Global Creative Director.
Lead on Apple.
Four years as Global Creative Director on Google’s Global Creative Works Team. My remit: oversee the largest global spenders within the tech vertical on YouTube’s platform. From 2020 to 2022 I was the lead on Apple, embedded with Marcom and MAL.
Feeding data-driven insight into creative that Apple creatives actually cared about.
Apple creatives aren’t short on taste. What they didn’t have, until we built it, was a shared, rigorous way to reason about attention on platforms like YouTube, where the first three seconds, the hook, and the narrative spine determine whether a film gets watched at all. Our job, embedded with Marcom and Apple Media Adtech (MAL), was to translate data into guidance creatives would respect and use.
Inspired by the Apple work, I led a multi-cycle study to unlock hooks and long-form. Three questions:
a) What is the best length for long-form content to drive consideration?
b) What narrative techniques actually move engagement?
c) How do Apple creatives adopt the best practices while keeping their unmistakable Apple flavor?
Data used to unleash creative, not flatten it.
The pride of this work: at the intersection of tech, creative, and data, best practice usually stifles. It flattens output into a sea of sameness. We used data to do the opposite. In an era of ripping off hooks and imitating what’s already working, we used rigor to unlock originality.
What came out of it was an entirely different approach to how Apple launched products and long-form films. Some of their most effective ad campaigns to date, including the three referenced above, are full stories, not vibes. They’re a radical departure from Apple’s usual move of just vibing the product. They respect the fundamental laws of attention while staying wholly original.
The impact: +10% YoY in global engagement measured across all Apple YouTube ads. A compounding lift that, at Apple’s scale, amounts to more viewing time than the entire length of human history.
Elsewhere in the seat.
Within this position I also worked with some of the largest global advertisers and Media & Entertainment partners on YouTube, with a single mandate across every account: figure out what makes ads unskippable, and make sure partner content actually performed once it got there.