CASE STUDIES

Skillet Street Food
In late 2007, two chefs got tired of working in restaurants, so they fitted a commercial kitchen into an old Airstream trailer. They pulled it around Seattle, setting it up in different places and serving seasonally relevant bistro-style food made from local, organic ingredients.

Reportage in TIME, Gourmet, Food & Wine and Sunset Magazines helped, but they wanted to open more trailers, so they needed to find investors as well as diners. I wrote and shot five videos to tell the Skillet brand story. Some locations were hard to find, so I gave directions to them. I posted the videos on YouTube, Skillet linked to them from their web site, and customers began emailing them back and forth.

Skillet soon found their investors. They converted a second trailer and have been serving hungry customers since early 2009.


T-Mobile Internal Communications
VoiceStream was the smallest of six US carriers when it was rebranded to T-Mobile in 2002. Their ad spend was tiny compared to that of the competition, and they couldn’t leverage the same economies of scale. But the competition had horrible customer service, so T-Mobile chose to differentiate itself there.

Leadership had to get the word out. As agency creatives worked to drive sales, the IC team worked to drive service. Five designers and art directors and I concepted and planned events, wrote newsletters, shot videos, and created web sites, ID packages and posters.

Our toughest job was a quarterly called Splash!, which T-Mobile mailed to employees at home. It was the only internal channel that leadership had, but no one read it because it was full of corporate cheerleading. We talked the leaders into focusing Splash! on top-line issues written as stories to make them more relevant to employees. We guided more detailed messages into templated departmental newsletters, and gave each department a branded ID package. Finally, since coaching is a T-Mobile core value, we stressed the speed and low cost of the face-to-face channel for their most urgent messages.

It’s hard to measure the effectiveness of IC efforts. But when you choose to differentiate yourself on service, then you win four J.D. Power & Associates awards for service four years running, chances are you’ve got a strong program.