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Adidas Originals wanted to own Copenhagen during Fashion Week — a full citywide takeover across seventeen locations. Working alongside lead agency Sid Lee, I traveled to Copenhagen with a member of my team to handle the music programming on the ground. I needed a moment.

Pumpehuset was a legendary Copenhagen venue that had gone dark. We brought it back to life for one night with Sleigh Bells. Seven hundred people showed up. The campaign drove a 92% sales increase on the day of the PR event and over 100,000 daily impressions from the street presence alone.

Pairings was built on a single idea: bring together a world-class musical artist, a world-class chef, and a world-class sommelier, and let them design the evening as one unified thing. The set list, the menu, and the wine — conceived together, for a room of one hundred American Express Black Card members who understood exactly what they were in.

We produced Pairings in partnership with Momentum, American Express's agency of record. But our role went beyond production. Through Greenlight's sister company Red Light Management — home to Dave Matthews, Tim McGraw, and others — we were uniquely positioned to deliver the talent as well as produce the events. We weren't just building the room. We were filling it.

I helped refine the pitch, managed the American Express partnership, negotiated every artist contract, every chef and venue deal, and produced each event. Five of them. Each one unrepeatable.

Authenticity was the central ingredient. The set list, the menu, and the wine were conceived together — each one informing the other. When Ben Harper performed "Number With No Name" — serenaded by a chorus of a thousand burning cigarettes — Chris Cosentino built the menu around char. That's not a production detail. That's a philosophy.

Two weeks before the Sting event, I was standing in his garden in Tuscany looking at a well that needed to not be there. A hundred Black Card members were already booking flights. There is technically a word for hurry in Italian. No one feels compelled to use it. Try ordering a coffee to go and see what happens.

The well moved.

As part of our overall fan strategy for Volkswagen, there was no more devoted fan base than DMB's — and no more sacred ground than The Gorge at the end of summer. The team and I got to work building what I consider one of the proudest achievements of my career. Area 41 was born.

The philosophy was simple: VW is a car for the people, so sponsor the people. The culminating moment was always going to be The Gorge. It's where the DMB tour ends every year. Sacred ground. And the name for what we'd build there was hiding in plain sight: #41 — one of DMB's most beloved songs, a number that would mean something to everyone who'd be inside.

DMB fans are among the most devoted in music. They drive for hours, they camp for days, and they know every lyric to songs that were never radio singles. At The Gorge Amphitheater over Labor Day weekend, they come for three days — but DMB is only on stage for three hours. The question was: what do you do with the rest?

Area 41 was an exclusive VIP space for Volkswagen owners within the larger audience — a community within the community. Not everyone could get in. But inside: yoga every morning taught by Dave's own instructor, smoothies from his local smoothie guy, a solar-powered photo booth, late-night screenings of The Goonies on the hillside, volleyball, tater tots served until midnight. And at the center of it all, a weekend-long Jenga tournament — because the grand prize was a one-on-one meet-and-greet with Dave himself, who famously won't do them for any amount of money. Meanwhile, outside, DMB played to the full crowd.

Surprise guests made it unforgettable. Carter Beauford — DMB's legendary drummer — came through and spoke. Allen Stone, one of the opening acts, played a private concert just for the people inside. Directions through the space were given by signage at the corner of Gray Street and Passat. iykyk.

And if you were flying in for the weekend, you could pick up a Volkswagen at SeaTac and drive the three hours to The Gorge yourself — which, if you've ever made that drive, you already know is the whole point.

Rolling Stone covered it. And at some point during the weekend, Dave heard how much people were enjoying it. He put on a bike helmet and sunglasses and rode through incognito just to see it himself. He still talks about it.

The year the Super Bowl came to Indianapolis, I threw a party for the people who actually lived there. Joe Montana and Cam Newton. The Roots and Jane's Addiction. John Besh in the kitchen. And Joe — the greatest of his era — recreating The Catch live, in the room, for Volkswagen owners who had no idea that was about to happen.

We put out custom T-shirts for fans to customize on the spot. Joe walked the floor, found one where a fan had written "South Carolina" across the back. He crossed it out. Wrote "San Francisco." That's not a brand moment. That's Joe Montana deciding he cares.

And then he did something that still gets me. Joe gave up his own Super Bowl tickets — his tickets — so we could bring fans with us to the game. To the Super Bowl. With Joe Montana. On his seats. That is fan engagement in its purest form, and it happened because the idea was real enough to make him want to be part of it.

Download a Volkswagen sign, print it out, and hold it up at the airport. We picked you up in a VW and drove you to the game. The brand was never just a logo on a banner — it was the ride.

The Catch activation won an award. It deserved to.

Kraftwerk's legendary eight-night retrospective at MoMA was one of the most coveted tickets in New York history — bootleg tickets were going for $35,000. Nobody could get in. Not fans, not press, not MoMA's own staff. Volkswagen was a sponsor. We had tickets.

The question was how to give them away in a way that felt as culturally alive as the event itself. With our incredible digital team at Deutsch, we built VWGIFaway.com — submit a GIF, win a pair of tickets, fifty pairs per night, eight nights. The winning GIFs were projected fifty feet tall at the corner of Houston and Bowery. Winners were driven to see their work on the wall, then taken to MoMA in a Volkswagen for the show and the after party.

Fast Company, AdWeek, Rolling Stone, and Time Out New York all covered it. And when the show ended, a fleet of Volkswagens was waiting outside MoMA. Because getting a car in New York after midnight is famously impossible — unless someone planned ahead.

Getting onto Target's official agency roster is notoriously difficult. You can't even pitch their business until you're on it. Their Partner Management Group — led by Jenny Roesner alongside head of experiential Dan Griffis — evaluates with the kind of rigor most clients reserve for their media buy.

We didn't present an Alice in Wonderland theme. We built one. I spent $10,000 transforming our conference room top to bottom. Scrolls were delivered to the hotel. Every detail of the experience was considered, designed, and executed before a single slide was shown. We went through Partner Management Group and came out the other side. We won it.

We were on Target's official master services agreement roster. That doesn't happen by accident.

Multicultural marketing was — and is — critical to Target. Reaching Hispanic consumers authentically, not as an afterthought, was a mandate. We answered it with a full presence at the inaugural Festival People en Español in San Antonio — a two-day celebration of Latino music, fashion, and community featuring Daddy Yankee, Luis Miguel, and Prince Royce. The activation centered around art, music, and beauty — an interactive exhibition woven through their beauty display, and a musical moment where every bracelet in the venue began to buzz and shift to color at precisely the same instant during the concert. It was something people felt, not just saw.

For the relaunch of Sony PlayStation's Twisted Metal franchise, we built something that had genuinely never been done before. Shoot My Truck gave anyone with a web browser the ability to remotely fire a real M249 SAW machine gun at an ice cream truck in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Live. From their couch.

Five weeks of setup. Fifty-five people on the ground in the desert. Forty-five explosions. The last one took the truck apart completely. The campaign kept #shootmytruck a nationally trending topic on Twitter for two days straight. Virtual violence in service of real sales — and proof that when the idea is right, the medium invents itself.

Snapple — part of the Dr. Pepper/Seven Up group — was in a panic. Their talent had fallen out. They were ready to shoot. They came to us wondering if there was anything we could do. I didn't find a replacement — I found an upgrade. I secured Maroon 5 and all five members, negotiated the full partnership, and locked in the tour sponsorship at the same time. Adam Levine came in and developed a hibiscus tea with the brand — aptly named Tea Will Be Loved. The video of all five of them choosing the flavor is online. It became a charity product and a genuine success for Snapple.

Girls Night In was born from an intimate understanding of the Target brand built over more than a decade across multiple agencies. I saw a customer they already had and a moment they weren't maximizing — and conceived a program to take advantage of both. Target was in! So much so, they brought their experiential business to 72andSunny just to have me execute it. The rest is history.

I conceived a complete ecosystem: the full consumer journey from invitation to doorstep delivery. A curated, hosted in-home shopping experience built around themed social gatherings — game night, festival prep, girls' getaway — where Target came to you. The goods, the snacks, the try-on moment, the energy of discovering something new with your closest friends. And in the room with you: multiple Target concierges, on-site, iPads in hand, taking orders that arrived at your door beautifully wrapped.

Seventy-five pages. No brief. No budget. I brought it to the Target executive team. They bought it. At a number that reflected what it was.

SXSW and ACL are two of the most competitive activation environments in the country. I've produced at both so many times that other agencies have brought me in to consult on how to do it right. Within my first thirty days at 72andSunny, I produced Google's activation at SXSW 2013 — the Google Playground, anchored by the Talking Shoe: a motion-sensing Adidas sneaker with an embedded speaker that tracked what you were doing and had opinions about it. ABC News. TechCrunch. AdAge. CNET. The Guardian. Business Insider. Fox News.

Google was already doing wearables before wearables were a category. My job was to put that idea in front of people in a room that made them feel it — not just read about it. That's the activation. The idea was theirs. The experience was ours.

Target was launching their Plaid line and wanted a genuine presence in music culture — not a banner, not a booth. Austin City Limits ends at 10pm. The city doesn't. I created the after party.

The venue was Arlyn Studios — Willie Nelson's recording studio in South Austin. The anchor was an exhibition of Danny Clinch's photography, with a thirty-minute conversation with Danny to open the evening. At around 8pm that same evening on the ACL stage, Danny had photographed Gary Clark Jr. and Dave Grohl fistbumping. By midnight, every guest at our party was holding a signed print of that photo. A moment they'd witnessed hours earlier, now in their hands.

The evening ended with something nobody saw coming: most of the members of the Foo Fighters. The Strokes. Gary Clark Jr. And Danny Clinch on harmonica. A private forty-five minute set. All of it free — because the room was right, the equipment was right, and the energy was right. That's what happens when you spend thirty years building the kind of trust that makes people say yes.

C3 Presents — the founders of Austin City Limits — made the partnership possible. Camille Styles documented it. Target got exactly what they came for: the SucksIfYouDidn'tGetAnInvite place to be that year.

I was brought in to produce the Pedigree Adoption Drive pop-up — a Times Square activation built around a strategic tension: Pedigree was sponsoring the Westminster Dog Show, one of the most exclusionary, pedigree-obsessed events in the dog world. The Must Love Dogs campaign said Pedigree believed in all dogs. Westminster said otherwise. The pop-up was the answer.

The store carried no standard Pedigree product merchandise — everything was custom-designed specifically for the activation, built entirely around dog adoption. The store drew more foot traffic per day than an Apple Store. Every single dog was adopted.

The campaign raised $4.7 million for shelter dogs, drove record sales, and won multiple industry awards. David Duchovny — the voice of the Pedigree brand — was the throughline that made the cultural credibility possible. The pop-up lived up to everything he stood for.

Target wanted a moment at BET Experience that felt as bold as Janelle Monae herself. With 89 days until her album dropped, we produced an activation in the outdoor plaza at Crypto.com Arena — 89 performers dressed exactly like Janelle, choreographed and staged by the legendary Fatima Robinson (Michael Jackson, Dreamgirls, Black Eyed Peas Super Bowl halftime show, Kendrick Lamar's Grammy performance) to perform "Dance Apocalyptic."

The photo from that day explains it all.

Together, Danny and I — with no small assist from the world's most passionate fan base — convinced John Varvatos to make Dave his spokesperson. Danny shot it.

That's not a transaction. That's what happens when you've spent thirty years building relationships that compound.

Mattel wanted to celebrate the 35th anniversary of Hot Wheels the way Hot Wheels deserved — with the spirit of every kid who ever sent a car flying across a living room floor. There was only one band for that. We brought Smash Mouth into the room with Mattel executives and built a song from scratch — down to the required beats per minute — engineered to carry the excitement of the anniversary in every measure. The song was called "Hot."

When the brief is a feeling and the deliverable is a song, that's a different kind of work.