ROHAN

While Babybel Plant-based cheese had been enthusiastically adopted by Vegans, the average American was either unaware or uninterested in trying it. The simple ask was to broaden the appeal of this new Babybel product.

Our idea started with the truth that while many people were interested in living a more plant-based lifestyle, most of us are hesitant to try new things for the first time.

Our creative lift? You never forget your first time! In a move that was a dramatic departure from Babybel’s usual family friendly communications, we stepped boldly into an adult themed zone!

We brought the program to life by developing a kit that allowed vegan-curious folks to try Babybel Plant-based for their first time - launched by a name that everyone associates with racy first times, American Pie’s Jason Biggs, and his wife, Babybel superfan and Insta-influencer, Jenny Mollen. The results? Delicious!

THE ASK
Drive awareness and consideration for Starbucksamongst Gen Z.

INSIGHT
Our research showed that Gen Z chooses and prefers brands that offer personalization—so we decided to get ‘really’ personal, leveraging a well loved cultural format.

THE IDEA
We got a Gen Z freestyle rapper to surprise ‘roast’ our audience - of course, we did so in the most Starbucks way possible, by making our roast positive and uplifting… we called it The Reverse Roast!

Apart from super strong performance metrics, our efforts to push Starbucks to try new social platforms got picked up by AdAge.

Ad Age Article

As a Creative Director at Edelman
I took lead on formally launching
Microsoft on TikTok.

This meant developing Microsoft’s brand voice as it pertained to the channel, drafting a strategy to talk to Gen-Z, and writing and producing the launch videos.

I worked closely with a team of Community Managers to ensure we balanced jumping on trends while staying on brand, championed diversity and inclusivity, and pushed Microsoft into talking with an audience that really doesn’t know what to make of it.

Link to Microsoft's TikTok page

In 2021 Attn: was chosen by Jessica Alba’s The Honest Co to launch a new diaper line - my role was to bring the agency’s pitch winning concept to life.

I employed a three-tier-funnel approach to build a 360 campaign with the goal of subscription growth through social targeting.

Our campaign performance was optimized via the implementation of robust AB testing at multiple touch points along the consumer journey.

UNIQUE PANDEMIC CHALLENGE
Building a fully realized ad campaign is challenging at the best of times, having to do so smack in the middle of the 2020 lockdown made everything a lot more interesting :

• While interfacing with clients purely online is something that the world is quite used to, developing a working relationship with an agency team 100% remotely from NY to LA was an entirely new experience for me.

• While I can boast of shooting commercials in many exotic locales around the world, this was the first time I conducted multiple video shoot days completely remotely.

  
  

Just BARE is a premium poultry brand looking to expand across America. The ask was to bring their USP to life - a Trace Code on the packaging that enables consumers to learn where their chicken was raised.

CREATIVE LEAP

While the best path would be to use farmers as the campaign voice, it is a direction used by many others brands in the category.

Our clutter-breaking approach was to capture content of our farmers when they were not farming.

By showcasing their passions outside of work, our farmers came across as real people, and not just props in an ad campaign. This relatability was key in achieving consumer buy-in.

BRANDING AND SOCIAL

CHALLENGE
For a generation, soccer was one man: Pelé. But even for legends, memories can fade over time. Our challenge was to reintroduce Pelé's brand to modern audiences and build relevance with today's youth through social channels.

SOLUTION
Our answer was to give Pelé a relevant voice, in-synch with current social noise. Our strategy focused on interacting with young star players and joining trending conversations.

RESULT
We increased Pelé's new follower growth rate on Twitter by 400%, and earned over a million new organic Instagram followers.

Inter Milan is a professional football team that plays in the Italian Serie A league. We began our relationship with the team by overhauling their 109-year-old brand with a polished new look and voice.

ENGAGEMENT PERFORMANCE
We created an interactive landing page that enabled fans to make personalized avatars of the new Inter jersey with their name on it, sized for a variety of social media platforms. The exercise saw 2 million impressions and more than 24,000 engagements in over 150 countries.

LOCALIZED SOCIAL CONTENT
While social media is considered global, tailoring content for local tastes amplifies success rates. A great example was the extremely successful Lunar New Year Campaign that doubled social engagement in mainland China, gaining Inter thousands of new followers.

We used traditional international social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, but also leveraged local platforms  like WeChat and Weibo.

CULTURAL EXPLORATION

America is most often interpreted in terms of ethnic silos, with a majority of conversations centering around White, Black and Latino perspectives. This project was about searching beyond these paradigms.

I reached out to photographers that had gone the extra to mile to document cultures based not just on race, but on belief systems, interests, passions and challenges faced.

My only filter in choosing whose work to include in the journal was the question "am I learning something new."

When asked by Kinder Joy to create a campaign that would run on social media platforms, our first step was to audit the competitor landscape.

We saw that the competition was simply running short edits of TV commercials on their social pages. Their scripted nature felt a poor fit for social media. This opened up a white space for our brand to own.

Research revealed that today’s mothers ranked our product extremely high on enabling self expression in their children. Our next step was to weaponize this insight by creating a match between a powerful creative hook and the right media platform.

Northwell Health is a chain of hospitals spread across NYC. To differentiate themselves from other health brands, they are revolutionizing how they serve food to their patients. They asked us to create a campaign to announce their exciting new initiative.

Our solve began with how we created our campaign, by going straight to the source : curating content around how the hospital came up with the idea, and how they are implementing it - by listening to the varied needs and tastes of the their patients.

Our execution looked to solve for pain points in the industry, like the fact that the healthcare system is facing record lows in trust, by employing art and copy that were at once clutter breaking, but also honest in their simplicity.

We offered our clients a nimble and efficient content creation platform that addressed the need to cater to a varied audience, both in terms of ethnicity, and in terms of the specific medical challenges they were facing.

PRICE WAR

BACKGROUND
Western Union, while viewed positively in terms of its reliability and wide network, faced a perception problem when it came to price. These videos were created around a promo to combat this truth.

IDEA
Along with a perception problem with price, Western Union was seen as a fuddy-duddy brand that had no sense of humor. Our commercials used funny situations and a catchy phrase to great effect, not just clutter breaking from the competition, but from it's own tired image!

BACKGROUND
The Mexican National Football Team, in conjunction with their key sponsors, Wells Fargo and Bud Light, asked us to create a fan engagement event - we were given just two weeks to execute!

CHALLENGE
We knew that fans of the team could simply watch the game at home, or their local bars - we needed to come up with a creative idea that would compel them to attend our event.

SOLUTION
We uncovered an interesting cultural insight : Mexican Americans have a fond association with the game of Loteria, similar to Bingo.

How is this relevant to soccer? Most of the players have names that mean something. For example, Chicharito translates to ‘Green Peas’ and Dos Santos, means ‘Two Saints’. This allowed us incorporate the players into the Loteria theme.

Our invite campaign, the event site dressing and participation games all used the Loteria theme to create an original and exciting draw for our target audience, pulling in hundreds of attendees, which was further amplified as online content for our sponsors.

We serviced the Anthem BlueCross account on a CRM project, developing a customer focused series of videos that would play in waiting rooms, their website and social feed.

CHALLENGE
Data suggested a declining level of trust in the American healthcare system, leading to people being hesitant to enroll for Anthem’s value-add services.

SOLUTION
Our key drive was to come across as friendly and accessible, paving the path to a perception of trust and competency. Our insight was that healthcare has always been seen as cold and impersonal - our goal was to challenge legacy notions by demystifying the category.

Seiko Watches asked us to create an ad campaign for their new product - the Coutura Racing Special, a premium watch inspired by their brand ambassador Jimmie Johnson, 7-time NASCAR champion.

PERFORM IN STYLE

Our idea was to show that the Coutura Racing Special is the perfect time piece to perform in style, allowing you to straddle all pursuits, whether work or play, with a single time piece.

EVERY SECOND COUNTS

Our campaign showcases how the Coutura mirrors Jimmie’s passion for performance - it’s superb craftsmenship and atomic accuracy are exactly what he needs to excel - on the track, and off it.

DIGITAL MEETS EXPERIENTIAL

In the summer of 2016, Edward Jones challenged us with recruiting people between 35 and 55 - trusted in the community, the perfect demo to assist in opening local financial consultancies.

However, most Gen-X-ers were of the opinion that they were not deemed attractive candidates by companies.

INSIGHT

Our solve was to use a time-line to demonstrate that they were exactly who we were looking for, and that their diverse life experiences were extremely welcome at Edward Jones.

EXECUTION

Our idea was to enable prospects to create their own time-line, a personal graphic that we encouraged them to share.

Recruiters at malls used a photobooth and their ipads to create quick time-line stories that were then used in local OOH.

CHALLENGE
The 9/11 Memorial Museum faces an interesting dilemma. While visitation is high by tourists, locals resist coming to the museum. When asked, the consensus is that they were here when the tragedy occurred - why would they want to relive the moment?

SOLUTION
Our campaign aimed to challenge this line of thinking, and to position visiting the museum as part of being a real New Yorker, a claim made with such pride.

SOCIAL CONTENT CREATION

INSIGHT

The Arabic diaspora in the US has been served with sub par advertising for decades. Finally, a client realized that using creative work that was fresh, and recognized that Arabs have a great sense of humor, would really break the clutter.

DIGITAL EXECUTION

This was around the time that someE-cards witnessed tremendous success with their Victorian art style of sharable posts. Our idea was to create posts that showcased the lighter side of everyday Muslim life, Arabic culture and Middle Eastern celebrities. 

SOCIAL INFLUENCER
Rounding out the campaign, and pushing for a wider social footprint, we reached out to select Arabic media celebrities, like Bassem Yousuf, known as the John Stewart of Egypt, and illustrated them to incorporate them into the campaign.

I headed creative on the HP Printer account at Publicis, New Delhi.

REWARDS PROGRAM BRANDING

BACKGROUND
Regional data revealed that over 50% of small and medium sized businesses went off-brand to restock on office printer ink. To combat this bleed, HP created a rewards program, that among other benefits, granted members access to exclusive networking events.

IDEA
Leading a branding team to create a campaign around the program, I came up with the name 'HP Inc' - phonetically tying the product category of 'ink' to the concept of business. The membership tiers followed the printing color system, further reinforcing the underlying subject of printing.

STRATEGY ADAPTATION
Comcast’s 2016 national brand campaign was called 'Fuel Your Fandom'. We were asked to adapt this core idea for four different ethnic audiences spread across the U.S.

We came up with the tagline ‘More than your average fan’, based on the insight that immigrant content preferences are a mix of shows from both the U.S. and their home countries.

We exercised cultural insights to tell textured stories that resonated more powerfully with the communities we were communicating with - for example, Japanese Americans and Filipino Americans index differently on how family time should ideally be spent.

VIDEO CAMPAIGN
To get people to upgrade their TVs to the Xfinity Platform, it was important to demonstrate the exceptional functionality of the product - our creative leap was to superimpose elements of the OS onto the daily lives of our consumer.

ON GROUND ACTIVATION
Based on the content they browsed for at on-ground demonstrations of the XFINITY OS, we presented potential consumers with custom made T-shirts that reflected their choice via an east-meets-west nickname.

McDonalds was the first brand I worked on at my first agency job at DDB. It was on this brand that I had my first TV commercial produced, for the 'Finding Nemo' Happy Meal. Unfortunately, the video file has been lost to the ages - but ask me and I am always thrilled to retell the story!

BACKGROUND
IDT is a US telecom company that made its name selling calling cards that help immigrants call their home countries. In 2016, they launched an App that is a one-stop solution to staying in touch with people internationally.

VIDEO CAMPAIGN
We used the insight that immigrants in the US miss their loved ones back home - we make the promise that our app is so successful in connecting you with your family and loved ones, that it's like you're still there with them.

CHALLENGE
Gold’n Plump is a mid-west chicken brand with a 30 year strong legacy. However, over the last five years, national players like Tyson and Purdue have eroded their market share.

INSIGHT
Gold’n Plump could not match the marketing might of the big national brands, but it had one big ace up its sleeve - mid west home ground pride.

SOLUTION
The luxury of being a household name is not enough - we developed an aggressive social campaign using house pride as a creative fulcrum by challenging folks to upload their kitchen creations. Our campaign drove up engagement, while also pushing people to our owned media to check their rankings and win prizes.

LOCAL OOH
Trying to make a dent in the beverage space in NYC? Fuhgedaboudid! Perrier, while a mature player Internationally, was facing stagnant growth in the US. This campaign, focused on local flavor to get people to buy in to the brand. Our game was to go very topical with what New Yorkers were talking about at that moment - for example reacting to Bloomberg's ban of large and extra large sized soda servings.

RECRUITMENT CAMPAIGNS
Gravity advised McCann Worldgroup on the U.S. Army recruitment account for 5 years. The top line strategy was to position the armed forces as an avenue for personal advancement, with a focus on education and career opportunity.

CHALLENGE
Like most public institutions, U.S. Army lagged behind in digital trends - ie, they were not commanding attention in the place where youth spend most of their time - on social media.

INSIGHT
Social media, to a large degree, is about community and self expression. Our idea was to push social stories from young soldiers onto the feeds of potential recruits.

While demonstrating opportunity was the main message, making the U.S. Army relatable was the real key to successful conversion.

SOLUTION
Our platform of choice was instagram, given our target demographic, and the heroic nature of our imagery. All that was left was to come up with a catchy hashtag!

EMERGING TECH MEETS TRENDY ART

When Facebook brought Live Polling to life, we used this new ability to reach people online to create fan engagement - in this case, allowing Bollywood aficionados to poll which movie would be illustrated.

ONLINE COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT

We used the art style popularized by the then new video game, GTA5, to create posters, sending people digital files to print once they engaged with our CRM program.

BRINGING CRICKET TO BASEBALL LAND
I worked with the Dish Network in 2014 to help launch their partnerships with TV channels that carried live cricket, bringing foreign sports action to the South Asian diaspora in the US. The campaign used grand images to magnify the scale of the launch.

BACKGROUND
Apple’s reinvention of the laptop and subsequent sales surge in the early 2000s resulted in a significant drop in HP's market share.

CHALLENGE
In a bid to drive up demand in the 18-35 demo, HP created a line of laptop accessories, but lacked a creative idea to anchor their initiative.

SOLUTION
Our research showed that urban, upwardly mobile youth over indexed as environmentally conscious - our leap was to design laptop ‘skins’ with a wildlife theme, collaborating with a few of India’s wildlife conservation societies, pledging a share of profits for every laptop sold.

RESULT
We saw a 8% lift in sales for the summer that the campaign ran.

Pitch work for Siggi's. Even though we did not win the business, I bear no ill will and still devour their delicious Skyr.

NEW TECH A LONG TIME AGO
This campaign harks back to when a push notification occurred every 10 minutes as opposed to every couple of seconds. Crazy as it seems, this was seen as a technological breakthrough and a game changer for Blackberry.
 

HOT NEW COMPACT
I created this campaign for the launch of Suzuki's new luxury compact car, the Suzuki Swift. The client saw the car appealing to young upwardly mobiles males, so our strategy aimed to position the car as an enabler to achieve higher social status, or in other words, get babes.

VIDEO
My TV commercial idea positions the driver of the Swift as a gallant gent that rescues Cinderella from her plight. However, it goes on to show that he has also rescued a number of other Disney princesses, revealing him to be a bit of a rogue. As the video quality will betray, this ad was made long enough ago for this plot to not be seen as heinously politically incorrect!

A couple of years later, after a tech upgrade, we ran ads to reposition the Swift as a car that was on the cutting edge of technology.

National Debt Relief, a debt consolidation company, asked us to help increase customer calls. In essence, the ads look to educate people in debt that there was an alternative to existing at minimum payments to their credit cards, or declaring bankruptcy.

I was tasked to rebrand this company, from the name to logo development, which then went on to be featured on their product.

I developed an online and in-store engagement idea which was a gamified quiz that helped people sort and find the product most suited to them.

Logo development is a particular passion of mine, and over the years I have helped create and mold the look and voice of a number of companies starting out, as well as rebranding established names. I have a particular love for working on identities for restaurants and the hospitality industry.

Vi is a quick-service Vietnamese restaurant in NYC. Started by chef Mark Sy, it opened its doors on the west side of Manhattan in 2015.

The logo is inspired by the concept of the traditional Asian farmer hat - or Nón Lá in Vietnamese. By using negative space to subtract from the letter shapes, one can see an imaginary hat!

Like Vietnamese food itself, my overall design direction for this brand was a mix of classic French Bistro design with Asian imagery, creating a fine tension between the two.

BRANDING AND PACKAGING

BRINGING CHUTNEY TO AMERICA
ChutUp is the saucy love child of chef Hugo Uys. It is a line of chutneys inspired by the unique mix of African, Asian and European gastronomical influences that inhabit his home country of South Africa.

CLUTTER BREAK THE AISLE
The branding aims to project a promise of exciting new flavors, while also alluding to healthy ingredients suitable for a modern lifestyle. All while making it clear that we're here to have fun!

I designed the logo, space branding and collateral / packaging for this upmarket Scandinavian deli on the UES in Manhattan.