James Thorpe

The magic of technology often lies in the simple truth of what it can do for people. For our 2021 Oscars campaign we aimed to tell two stories that represented the best of Google's helpfulness. Keeping families in touch and keeping kids engaged and learning became exponentially more important to people all over. We produced these films born from stories in our own creative team, and clever media buying helped A CODA Story land right after The Sound of Metal won its Oscar, while An Octopus Story landed immediately after My Octopus Teacher won. The little details helped these stories stand out as one of the night's most memorable and talked about moments.

In 2020, Covid-19 caused 41% of US Black-owned businesses to close, while Google Trends showed that searches for “Black-owned” skyrocketed by 600%. In short, people were looking to support Black-owned businesses, but lacked a way to find them. So we built a feature for businesses to identify as Black-owned, making this attribute searchable in Google Search and Maps. We created a 360 campaign encouraging people to search and support Black-owned businesses, resulting in 96,000+ businesses signing up, delivering help at scale when businesses needed it most.

Unless you've been living in a glacier cave—or especially if you've been living in a glacier cave, you know climate change has taken hold of our planet. While the conversation among Gen-Z is that our planet is, well, fucked; we wanted to remind them that there's still things we can do to reverse the situation.

To celebrate Minecraft's staggering 1 Trillion views on YouTube, we created a thank you message to the gaming community that made it possible. The video featured 30+ creator cameos and 30+ Easter eggs that only true Minecraft fans would find. And find they did. The community immediately jumped in creating countless reaction videos calling out all the things they discovered.

The Hit Pause initiative was first launched in the U.S. in September 2022. It gives viewers across YouTube resources to better assess the content they watch and share.

The effort focuses on how to detect misinformation, from recognizing manipulation tactics to looking for cues to determine trustworthiness.

Created in partnership with WKNY, this campaign aired during the 2022 NBA finals with a simple yet hard to fathom proposition, YouTube TV is more than cable for less than cable. $680 less, to be exact.

XFINITY is an Internet and Entertainment provider serving over 26,000,000 customers in North America. As part of their long-term growth plan XFINITY chose to enter a new market, the wireless business, going head on with some goliaths - Verizon, Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile. This would be XFINITY's largest ever new product launch. 

Our task was to name, position, design and launch a new wireless service from scratch.  

Stubhub in North America is largely known as a ticket marketplace for sporting events, but their business has become a lot more than just sports.

Our task was to re-invigorate the Stubhub brand and look to position them as destination for any kind of experience. We found our enemy in the "netflix and chill" culture of staying in rather than going out, and looked to encourage folks to get out more by highlighting the FOMO factor.

We launched a global brand identity refresh alongside a global communications push with film,
digital and OOH. 

The Tipping Point Community is a Bay Area–based nonprofit that aims to help break the cycle of poverty.

Our task was to increase awareness and encourage smaller donations (those less than $100) from a larger percentage of the San Francisco community.

In San Francisco those living below the poverty line make 5x less than the average household. So we decided to give San Franciscans a taste of what it’s like to live below the poverty line.

We looked at the everyday transactions of San Franciscans  and created a campaign, “#PovertyLinePrices,” that showed basic needs–things like a bus pass, groceries and rent–at a 5x higher rate.

To launch the campaign, we took over a local convenience store for a day. We charged customers 5x the normal price of items and recorded their reactions. Beyond the store the campaign launched with Digital, OOH and even supermarket circulars in the local paper.

1 in 9 kids is diagnosed with ADHD, and while medicine and care helps, Specialized knows from it's own independent research that riding a bike every day can help too.

Our task was to raise awareness not only of the pervasiveness of ADHD today, but also of the benefits that cycling can have for these youngsters. 

ebay is one of the earliest
e-commerce sites around, and in today's hyper-competitive and ever-changing landscaped ebay often gets overlooked as an "old dot com" company.

Our task was to reinvigorate the ebay brand and highlight the vast array of items available on ebay, not just the stuff you expect but new items, high end items and iconic brand names too.

Trello is a project management tool that helps people plan anything together. It's a beautiful visual tool that can be used for any type of project, from the personal to the professional, from the smallest to the largest, no matter your need Trello is the perfect tool to help you plan together. 

Our task was to bring the product to life and show the world all the wonderful things you can do together with Trello. 

For most of us the outdoors can be a fairly intimidating place, filled with dangerous animals and a perception that you kind of need to be an expert to get by. 

We used the biggest stage of them all, SuperBowl 50 to introduce the world to a friendly, more loveable side of the outdoors. 

How does one of America’s least liked brands transform disapproval into praise and still boost revenue?

The answer was in highlighting what an enthusiast audience of Xfinity subscribers like best about the service—our content. With our campaign for Watchathon Week, we helped binge watchers interact in a different way with the shows they love and took their fandom to a new level. By creating experiences offline and online, we reversed negative sentiment and drove new premium subscriptions to Xfinity’s On Demand offering.

In the face of an ever expanding product portfolio and a desire to increase sales in North America, BMW's luxury status and long time tagline of the Ultimate Driving Machine was fundamentally being questioned. 

Our answer was to double down on the Ultimate Driving Machine and reaffirm that any and every single BMW was indeed an Ultimate Driving Machine.

BMW wanted to dip it's toe into the electric vehicle market, however the mass market was already in rapture with the Nissan Leaf and BMW's electric experiment would only have 700 vehicles, that quite frankly weren't perhaps the BMWs American drivers would expect. 

Our task was to launch this electric experiment before the cars were available, to get 700 people to want to drive the cars for 2 years and pay a hefty premium for a lease to do so. 

We leaned into the experiment and launched a fully integrated social experiment of our own all around the Future of Mobility. At the core of the campaign was an interactive mini-documentary series exploring mobility. 

The Vanguard Group is one of the largest financial services companies in the world. Their magic is in their company structure which is designed to benefit investors not investment firms. Since their founding they have been zealous about saving investors money, and lowering costs across the industry as a whole. 

Our task was to shine a light on the things investors perhaps overlook the most when it comes to investing - costs. 

As part of a larger communications effort we launched the "At-Cost Cafe" which used coffee to showcase the difference in costs and pricing between Vanguard and the financial services industry.