JUSTIN TRUDEAU, THE LIBERAL PARTY, AND THE AIR FARCE

in 2013 I got the chance to write ads for Justin Trudeau, who had just recently been elected leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. (No, they’re not the ones that were instrumental in helping him win the 2015 election. Credit for those goes to my first creative director and mentor, David Rosenberg.) When Trudeau announced that he was resigning as Prime Minister, I took a moment to track down the one spot we actually made with him. And it was only then that I realized that our ad had been parodied at the time by the Royal Canadian Air Face. Whether it’s This Hour Has 22 Minutes, Rick Mercer, or the Air Farce, it was always an unspoken goal to have your work made fun of by any of them. It meant you’d crossed over into popular culture. If only someone had told me back then. Here’s ours:

And here’s theirs:

It’s neither of our greatest work, but it was fun to discover, almost 15 years after the fact, that it existed.

My greatest achievement in the brief time that our agency had the Liberals as clients, was working with art director Yasmin Sahni to put together a wardrobe brief for Justin’s team that would take him from looking like a young, not particularly fashion-savvy man to being named on of Vanity Fair’s best dressed people in the world. We can’t take all the credit, but we got the ball rolling.