The Challenge: Windows was (and still is) the biggest desktop operating system with the most applications available everywhere. And yet, they’d focused solely on the productivity story, and seemed to cede the notions of creativity and passion to Apple.

The Change: With “Start Something,” we took a familiar launch point and showed how it could take you anywhere your passions might go. To keep the feel personal, we took a core set of stories and re-wrote, re-cast and re-shot them in a dozen languages around the world. No dubbing, no sub-titling, no sense of passion belonging to someone else.

The Challenge: Brewery Ommegang is a rare one, making fine Belgian beers on some truly hallowed ground in Cooperstown, New York. But they’d never connected the dots between the source of their own inspiration and the outstanding quality of their beers.

The Change: With “Where Heaven Met Earth and Stayed Awhile,” this magical sense of place became the natural start to their story. The beers themselves are what happened here, and Ommegang was free to tell how each came to be – and how each one pairs uniquely with life.

The Challenge: Reliability. Safety. Power. Choice. Toyota offered core values that really mattered to drivers in the California market, but they had never really found a way to speak about them directly.

The Change: With “Wouldn’t it Be Nice?,” every value could take its place in everyday life, showing that the car you need could also be the car you they want. Breakthrough news? No. But a smart and simple shift of perspective that really broke through? Absolutely.

The Challenge: Cool School is a collection of YouTube-based shows committed to offering kids fun, imagination and positivity in every short episode. But even with well over a billion watched minutes, they were still a bit less than the sum of their parts.

The Change: With “Think a Little Big,” we brought the essential spirit of all the different shows to the forefront in a singular way. Most importantly, it offered both a genuine promise that could both attract viewers and serve as a guiding light for the brand’s content moving forward.

The Challenge: All gas is the same! No, cheap gas is lousy gas! Okay, sometimes, the truth is hard to find. But, somehow, we had to convince people that Arco gas is actually as good as premium gas blends from the big brands, which it is.

The Change: With “Straight Up Gas,” Arco could just tell the straight up truth in a way drivers could trust. When good gas for less cash is your unique formula, well… just say it like is it. Here, the value finally shined through in their voice – which included the talents of JK Simmons on radio.

The Challenge: In the prime time of aggregations sites like Yahoo! and MSN, the game plan was to offer everything to everyone… which worked for absolutely no one. Campaign after campaign had underperformed, because you just can’t please all the people, all the time.

The Change: With “How Can the Butterfly Help You?,” we allowed different Butterfly characters to represent different services, but swapped a million features for the promise of a singular kind of relationship. Not only did consumers finally begin to see MSN like a friend who was always around to help, the brand began to see that in themselves.

The Challenge: Straight out of Berkeley, Wildwood was a real heath food pioneer that needed to be introduced as a new player in the nutrition game. But its history had always made it seems like a “hippie brand” that was not in step with the times.

The Change: With “Wild by Nature,” we embraced the history by returning to the mission. Instead of feeling like a brand that was chasing the latest trends, the brand was able to send the clear message that they were the trend.

The Challenge: In year four of the HP’s “Change” campaign, the idea that the brand could help business embrace change was well seeded. So where to next?

The Change: With “Change How You Change,” we acknowledged that, yes, change had become a constant. So our goal was to encourage readers to begin to see change itself as an internal perspective rather than an external set of events and circumstances.

The Challenges and Changes: Across my years in Chicago, Detroit, New York, San Francisco and now Boulder, I’ve been lucky enough to work with many brands facing big moments of change.

Some creatives don’t like to show old-as-bones work, but if the heart, humor and brand judo still hold up, I think it just shows a nice, long history of really solving problems.

< back home, my good man