DON'T WORK IN THE PAST
Brand Launch

In this content series, we featured Gary Cole in the role of Bill Lumbergh from Office Space as the perfect relic of a business past we're all trying to leave behind.

 

PLAY WARM

If you're cold, you're thinking about being cold. If you're thinking about being cold, you're not thinking about the game.

I created this campaign as the oldest summer intern ever at W+K, Portland.

MOST INTERESTING MAN IN THE WORLD

The man, the myth, the advertising juggernaut. I wrote countless social posts for this award-winning rake. Here are just a handful.

After writing the first few posts as Trojan Man, my creative director said, “Wow, Craig, you really nailed the voice.” Oh you mean the voice of a guy who speaks in sexual innuendo? Real stretch.

While I recently blacked out my stand-up appearance schedule, I do perform weekly as the warm-up act for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Having done warm-up for years for the likes of Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, Jimmy Fallon and many others, I feel that constantly generating new material for an intelligent, millennial audience is the ultimate form of creative exercise. It's basically cross-fit for my brain.

GENERAL BRAND

Nancy O’Dell: Where’d ya get your start, Randall Park?

Randall: Bringing Craig Baldo’s razor sharp copywriting to life in Verizon commercials.

Harry Bliss is an acclaimed illustrator and hilarious human being. I emailed him one day asking if he'd be willing to draw up some of my ideas. His response: "How did you get my email?" The rest is history. Our joint works have appeared in publications including The New Yorker, LA Times, Boston Globe and Chicago Tribune.

My most recent collaboration is with Corey Pandolph, another crazy talented guy with a drawing utensil. Here, you'll see our cartoons tagged, "Pandolph/Baldo" ...because those are our names. We've had several published in the New Yorker.

Honestly, writing for these guys is way easier than winning the NYer cartoon caption contest.

ALWAYS AL DENTE

It was one of those times you cursed freelance. I came in and wrote a lovely little spot, then the in-house team traipsed off to the Amalfi Coast for two weeks to shoot it.

With literally trillions of hits, my Modern Love piece about divorce was 'most shared' in the Times for the week of November 6, 2017. So mind-shattering, they translated it into Spanish.

LESSONS IN 3CONOMICS

Ad Age wrote: "Wendy's has done a nice job in positioning its menu of inexpensive sandwiches under the '3Conomics' banner. And – even more refreshing – it has not resorted to a desperate hard-hitting tone in the work. Instead, it's continued with the effective use of humor, while clearly expressing the 3Conomics value idea. Who says you can't sell with a smile in hard financial times?"

The spots were directed by Chris Smith and helped Wendy's stay ahead of the King during the recession, while earning us a Golden Bagel at KBS. 

When I look back on the ads I've seen, I remember a bunch of smart, funny, shareable lines. I try to tweet lines like that.

If working in the Nike Quad at Weiden doesn't turn you into a sneaker head, it certainly rouses you to invent custom wooden drawer components designed to look like classic Nike shoeboxes that neatly house dozens of pairs of kicks in any spatially challenged room. Behold the Nike Kickstack.

TOMORROW WIDE OPEN

What the average retirement plan lacks is the idea of a future that is constantly evolving, when in fact, nothing is "fixed." As an investment partner, Schwab understands the need to adapt, always helping to keep your choices for tomorrow wide open. 

MAKE THE WISER CALL

Targeted toward male sports fans who might typically drink beer on game day, we came up with fun, familiar scenarios evoking bar smarts. The same smarts used to order a whisky drink over beer. 

My stand-up has always informed my work as a copywriter. It's essentially the same insight-excavating muscle.

Nike Backyard was a line of branded game sets and swag that celebrated backyard sports like tetherball, horseshoes and badminton. Nike Backyard still rallied you to Just Do It, but with less intensity, more joy and nostalgia. Weiden + Kennedy loved Backyard and featured the work in their "Wild Pitch" presentation to Nike.

I've been part of major, real-time social response war rooms for events including the Oscars and Superbowl for Samsung as well as the Critic's Choice Movie and TV Awards for AMC. I was also a staff writer for the 2013 MTV VMAs which had me catering last-minute award intros to some of the biggest egos on the planet. Point is, I can churn out art-directed, fact-checked, spell-checked, bit.ly'd pieces of content in under 140 characters before Kanye can hijack the next acceptance speech.

SOBRO – A WEB SERIES

This is what happens when I go too long without a gig that allows me to write witty dialogue.

SoBro (South Brooklyn) is set in the trendy, child-riddled neighborhood of Cobble Hill. It revolves around two 40-something dads who struggle to advance their lives despite being stunted, self-sabotaging man-children. Only now, the race is on to make something of themselves before their kids are old enough to recognize failure.