What was your first job?
My first real ‘job’ was a bit of a surreal accident. My stepmother worked in the ticketing department at the Fabulous Forum. She was a psychic-leaning, astrology-obsessed mystic, who, regardless of her New Age wackiness, was well-liked there. While other kids my age were out riding bikes, I was sitting at a wood-paneled table in the office of the legendary Jack Kent Cooke, functioning as his unofficial—and very unpaid—fulfillment department.
One summer, I was tasked with the Lakers’ season ticket mailings. I had a massive, tractor-fed dot-matrix printout and had to match clients with labels, stuff the envelopes, and seal them with my tongue to meet the daily 4:00 PM deadline. No paid adult could match my speed; I was the king of direct mail before I even hit the third grade. Can you imagine Jeannie Buss today entrusting a seven-year-old with a package containing the most expensive tickets in town? I don’t think so.
But the real education wasn’t the logistics; it was the proximity to Cooke. He was a self-contained ecosystem who marched to his own beat and treated his life like a novel better than anything F. Scott Fitzgerald could write. I’d be sitting there assembling mailings while Cooke performed for his staff. He was a practitioner, not just a dreamer. He used to bellow in that gravelly voice: ‘Ideas are overrated unless you have a guy who can execute them.’ He’d scold anyone who brought him a ‘bright idea’ without a fifteen-year plan to carry it through.
That was my first taste of the media world. One hour I was walking a mile through Inglewood just to save three cents on a half-gallon of milk, and the next, I was flipping the switches on the arena lights with a man who claimed his life was better than Gatsby’s. It taught me early on that a ‘big idea’ is just a hallucination until you have the grit to execute it.
Do you have any brainstorming rituals? What are they?
I’ve learned not to force the muse. My ritual is actually a bit of a paradox: aggressive saturation followed by total detachment. I’ll spend days consuming every scrap of data, every failed competitor campaign, and every weird consumer insight until my brain is hit capacity. Then, I just stop. I go on the treadmill, I head to a gallery—I do anything to let the machine run in the dark. The best ideas never strike when you’re staring at a blank whiteboard; they show up the second the subconscious has room to breathe.
When I finally get back to the room, it becomes a sculpting process. We start with what I call ‘The Exorcism.’ We purge every safe, obvious, and boring idea onto the wall just to get them out of our systems. Creativity is a volume game, so we keep swinging until we’ve hit a hundred iterations. You have to strip away the ego and the artifice to find the ‘interesting’ question rather than the ‘right’ answer. By the time we’re done, we’ve usually dug up that one raw, human truth that actually moves people.
What’s your dream project?
My dream project isn’t about a specific brand or a massive Super Bowl budget. It’s actually much simpler: I want to solve a problem that people have accepted as a permanent part of their lives. In this industry, we spend a lot of time chasing ‘The New.’ But the most profound work usually happens when you take something that is fundamentally broken—a confusing healthcare process, a disconnected local community, or even a product everyone uses but no one likes—and you apply that ‘raw, human truth’ to fix it.
My dream project is to find a brand that has lost its soul and help it rediscover its ‘Fifteen-Year Plan.’ I want to take a complex, messy human friction and use the tools of media and storytelling to make it disappear. There is no greater professional high than taking a ‘bright idea,’ executing the hell out of it, and realizing you’ve actually made a person’s day slightly easier or their world a little more legible. To me, that’s not just marketing; it’s being a practitioner of the craft.
How do you think we’ll be telling stories differently in five years?
In five years, the how of storytelling is going to be effortless, which means the what—the soul of the thing—is going to matter exponentially more. We’re already entering an era where anyone can generate a polished image or a perfect sentence in seconds, but all that really does is create a sea of ‘bubble work.’ It’s pretty, but it’s hollow.
I believe storytelling is going to shift away from passive consumption and toward actual participation. We won’t just be broadcasting messages; we’ll be building immersive worlds where the audience has a stake in the outcome. As our tools become more automated, the stories that actually move the needle will be the ones that feel dangerously human. We’ll be telling stories that aren’t just seen on a screen, but felt through the visceral reality of execution.
The brands that win won’t be the ones with the best algorithms; they’ll be the ones that use technology to get back to the raw, jagged truths that code can’t quite replicate. In a world of AI-driven perfection, the ‘interesting question’ and the ‘unpredictable plan’ will be the only things left that can actually cut through the noise.
What’s the first thing you look at when you view an entry?
I judge a lot of writing, but when I view an entry, I’m not just looking at the prose—I’m looking for structural integrity. The first thing I look at is whether the work actually respects its environment. You see so many entries that feel incomplete or superficial; they lack the sheer effort required to prove they belong on a pedestal.
I’m a firm believer that an award is a competition, not an entitlement. If you’re submitting, you have to do your homework. You have to look at what the winners before you have done and find a way to rise above that bar. I have no patience for ‘bubble work’—that thin, airy stuff that looks good on the surface but collapses the moment you ask it to solve a real-world problem.
That’s a standard I apply to everything, not just award entries. Whether it’s a massive campaign or a single sentence in a pitch, I’m looking for the ‘practitioner’s’ touch. Every project and every word should show that you’ve done the work to move past the obvious. If you haven’t put in the effort to make the work undeniable, why should the judges put in the effort to reward it?