’s creative department is, it’s valuable to hear the opinion of an outside creative resource. I typically meet with the teams running two key accounts. We walk through the work and look at creative or strategic improvements.

In this speech/workshop, attendees will use current advertising examples to rate, rank, and discuss what elements are in play, and then conclude with best practices.

A brief look at how complete and total disobedience results in better work. We’re talking about Dru’s “Disruption” model but on steroids.

In this talk we discuss the art of reductionism and how taking away everything that isn’t a “load-bearing beam” always improves the work. https://vimeo.com/30688422

We creatives can complain about bad briefs all we want, but at the end of the day there’s nothing we can do about some things in this business. This talk is about the things we can control. It’s about time and energy management, about craft, about making things way...

In which we explore the unique issues around managing creative people, who don’t like to be managed. Participants will leave the session with short- and long-term solutions to optimizing the creative output of their organizations. (Particularly appropriate for account...

With a half-century of over-hyped claims, the ad industry has created a nation of eye-rollers. Which makes claiming authenticity today especially tricky – because we marketers do have an agenda: to sell. In this session we’ll discuss how brands can stake out...

A talk in which we explore how to use tensions in our culture as well as the polarities in life to create more ideas and better ideas.

“Big ideas” are nice. So are “campaigns.”  But telling brand stories with platforms is more powerful, more flexible, and more profitable. Using industry examples as well as some amazing work from his students, he’ll show how searching for the “Big Idea” may not be as...