Over the course of my career, I’ve had many opportunities to work with organizations, associations, and agencies that often have more complex and nuanced communications needs than a typical consumer brand. In these cases, what’s needed very often is the introduction or reframing of a concept so its relevance is more apparent to the target audience.

The Canadian Real Estate Association - No Regrets

At a time when, thanks to the internet and HGTV, more and more home buyers and sellers were becoming convinced they could go it alone, the Canadian Real Estate Association needed to make people understand the value of using a Realtor. In this long-running and highly effective campaign, we hyperbolically demonstrated the pitfalls of not trusting the experts.

INterval House - Phone DEMO

Mount pleasant cemetery group - the more you leave to remember

Many Canadians believed that domestic abuse was declining or had been largely eliminated. This is because the types of abuse they imagined - the kind seen in movies and on TV - were very far from the types of abuse women were now facing. Interval House, Canada’s oldest women’s shelter, needed people to understand what abuse now looked like in order to remain top-of-mind both to donors and the women who need help.

There are fundamentally two types of funerals. The first are the unexpected, sudden, or premature ones. They are incredibly sad events. The second type of funeral is a joyous celebration of a life well-lived. There is sadness here as well, but it is not the main emotion. We asked ourselves, what the Mount Pleasant Group of Cemeteries could do to increase the number of that kind of funeral. And the answer was to try to eliminate as many of the first kind as possible. By making people see funerals in a different light, we encouraged them to consider what kind of celebration they would like and to start pre-planning now.

In the late 2000s, if Canadians heard anything about Electronic Health Records, it was usually about Ontario’s eHealth scandal. People saw EHRs as a boondoggle and money pit. They didn’t understand, however, what a critical role they could play in improving outcomes in our healthcare system. We created campaign that demonstrated the immediate benefits EHRs could deliver with the simple tagline of , “Knowing is Better than not Knowing.”

Canada Health Infoway - Knowing is Better

Staples business Advantage - Business is human

And finally, I recently worked on relaunching Staples’ US B2B brand, Staples Business Advantage, to help enterprise customers understand the importance of real people in a world increasingly driven by AI and automation.