An assortment of advertising concepts and copy

Ottawa Regional Cancer Centre telethon campaigns

The two telethon campaigns that Donna Darby and I worked on for the then-Ottawa Regional Cancer Centre are among the most rewarding advertising projects I’ve been part of. To its immense credit, the client’s team was not afraid to confront the realities of cancer head-on with harrowing stories or survival from our community. The high-level strategy was to recast the immense global challenge known as cancer as a hyper-local health crisis affecting you and your next-door neighbours.

We-Vibe concepts and copy

Back when We-Vibe sex toys were pioneered by the Ottawa-based company called Standard Innovation, I worked extensively with Utopia on a range of stimulating deliverables, everything from point-of-purchase displays to traditional print ads. The core product, the We-Vibe couples vibrator, was an innovative and global phenomenon. Our aim was to add the degree of sophistication that’s often absent from brand expression in adult novelty industry. Like a torrid love affair, the job was intense and would inevitably run its course as the company changed management and then changed hands altogether. It was fun while it lasted …

St. Lawrence College print and TV campaigns

Recruitment advertising for post-secondary education tends to all look the same. Much of it features bland images of students with vague aspirational messaging. For our work with St. Lawrence College in the early 2000s, Donna Darby and I tried to dig deeper and add humanizing detail that would offer a more direct connection between the personalties of students and specific careers they might dream about. The overarching concept, “First you dream it, then you live it,” resonated strongly enough with the client that we were invited back two years later to update the creative. This time we added a secondary message: “Meet the president of You, Inc.”

Treefrog print ad

This is a one-off advertisement that still stands out for me as a creative and substantial copywriting success. Back in the day, Utopia’s Donna Darby and I were connected to a software company in Bermuda called Treefrog. To pitch development services to Bermuda’s reinsurance firms, Treefrog wanted an ad that would speak to reliability using a whimsical, local twist. We jumped at the chance to combine the art of advertising with educational biology!