Eric Arnold • copywriter • creative director

THE PREMISE:

Fox Sports decided to give away all of Terry Bradshaw’s money, forcing him to make some serious lifestyle changes. Naturally, he ain’t happy about it.

I’ve been a baseball fan since I was a kid. So getting the chance to promote some pretty special MLB games was a dream assignment.

When you’re the biggest video game in the world, there’s only one problem. It’s hard to get bigger. It’s hard to entice new gamers to come into a community of 150 million players when literally all of them are better than you.

We had to somehow make being a noob cool. So we created a bunch of videos encouraging gamers to embrace the stage when they totally suck. Because new experiences are fun. Even when you’re getting obliterated.

The videos got a ton of views. Which could be because they're super brilliant. But it could also be because League of Legends has an enormous fandom that will watch anything having to do with League of Legends. I prefer the first explanation.

Credits: This was a huge team effort led by Tim Richards, Susan Alinsangan and myself. I wrote the videos. But the entire marketing team at Riot (people with way more knowledge about the game and its players) was invaluable in getting this thing off the ground.

We all know the ad business isn’t exactly known for graceful aging. Even the legendary mascots from some of the greatest campaigns of all time eventually get pushed aside for something more algorithm friendly.

So fellow writer, Alex Smulian, and I started wondering where the Kool-Aid Man, the Taco Bell Chihuahua, the Noid, the California Raisins, and the rest of them end up when it’s time to hang it up.

So after a lot of eBay shopping, and a full-on 1/12th scale production in his basement, we made Mascot Manor. Most people seemed to enjoy it. Hope you do too.

If you’re interested in experiencing it in full, visit us at: https://www.mascotmanor.com or follow us on Instagram: @mascot_manor

Working on this campaign was a career highlight. We got to meet and work with some of the most incredible talent in the music industry. And I even got to sit on Stevie Wonder’s knee in the recording studio. (True and funny story.)

Credits: I did this campaign with my partner, Steve Yee — who designed all the posters himself. But the project would have never happened without Patrick Condo & Bob Rayburn (GCDs) pushing this thing through when it came so close to dying countless times.

A few years back, I was lucky enough to be a creative director on Lexus. During that time, we were highlighted on TBS’s Funniest Commercials of the Year. Which is no easy task on a luxury vehicle account. I assure you.

We also had the opportunity to launch the F Series. The first true performance line in the history of the company.

And we made a single ad that was also 1000 ads.

Among a few other things.

Mark Naparstek and the team at Good Giant needed some work for their ski resort client. The brief was simple. “Mt. Rose is turning 60. Make some cool posters and OOH to plaster all over Reno in the Fall.”

Um… Yes, please.

The glory days when everyone wanted to Be Like Mike were long gone. So to return Gatorade to its rightful place in the hearts and minds of athletes, we created a sports anthem chant and built outward from there.

Creative Team Credits: Made this with my partner Javier Castillo (AD/CD) and Lori McMichael (AD) under the awesome creative leadership of Jayanta Jenkins, Donna Lamar and Jimmy Smith.

I’m not a good golfer. I’m not even an average golfer. Or really, a golfer at all. But I’ve played enough to relate to how unbelievably hard it must be to play this game at the highest level. Which made this a fun project to work on.

The League of Legends Championship Series is the most popular Esports league in the world. And the network that protects the League of Legends champions from ping, lag, glitches and all other evil gremlins is the Cisco network, known throughout the Riot community as “The Realm.”

This was a rare social campaign that was both B2C and B2B. We had to get people excited for the tournaments for Riot. But Cisco wanted to create brand loyalty and gaming credit among young players currently considering a career in IT.

Three years later, Cisco had the highest fan recognition score of any Riot marketing partner.

The conversation on Twitter explodes during the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl. What are they talking about? Predictions. So we harnessed that energy. Asked the Twitterverse to make their craziest predictions. And turned the roof of SoFi Stadium into the world’s biggest Twitter feed.

A few lucky tweeters with the best/funniest/most-off-the-wall predictions got to spend the Super Bowl in the Twitter luxury box meeting and hanging with some of NFL Twitter’s biggest influencers.

Credits:

Dustin Levine: Producer

Mattio Olivotti: Creative Lead

Patrick Hodges: AD

Cisco’s mission is to bring the power of their network to all corners of the planet. Because when everyone has access to technology, everyone has access to education and health care and ideas and other cultures. And that, hopefully, will be a big step toward putting us all on a more equal playing field.

Credits:

Agency: The Sidecar Collective

ECD: Dennis Lee

CD/AD: Karine Grigorian

Back when I was working at Twitter, sometimes my job was to honor other people who work at Twitter on Twitter.

In this case, Twitter superstar Melissa Barnes was inducted into the Canadian Advertising Hall of Fame. We needed to celebrate her achievement. So we turned the brief and the conversation between the creative director and account person into a surprise congratulatory video that we tweeted out on the day of the announcement.

* Any similarities between the creative director here and a real person you might know is entirely coincidental. Maybe.

“Look, mom! There’s a Jaguar on the loose.” Everybody loves a good visual pun. Or is it a play on words? I can never keep them straight.

Credits:

Agency: Spark44

Peter Buck & Matthew Page (ECDs)

Scott Clark (CD/AD)

I love all thing sports. I love playing them. And I love watching them. So to get the chance to talk about sports every day, work with famous, world-class athletes and get paid for it was a lot of fun. The fact that we got some cool work out of it was a bonus.

The University of Arizona asked Riester Advertising to put a new spin on their long-running “Wonder” OOH, print and social campaign. Riester — and CCO Peter Buck — asked Karine Grigorian and I to help them do it.

The Quest for G was a Gatorade original series. I was the head writer for a season and a half.

The idea was to find and help create the next great American Olympic champion. We started with a nationwide search and found our eight raw athletes. Eight diamonds-in-the-rough armed with nothing more than a world of potential and a dream to finally reach the ultimate goal. Then we gave them the opportunity to be world class – to work with the best trainers, nutritionists and scientists in the country. The athletes took it from there.

Heal the Bay does some great work taking care of California's beaches. Among many other things. So if you live in CA and wanna help out, check them out.

Credits: David DeRoma (CD/AD)

The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue is iconic for some. Semi-respectable smut for others. So creating an idea for the center spread definitely had some unique challenges. We wanted to appeal to the core readers of the magazine. But also do something worthy of a respected luxury brand that everyone could have fun with. (No bikini car washes or strategically placed mud allowed.)

The plan... Celebrate the history and appeal of the issue. While at the same time, poke a little fun at the pageantry and over-the-top ridiculousness of the whole “bikinis and cars” culture.

So we recruited SI swimsuit model, Tori Praver, built a track inspired from her photoshoot in the magazine, promoted a real-live race between two world-class drivers and then created a mobile video game so gamers could test their own skills. The result: The Tori 500.

Made with David DeRoma (CD/AD), Scott Ivener (CW) and Andrew McGuire (AD). Under the protective watch of Craig Crawford (ECD) and Alistair Green (ECD).

Mark Twain is a better writer than I am. So we stole his words and then used them to sell cars.

With all due respect to beer, the most interesting man in the world is a coffee guy. He’s a former refugee named Jack Karuletwa who escaped the horrific genocide in Rwanda, moved to America, played for the Harlem Globetrotters and then returned decades later to help Rwandan villagers recover through coffee farming.

It’s an awesome story. One I was fortunate enough to help tell with Dennis Lee, Karine Grigorian and the team at The Sidecar Collective.

https://silverbackcoffee.com

When you do something good for nature, nature will thank you for it.

Infiniti was the first major account I worked on in my career. Still got a few pieces from those days I look back on and smile.

Print may be dead-ish. But I don’t think great headlines or quick, arresting visuals will ever go away. Thank goodness. Because if you ask me, few things are more fun to do in this business.

I picked up some photography skills over the years. I learned things like, stand in front of something or someone interesting to look at. And then press the button.

I can’t draw or paint or sculpt or carve or whittle or ink wash or stencil or weave or knit or blow glass or screen print or do any of that other cool stuff actual artists know how to do. So I use light and then press a button.