Kevin Sypal

Storied American insurer, The Hartford, was ready for its first ever brand campaign but needed more than a fresh coat of paint - it needed to wake up a 200-year-old legacy. We did the unexpected: traveled back to the brand’s very beginning, uncovering the founders’ earliest act of customer commitment that represents how the brand carries itself even to this day. The result? A fully integrated campaign and a complete brand identity overhaul, bringing every line of business under unified look and voice.

When you’re the original, you’re a whisker away from being old. Mountain House, established 1969, is the freeze-dried camping food leader. But just as the outdoor movement exploded, pandemic supply disruptions hit — and competitors stole share. Their approach was functional, so we took another path. Culture mining revealed campers’ hunger for nostalgia. Taking a cue from Daniel Boone and Grizzly Adams, we embraced our OG cred with an earworm of a silly little ditty about our portfolio. It spread across social, shedding perceptions of the category as “space food,” driving record-breaking site traffic, and spurring new campers to consider Mountain House.

How do you let today’s beer drinkers know that legendary (but outdated and out of style) Fort Collins ale, Fat Tire, is changing it’s recipe to be crisper, brighter, and more drinkable? You tell the mundane story of the last old recipe Fat Tire to come off the packaging line in all its unceremonious glory.

A quintessential Apple holiday film with a dose of celebration and optimism that feels more like a children’s book captured through the iPhone. Shot by Academy Award nominee Jason Reitman.

An Apple launch event introduction film that was a love letter to the state of California, scored by a reinterpretation of Marlena Shaw’s famous California Soul track and featuring performance held throughout the state’s famous natural landmarks and environments. 

Taking the iconic Shot on iPhone campaign to new places, like dressing up pets as humans to give people something to smile about coming out of the pandemic, and growing followers of the @apple account to new heights with new content series and integration.

To engage and excite Louisville students, student-athletes and future recruits, we needed to design the Adidas lounge which players walk through on their way to the field. However, after examining the experience, we realized this lounge should be connected to a much needed revamped tunnel walk experience. So, we made it something truly innovative — a fully immersive experience filled with light and sound — that players feel and the cameras catch during big games.

The last time you thought of Almond Joy was probably when you gave your grandpa one after you found it rattling around the bottom of your trick-or-treat bag. To capture a new generation of fans, we launched Almond Joy’s first campaign in years by enlisting Tim & Eric to bring the brand to life in a weird, wonderful way. As the only chocolate covered coconut candy bar, we needed to remind consumers to heed the call of the coconut when you need a taste of vacation.

You can’t be confident if you don’t have fresh breath. Thankfully, Ice Breakers is icy-cold and refreshingly minty enough to give you the confidence to break through no matter what’s standing in your way. Oh, and a sparkly dancing unicorn mascot and an auto-tuned theme song help, too.

Jell-O was a fun brand when you were a kid, but lost its way as consumer preferences shifted and the brand defaulted to good-for-you messaging. But since Jell-O already had a place in consumers’ nostalgic hearts, we simply needed to remind them of the joy that the jiggly shape and product slurping once brought them. Enter the Fun Things Up platform and a mission to prove that Jell-O is the most fun food in the world.

How do you compete on a large stage when you are handily outspent by the competition and you want to advertise in the Super Bowl? You advertise in the first commercial slot the moment after the game ends. The twist is that you then congratulate the city of the team that DIDN’T win since they tried so hard and deserve to be rewarded for having made it so far. So days later, on the day of Super Bowl champs Baltimore’s ticker tape parade, we published a map and showed up in San Francisco with tens of thousands of free pudding cups and gave it out at iconic locations throughout the city, enlisting celebs like Ronnie Lott to help cheer people up.

Grey Poupon has been around for hundreds of years and has always stood out as a beacon of refinement. But with social media becoming a showcase of bad behavior in modern culture, we went on a mission to bring back and reward refinement. We developed the Society of Good Taste app that only let the most refined fans follow the page. An algorithm scanned potential fans’ social profile for classy behavior, and if they didn’t pass the test their “like” was removed and they were asked to refine their profile. 

Twizzlers are probably a top five movie theater snack, so a partnership with an Independence Day movie reboot seems logical. But the real challenge was finding a way to connect a completely unseriously floppy chewy candy with a very serious apocalyptic summer sci-fi blockbuster about an alien invasion - and getting the studio to buy off on it.

I love boxed mac & cheese. There, I said it. And I love mac & cheese shapes more than anything. So the opportunity to do a collaboration with Star Wars was an advertising career moment you savor - acting as steward of two American icons coming together. But the challenge was that they’re brands from a different universe, so we had to find the common ground and pull from their collective fandom to create advertising magic.

In-home research showed us that although adults claimed to make mac & cheese for their kids, they secretly made it because they themselves liked it. They snuck in spoonfuls while preparing it and stole bites from their kid’s plates while serving it but were ashamed to admit liking “kid’s food”. The “You Know You Love It” campaign embraced and celebrated these parents, using charming stories from the kids’ perspective that gave parents permission to eat it without shame - and opened up new eating occasions for Kraft Mac & Cheese.