Writer. Strategist. Collaboration-obsessed, diehard believer that winning creative is a team sport.

 
Co-workers started calling me “Coach” a long time ago.  I love bringing creative people together — each with different skills, experience, perspective — to make something exceptional as a team. Talk about a great job.
 
I solve problems.  That's the job of a creative —either as a leader of mega talented groups of creatives, or as an individual contributor —the objective is always  to solve problems with  storytelling that makes the audience pause and forget the other 10 things on their mind a second ago.  

Creative direction, writing, product storytelling, program development and strategy on multidisciplinary, integrated campaigns utilizing content, social media, events, experiential marketing and digital creative.
 

Pandora Live

Challenge: Have our brand stand out during Super Bowl week. In LA. Make SiriusXM’s party the place to be, and nationalize our audience with a live-stream re-air on SiriusXM (audio) and TikTok (video) within 48-hours.

Insight: This was not just party, but moment to connect with listener and viewers across the country. It was also an opportunity to capture content for a variety of content hubs and stations, including Andy Cohen’s station on SiriusXM, Pandora, a John Mayer hosted station, the aforementioned TikTok stream, as well as a variety of social initiatives. Our team drove all content: promotional, event production, scripting, social, audio capture, editing and more. I wrote the show script and collaborated with Andy Cohen’s team on his content as well. 

Between virtual show, in-person event, and TikTok re-air, Pandora and SiriusXM had over 200k viewers. The event also drove $9M in ad revenue (station sponsorship, onsite activations, RSVP sponsors, etc.).

Other Pandora Live events I’ve led include: Ed Sheeran, Lewis Capaldi, and my favorite - Los Dos Carnales.

 

Listen Like You

Challenge: Ignite consideration across key growth audience segments. Let them know SiriusXM is more than Howard Stern and more than what they remember their parents signing up for back in the day.

Insight: We developed a scaleable campaign that spoke to three pillars of our content offering: exclusivity, depth and breadth. Throughout the series of videos, we highlighted a variety of programs exclusively on SiriusXM across comedy, sports, music and talk featuring talent and content that resonated with the target audience. The design, motion and copy was built to be quickly refreshed to feature new talent and content within the same template. The multi-genre video above outperformed across the board, including CPV, CTR, and landing page views.

 

SiriusXM App Launch

Challenge: Introduce, educate and get existing users excited about the new and unfamiliar app.

Insight: Launching a shiny new app intends to attract new listeners, but a brand can’t forget the listeners who’ve grown familiar with the old version of the app. We partnered with our Lifecycle Marketing team to construct and execute a massive, 60-day email campaign that walked all kinds of users through features, tools, and improvements. I served as Creative Lead and one of the copywriters for the campaign.

 

Marketing

 

Challenge: What do you do with a monster-sized billboard in Times Square during a pandemic?

Insight: You turn it into a social strategy. Sounds counterintuitive, but a billboard in Times Square is not just an OOH opportunity; it's a cool visual for featured artist to post, making a billboard at the center of the world a solid social strategy.  We developed a design and copy system that could be updated 2-3 times per week and broadcast in Times Square and sail through artist approvals.

To date, we’ve accumulated ver 1B impressions from Times Square and artist social shares and aired over 150 creatives (and counting).

 

Pandora Trial and Upgrade (CRM)

 
 
 
 

Challenge: The CRM team recently came to the Brand & Content Creative team with an interesting issue: the same house ads remained statistical winners for a long time, to the point where they were starting to feel out of date. They asked us to come up with different approaches to these trial and upgrade ads. We needed to start testing and identifying winning creative that felt of the moment.

Insight: We needed to encourage trial and upgrades to Pandora Plus and Premium tiers without knocking the ad-supported tier (those advertisers are what keep the lights on, after all). The creative had to convey the message in audio and display separately, as well as together. Folks aren’t always looking at their phone when they listen, and interstitial units don’t have companion audio.

 

Original Programming

Pandora Stories

Challenge: The vast majority of music is available on all of the major digital streaming platforms. Everyone basically has access to the same catalogue as far as 99% of consumers are concerned. So exclusive content is key to bringing in new users and convincing lapsed users to come back. We needed to collect exclusive content at scale.

Insight: In creating Pandora Stories, we allowed creators to combine the storytelling possibilities of podcasts with the musical power of playlists. We built it to empower creators to tell their stories and grow their fans with exclusive spoken-word content alongside Pandora’s catalog. It’s one thing to hear “Like A Prayer”; it’s another thing to have Madonna in your ear with a little insight about the making of the song right before you hear it again.

As part of the launch team, I worked with our editorial counterparts to develop themes, creative guidelines, tone and voice, as well and best practices. We then produced hundreds of the programs internally as a way to show artists the power of this new storytelling tool.

It worked. The Stories feature is accessible on our Artist Marketing Platform and widely used by artists and editorial hosts. As a programming feature, listeners loved it. In the first 60 days of launch, almost a third (28%, 66k) of Stories listeners moved up a listener segment (frozen, cold, idle, occasional, casual, loyal, new).

Listen to Stories from Taylor Swift, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Snoop, and Willie. Plus, a couple of our Screen Songs Stories below.

Click the image to listen.

 

Country Built

Challenge: Ford came to Pandora with a request to “do something aligning with country music.” Our team responded with a journey that would take our host across the country over the next few years. Country Built shared the nuances in the sub-genres in country music, the history of country music, and introduced young artists keeping country music legacies alive. 

Insight: One of our largest custom sales programs generated over $3M from Ford Trucks on Pandora. Part playlist, part interview, Country Built served as proof-of-concept when it came to an audience appetite for podcasts on Pandora. The program also demonstrated our team’s ability to create and produce an original show. Shortly after Country Built, Pandora partnered with Questlove to create his weekly podcast (Questlove Supreme). While podcasts would’ve ended up on Pandora at some point, the success of Country Built (listeners, ad revenue) helped expedite that process and prioritize podcasts on the engineering roadmap. 

Huuuge Fan

Challenge: Create original, exclusive podcast content and expand beyond music while leveraging our relationships with music and entertainment industry.

Insight: Huuuge Fan was the first original sports podcast on Pandora. Soon after SiriusXM acquired Pandora, it was clear Pandora would broaden from solely a music platform to an audio entertainment platform. Sports made sense as an initial step to outside of music: not only do musicians love to talk about their favorite teams, but the show also introduced new household names to the platform, including documentarian Ken Burns, ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith, and Tracy Morgan.

 

Design-A-Thon

Why should engineers be the only people breaking stuff in search of innovation? There wasn’t a good answer to that question, so I started a creative version of a hack-a-thon. The goal was to develop new content and ad product ideas, whether they were feasible or not quite yet possible. Anyone on any creative team at Pandora was welcome,  just as long as they were willing to try something crazy. Innovation through creative. 
Impact:
  • It’s grown: we're planning our 5th edition of Design-A-Thon with participation across Pandora, Stitcher, and SiriusXM
  • Team-building initiative that allows low-risk space for professional development opportunities
  • Promotes positive competition
  • Led to increases in ad spends from key brands
 
 
 
 
 
 

Writing &

Other Work

Running In Corduroys

Why my mom started running, what made her stop, and the joy of watching a parent discover a new part of their life.
Mom was in her fifties when she took her first run. On a winter night, she ran to the snow pile beneath the yellow street light at the end of Farington Circle. About 500 feet from the end of the driveway. She walked back. 

Mom’s workout attire for the run: corduroys, a sweater over a white blouse, winter boots, and a parka. School teacher meets hockey mom. 

I often imagine her first run while running through Oakland. She probably didn’t even walk to the end of the driveway. The corduroy zip, zip, zips in the frozen stillness as she passes the neighbors’ homes —first the Henches, then Bergersons, then the Collettes and all of the rest.

Hooked? Keep reading!

This One’s For You (BAMM.tv)

Performances and conversations between songwriters and their inspirations. I developed this program while at BAMM.tv, and we knew of the endless studio performance programs in the music world, and we wanted to add a different perspective. I’m drawn to the subject in some of my favorite songs—what’s their side of the story, what was their reaction when they first the song they inspired? We had no idea what would happen with this concept, but we thought it was worth finding out. As a songwriter, I offered up to be the test case. Here’s what came of it. 
I was the creator of the program, as well as the singer/songwriter. Special thanks to Bill DeWitt.
 

About

All works on this site are the property of my clients and are featured here with their express permission.

I like to run, write, brew beer, and I am on lifelong mission to find the world’s best cheeseburger & fries. My buddy and I have been posting a weekly sports newsletter for 5+ years. I grew up in Minnesota. I went to college in South Dakota. I went to more college in San Francisco. My wife and I try not to be too annoying about how cute and funny Charlie is, but—seriously—she’s got a funny sense of humor.