My origin story in advertising starts with these curiously strong mints.
My first job out of college was as an account guy (a “suit”) at Leo Burnett, helping lead a small, ragtag group of creatives on a little account called Altoids.
They needed someone willing to help make wild ideas happen on shoestring budgets, without letting agency process and bureaucracy kill them along the way. That became my specialty: finding unusual media opportunities, figuring out how to pull them off, and helping get ambitious creative work sold, produced, and out into the world.
I tracked down a tugboat and flew to New York to meet its owner so we could wrap the thing in Altoids branding. We wrapped a chimney in Chicago. We put Altoids on rickshaws in New York before that kind of alternative media was commonplace. We advertised on matchboxes, bar napkins, postcards, wild postings, outdoor, and all kinds of strange media placements designed to feel discovered rather than bought. We even partnered with pop artist Chris “Coop” Cooper on an illustrated muscle-car giveaway.
It was scrappy, strange, and an incredible education.
This was where I first learned what makes great creative work, how creative strategy shapes an idea, how to lead a team, and how much persistence it sometimes takes to get a genuinely unusual idea made.
And I got to learn it alongside some extraordinarily talented people. Stefan Poster and Mark Faulkner originated the campaign, and I later worked closely with Andrew Meyer, Dustin Smith, Nic Fantl, and others who went on to become major figures in the advertising industry.
It was also where I realized my own forte was on the creative side.
Leo Burnett had been generous enough to pay for me to take classes at Second City, and I had become deeply involved in the Chicago comedy scene. So when an opportunity arose to join the creative department, I went the other direction: I moved to Los Angeles to write monologues for former Black Flag singer Henry Rollins on his new IFC series, The Henry Rollins Show, and began a career in Hollywood as a comedian, actor, and filmmaker.
Branded work would find its way back into my life a few years later after I made a short film called Google Maps.
I can’t take credit for the creative itself. That belongs to the talented teams behind Altoids. But I was deeply involved in helping develop, sell, produce, and execute the work, and I’m proud to have played a part in it.
And the campaign worked.
Altoids became a true earned-media and cultural phenomenon. We grew from a small regional brand in Seattle to beating brands like Certs and Tic Tac and becoming the number-one mint in the country, without ever advertising on television. The whole strategy was built around print, out-of-home, wild postings, alternative media, and a constant stream of strange ideas that generated cultural buzz far beyond what we could ever afford to buy. The campaigns I worked on won three Effies, Mediaweek’s Plan of the Year Grand Prize, and countless other creative awards.
During my time on the account, we launched Cinnamon Altoids, Altoids Gum, Altoids Strips, Altoids Sours, and several other extensions. And about a year or two after I left, the Altoids brand was sold for $1.6 billion.
Not bad for a little regional mint brand from Seattle barely a decade earlier.
