Stephanie Arnold

Kohl's, the 2nd largest retailer in the country, wanted to "hit their target right where they lived.”  Since we couldn’t possibly know all the addresses for females 18 to 40, we headed straight to where they hang out:  the Internet. We found it was an avenue for our target to, in their own words, show off their purchases and sell to like-minded shoppers.  And so a campaign was born. 

Menopausal behavior has always been the brunt of jokes. My experience is you not only need physical relief, you need a sense of humor. This campaign is all about both.

Happily, the client agreed and approved TV, digital, print and social media.

After the launch of the "Menopause Monologues" campaign, sales of Estroven products climbed following each TV flight, and continued even while advertising was off the air.

Retirement communities have a bad reputation – for most of them, deservedly so.
Not this one.  Sun City communities are designed for active people, who define “assisted living” as a smorgasbord of land and water sports, A+ restaurants, nightlife and a load of other amenities.  So we actively removed ourselves from the rest of the herd.

This diversified technology company wanted a campaign to salute their scientists who are the bleeding edge of cutting edge. To that end, we gave them a tagline and ads that spoke to their spirit as innovators.

A lot of contact wearers don’t see the difference between contact lenses. But with Air Optix  lenses they would feel it. Feeling is believing became the tagline, which we used on digital banner ‘demos.’

When I was hired, the client (restauranteurs in Russia) were in the process of spending $29 million turning the corner of 42nd Street and 8th Avenue into a high-end restaurant complex. The 26,000 sq.ft space would house two upscale restaurants, a coffee house, a bar, and store for artisanal food-related goods. My job was to position and name the overall complex and all the individual venues. It was a unique experience:  the client (mostly Russians), required presentations complete with translators, and the chef (from here) had an ego to rival anything from ad-land. I learned a lot. And ate even more.

Nobody had thought to pre-empt the existing Cold category before, but inventing the "PRE-COLD" category made ZICAM a category of one.

That won the agency the business and sent the client rushing out to trademark the term.

Now the trademarked “Pre-Cold” is used in all ZICAM advertising, promotion, PR, digital and packaging, along with our tagline: Go from Pre-Cold to No-Cold faster.

After 1 month, sales grew 11.4%.

It was very satisfying for the client.

For the agency.

And for my art director, Florence Buchanan, and me, since neither of us have had a cold since.

Daffys’ shoppers were designer-obsessed as well as bargain-obsessed. If they saw something they wanted they wouldn’t rest till they found it for less. (Being the market was a big help.)  All it took was a new way to showcase style, partnered with where to get it for less. I mean really, who pays retail?

Some cholesterol problems are immune to diet, exercise and regular cholesterol drugs. Imagining how that must feel led to a fun, ownable way to visualize the problem, and introduce a new class of drug.  (Unfortunately, the FDA withdrew support from this drug.)

I’ve always wanted bank advertising to have fewer happy tellers and more honesty about the banking experience, so when this project came along that’s what we pursued. Would the bank go for ads and digital banners without handshakes and smiling customers? You never know until you try.

VMware, the inventors of virtualization and a leader in cloud computing, needed  case studies written for the Harvard Business Review. The advertorials ran as cover wraps.

Liquor is fun to work on, and this was my first time working with the “shotgun & pick-up” demographic. When the research told us the market not only enjoyed the taste of our product, they enjoyed its rectangular-shaped bottle because it kept it from rolling around the floor of the pick-up, we had a pretty good idea of who we were talking to.  “Homemade” was this market’s gold standard, so we one-upped that. Then we found an archival photo that might actually include some of our market’s forebears and hand-tinted it. Client and market were sold. So was the Whitney Museum. The poster appeared in their best of Outdoor Advertising Show.

The brief was simple: 1) create a series of in-store Christmas posters, 2) no need to show shoes and 3) not warm and fuzzy. HALLELUJAH!
 

Teenagers. They’re more susceptible to colds than people over 50. And they’re highly suspicious of advertising. They need simple, irrefutable logic.

Allergies stink. Even if your problem isn’t life threatening, it’s still stealing little pieces of your life. Look, we’ll break it down mathematically for you.

Thanks to Blu-Ray, it’s getting so you can watch a movie and be able to see stuff you never dreamed was there – even stuff that’s not supposed to be. And therein lies the fun of this series of quarter-page ads: memorable movie mistakes.

Rich Media mobile ad for an MS drug. Their national campaign features MS sufferers metaphorically fighting back against their condition by throwing paint at words on a wall. In this iteration, a bouncing ball of paint in the first banner invites the viewer to touch it and "Take aim at relapsing MS." Once the ad opens, the ball of paint wiggles invitingly on a launchpad. The user flicks the paint ball, using it to hit words such as "relapses." The paint ball splatters across the words, and the product message is revealed. Messages are wiped clean by a splatter of white paint, and the user can try again.

A lifetime of observation assured me we spend more time worrying about how frames will make us look, than how lenses will make us see. The irony was too irresistible.

While on the market, Vioxx handled the kind of pain that was limiting. As a former runner, that kind of pain seemed unfair. Even dictatorial. People needed to know they had rights, and they could exercise them.

Most birth control pills contain testosterone.  Not ours. That fact – along with a hefty dose of masculinity – seemed to be a great way to introduce Stezza.

As animal lovers (okay, dog lovers), nothing made us happier than to work on this rarity: truly healthy food for dogs (and cats). All-natural HALO’S Spot’s Stew was the care we owe our four-legged kids – hence the tag line. Would anyone share our devotion to dogs and cats, and want them to be healthier and stick around longer? Lots of famous people – hence, the campaign. (And that’s the last time you’ll hear ‘hence’ from me.)

The campaign included interactive web banners in the form of a quiz. The correct answer takes you to a HALO web page that says, “Congratulations! You are correct!” and then tells the story of HALO. The wrong answer takes you to a HALO page that says, “Sorry, the correct answer is ...” and also tells the HALO story.

Sidewalk stencils (and leashes) were placed in front of key retailers for the relaunch of Halo Spot’s Stew. In addition to parking meters, “No Parking” signs and trash receptacles were used depending on environment.

I think of this campaign as ‘Your bucket list plus a bucket of common sense to go with it.’  We’re all so busy making lists of the things we want to do, without a single thought as to how we can do them if our bodies won’t let us. This campaign was conceived as a friendly warning.

We decided a maker of proven, implantable heart devices should let people know they didn’t have to wait for their medical miracle to be invented, there were medical miracles available to them now.

When I need a beer, I need real beer. What else is there to say?

To be hired by the inventors of branding to do their branding? Not too much pressure.  The best thing was to sell them their very own sales pitch – that way they couldn't say 'No.'

It’s crazy rich.  Is there a litmus test for crazy rich? Absolutely. Politics.