TODD TILFORD : creative director / writer

A Sonic Slush tee I created that led to a new, limited edition product line and a dope pop-up at Bonnaroo. Rock & Roll isn’t dead, yet.

From bankruptcy re-start in 2001, we devised a critical pivot strategy away from Converse management’s proposed position - “the athletes’ shoe of choice”- focusing instead, on the Chuck Taylor All Star product line. Identifying the shoe’s unrecognized and untapped power as a counterculture icon.

Taking cues from the simple canvas design and people’s tendency to personalize their Chucks, we created a brand platform based on championing originality, creativity, self-expression, and collaboration. Activating and engaging the creative community, we re-launched the brand via the Blank Canvas Project.

From there, we led the execution of all content and marketing materials, including website, social, digital, experiential, community and influence. Along the way, we pioneered the coming wave of mass customization and artist collabs.

In July of 2003, just two years out of bankruptcy, Converse was acquired by Nike for $309 million. The Blank Canvas platform remains the foundation for the Converse brand today.

“Our whole mission is to inspire originality and be an advocate and catalyst for creativity.” - Converse CMO Geo Cottrill

Converse raked in a reported $2B in sales in 2017, versus a reported $205M in 2001.

We re-positioned Michelob Ultra not as another light beer brand, but as the world’s first beer+fitness hybrid brand. We devised the strategy and implemented cross-platform marketing that led Michelob Ultra to become the fastest growing beer in the world. Michelob saw a 22% increase in total volume, 6X share growth, and 6.23 million new household users. In the midst of a category-wide decline, Michelob Ultra has seen continued growth. Holding strong as the fastest growing beer in the world for 5-plus years, it has grown from the 8th largest beer brand in the world to the 5th.

This work made KFC the most viral fast food restaurant on the planet and turned around a eight year sales slump. The work included the first national TV campaign shot completely on an iPhone. It also included their biggest viral video to date, “chicken Corsage,” which had thousands of kids asking their dates to the prom with a chicken corsage. The chicken corsages sold out faster than KFC could make them.

This work made Kmart the most viral retailer on the planet racking up over 100 million views. The work included one of the top ten most viral ads of all time and the world’s first shoppable viral video.

In many ways a victim of their own success, in 2009 the NFL was beset by a myriad of high-stakes organizational, budgetary and revenue problems. Their chief objective was to regain control of the NFL brand name that was being usurped by the league’s many marketing partners and return the power of the brand back to the league’s own business units by making them the priority destinations.

A strong, unified, clearly-defined vision for the league was required in order to maintain a leadership role and build a successful future for Americas favorite sport.

“We have wanted to create a single brand campaign throughout the league for years, but we’ve never seen an idea that addressed all of our varied business issues with equal effectiveness.” - Mark Waller, the NFL’s Senior Vice President of Marketing and Sales.

To achieve all this, the NFL hired us to create the NFL’s first unified brand platform. It was centered around the line, IF YOU WANT THE NFL, GO TO THE NFL. To bring the new campaign to life, we used a ground-breaking creative technique in partnership with the storied NFL Films crew to shoot NFL action in never-before-seen super slow motion. This not only gave the world a view of the NFL they had never seen before, but changed forever the way all sports are watched. It was the visual centerpiece for the new integrated campaign that connected and unified all the NFL’s business units (tickets, merchandise, fantasy league, youth efforts, NFL.com, and the NFL network/channel) under a single league platform exponentially increasing efficiency and effectiveness. Control and ownership of the NFL name was regained, and sales and viewership hit record highs.

“We are excited to launch for the first time an integrated, dynamic, groundbreaking campaign approach that promises to build fan affinity and consumption across all of the NFL business units.” - Dena Kaplan, Senior Vice President, Marketing for the NFL Network

Perhaps the best gauge of the effectiveness of the brand platform is Roger Goodell’s compensation. Over the course of the effort, it rose from $10M in 2008 to $140M in 2014.

By 2009, DIRECTV enjoyed the lead position as the number one satellite broadcast provider. However, their growth had slowed. Corporate objectives were set on igniting new momentum by taking the fight directly to cable providers in order to capture a larger market share.

Though largely at parody with cable in many facets, research proved our intuition and confirmed a small but significant opportunity for advantage: DIRECTV was perceived to have slightly better sound and picture quality compared to cable and other providers. Using this insight, we created a transformative strategic repositioning and new brand platform for DIRECTV, establishing the service as the “premium television viewing experience.”

The effort delivered the highest sales and stock prices in company history. And the “Petite Lap Giraffe” became the brand’s biggest viral hit.

DIRECTV was acquired by AT&T in a deal valued at $45B.

Dr. Martens sales were suffering. We were brought in to create and implement a new strategic positioning and brand platform that would resurrect and “re-cool” the Dr. Marten brand and, at the same time, dramatically increase sales. To do this, it was critical to both re-engage their hardcore, counter-culture influencer base and, at the same time, widen their mainstream appeal. The brand platform created and launched globally was called “Brand Art” and included film content, social, digital, website, publishing, experiential, influencer, poster, OOH, packaging, POS, and an original t-shirt product line.

During the three years the campaign ran, Dr. Martens’ sales reached all-time highs, topping out at over one billion in sales for the first time in company history and making Dr. Martens one of the world’s top brands.

Steve Job’s time with Pixar helped fuel his desire to entirely revolutionize the professional post production model for film and television. Upon his return to Apple in 1997, a special division was established under his direct supervision - the Apple Pro Apps team. With editing software Final Cut leading the way, the revolution would indeed be televised.

We began acting initially as a beta test facility for the new software and hardware offerings. As the relationship flourished, we became more of an off-campus innovation team/skunkworks division.

Special innovation projects covering content development, software development, and business development, including high-profile collabs with Karl Lagerfeld (world’s first fashion podcast), Gucci (top worldwide podcast for months) and General Motors (first national TV campaign with post-production done entirely on Macs). The latter causing Steve Jobs to query, “Are our own commercials made on a Mac?”

In 2008, Diageo announced an investment of $900 million in a joint venture with the owners of Ketel One Vodka. After a sluggish first-year sales report, and with the entire Vodka category down and suffering from the rise of brown liquor, Diageo determined a full rebrand and a deeper commitment to marketing was required in order to recognize a better return on their investment.

Through research, analysis and intuition, we developed a timely strategic opportunity for Ketel One. With the rise of the super-premium vodka brands and the cultural zeitgeist of the time, vodka was almost exclusively recognized as more of a female spirit and just something to be put into a mixed drink. Men were increasing turning to brown liquor as their drink of choice. The antidote to this dilemma and the decreasing sales? An entirely new campaign that repositioned what Vodka was all about.

In June of 2009, the “Gentlemen, This Is Vodka” campaign delivered a 53% increase in sales for Ketel One in the first three weeks after the campaign aired. Sales eventually stabilized at a 38% gain for the following year.

Posters from the Boeing Flypaper Project, celebrating the company’s 100th anniversary of aircraft-making. Paper planes designed by Boeing engineers were turned into posters which, in turn, could then be folded and converted back into paper planes. (Check out the case study in the “More Cannes and D&AD Gold” section.)

As a fIrst step in a long-term plan to build out a multi-brand portfolio, Tommy Hilfiger acquired the rights to a number of Karl Lagerfeld trademarks. Plans were then set for a high-profile debut of two Karl Lagerfeld collections at the 2006 F/W New York Fashion Week, the event would mark the icons first showing in the States.

We were commissioned to devise a revolutionary media solution that would definitively usher in a new age of digital fashion. Armed with knowledge that Lagerfeld was an immense fan of Apple, we made introductions and set to work creating a collaborative match.

Though initial overtures were met with resistance, due to Steve Jobs’ reluctance to partner with the Fashion industry, the team persevered and with help from Allison Johnson continued to push until Jobs gave way to allow the experiment.

The match delivered success for all parties. The concept aimed to capture and convey the Lagerfeld experience. The goal was to deliver a stylized lm, that captured the essence of the event in near real-time, applying constructs of live event television production to the runway show. With the support of the Apple Pro Apps technical team, a multi-camera live and post production team was assembled to capture a complete picture of the proceedings from Hair and Makeup to Runway to After Party, delivered in near real-time, on as yet unreleased, new Apple Video iPods.

As Suzy Menkes wrote for the NY Times: The revolutionary moment in America’s fashion season happened an hour after the shows were over last week. Karl Lagerfeld was handed an iPod, its video screen alive with the lean, dark silhouettes of his entire runway show.

Apple’s relationship with the Fashion industry has continued and deepened over the course of the last ten years, as noted recently in the February 2016 issue of Vogue: Apple and Fashion: A Love Story for the Digital Ages

Content Film Series for Jack Daniel’s called Uncut. Jack Daniel’s has always stood for doing it your way and doing it the right way. Uncut is one shot of Jack Daniel’s followed by one shot/take of a song chosen by the performer performed the right way - their way. Pure. Uncut. Undeniable.

The Humvee, or Hummer, was created for military use in battle. To increase sales in 1994, AM General began to market the vehicle to ranchers and farmers as an industrial utility for work in the fields. We called AM General and suggested they were missing out on a huge, untapped opportunity. AM General listened and hired us as their new agency to devise and implement a strategic re-positioning for the Hummer, from military-grade farm utility vehicle to military-grade luxury exotic SUV.

The brand platform was all about being unstoppable, about empowerment - being capable of conquering any and all obstacles. Something rooted very much in the psyche of the highly successful, high-end executives, athletes, and entertainers we were targeting. The marketing transformed the Hummer into a cultural icon with a cult-like following, increasing sales exponentially and generating a ten-fold return on the marketing investment.

The effort culminated in an acquisition by General Motors.

“Few brands in the last ten years made the impact and created the kind of focused marketing excitement as Hummer.” - Ron Zarella, President of GM North America.

One of my favorite print campaigns featuring a whole new way to write headlines.

The launch spot for the Julia, Alfa Romeo’s biggest launch ever.

The work that changed the face of gaming marketing.

The good news: we won the Warrior Lacrosse and Hockey accounts and they had just negotiated a big TV buy with ESPN as a part of their deal to finally broadcast the Pro Lacrosse League Finals. The bad news: they only had $60,000 left to produce a TV campaign to cover all of that air space. What do you do? You raid Kim Jong Il’s private film library (we think he was training his elite soldiers to take on James Bond instead of the Marines). No, we didn’t pay him. We figured he was the poster boy for the “axis of evil” and would have a hard time coming after us in American courts. We used what little money we didn’t have to film the top pro lacrosse stars in a nearby park so that they matched the North Korean special ops units from the footage. It was a huge hit that took on cult status.

Devised strategy to reanimate dead social network with objective set for acquisition or IPO. Co-led ground-up product rebuild alongside design-build firm JosephMark. Devised and implemented content marketing driven re-launch plan leveraging and activating the creative community that took user growth from 8M to 55M in less than six months. Myspace was acquired by Time Inc.

Fine art for everyone.

Rebirth.