work
🏆 grand clio winner
🏆 the one show gold pencil
🏆 cannes lion grand prix
🏆 the one show gold pencil 3x
🏆 grand clio winner
🏆 cannes gold lion 2x
🏆 webby winner
🏆 cannes lion gold
🏆 silver clio winner
🏆 cannes lion gold
🏆 the one show gold pencil 2x
🏆 gold clio winner
🏆 silver clio winner
🏆 63 emmy wins
🏆 5 oscar wins
🏆 gold clio winner
For 15 years
I’ve worked in social.
Twilight
Deadpool
Ted Lasso
Severance
All of it was culture.
The skill that
connected them
wasn’t taste.
It was empathy.
Marketing starts
with understanding
what you like and why.
Great marketing starts
when you understand
what someone else likes
and why.
creative director
Severance
Anyone with a job
has experienced
the liminal space between planes of existence
known as a corporate office.
To promote Season 2
we brought the severed world
into the real world.
Grand Central.
Apple Retail.
Olivia Rodrigo.
Duolingo.
Any brand with an elevator.
It's hard to explain
what it felt like
to be at the center of it.
Here's two minutes that tries.
creative director
“More TV Shows Need To Take a Page From Severance Marketing”
back to work
“I can harness the wind
but I ain’t it’s god damn creator”
- Captain Jack Aubrey, HMS Surprise
@AppleTV
When we launched Apple TV+
in November 2019
we were late to the game
Netflix
HBO
Hulu
Prime Video
Streaming brands with
years of established social
We could copy what worked
or find our own voice
The thing about voice
is that it’s more
than copywriting
It's how you edit
how you design
how you think
different craft
same language
It all comes down to signal
We wanted to win social
without looking social
To be online
without sounding online
So we worked inside out
not outside in
We obsessed over the footage
Frame by frame
Line by line
We admired the craft
that was already there
We watched and rewatched
until details emerged
that others missed
Shots
Quotes
Fleeting moments
The smallest slices
that contained the whole
The challenge for us
wasn't making the magic
It was preserving it
Compressing it into short form
without losing what made it special
We used our judgment
When to edit
When not to
When to start
When to cut to black
The perfect line of copy
after the perfect line
of dialogue
Over seven years
across 400 titles
we built an identity
A way to funnel
a firehose of content
through a single filter
Apple
Simple
Elegant
and clever
The tension was always there
Between vertical platforms
and horizontal shows
Between speed
and craft
Between brand
and culture
That's where
our voice lived
Edgy without cutting
Human without saying "me"
Witty, not snarky
Simple but deep
Serious and funny
weird but accessible
Fluent in culture
But speaking our own language
Slices
A Case Study
7 years, 400 titles. at Apple TV
we needed to find a way
to filter it all
through one brand
so we invented an ad system
that we ran for two years
It generated billions
of organic views
and millions of
engagements
No paid media.
We called it Slices
We wanted to bring
Apple’s simplicity
to entertainment marketing
At first glance
entertainment marketing
on social
all looks the same
Memes
Creators
TikTok trends
Fast edits made
for fleeting attention
Golden Globes Teaser
4.5M views
The logic is understandable
Social platforms reward immediacy
familiarity, and emotional reaction
But there was a tension
How do you cut through on social
without compromising
premium storytelling?
For Apple TV, the challenge wasn’t simply attention
It was maintaining a standard of quality
In a feed filled with slop
The work needed to feel
cinematic, elegant and human
At the same time
traditional premium marketing
came with real constraints
Original spots required
Budgets, timelines, approvals
and perhaps most critically
access to talent
Social moved too quickly
for that production model
to scale
There was also another truth
Legally, every organic post
was an ad
No matter how “organic”
you tried to make it look
So the question became
How do we make those ads feel like Apple?
It was a humble realization
Nothing we made as marketers
would ever look better
than an Apple TV show
Apple hires Emmanuel Lubezki to shoot commercials
Apple TV hires Emmanuel Lubezki to shoot episodes
A slice wasn’t just social strategy
It reflected a belief
The way something is marketed
should reflect the way it’s made
What if the best marketing
for our shows
was the show itself?
3M views
The insight was simple
Hidden inside
long-form storytelling
were emotionally complete fragments
Already functioning
as miniature advertisements
Tiny moments of intrigue
Humor
Tension
Beauty
Catharsis
Fear
2M views
For example
this was an untouched
montage in the pilot
episode of Cape Fear
Pure footage and pure score
All we did was spell out
the amazing A-list cast
in an SF font
with logos
added to the end
On social
a second can feel like
an eternity
International Women’s Day
4M views
We looked at the space
between dialogue
The quieter less obvious moments
The ones you’d never see on a talk show
Not applause lines
Emotional residue
Discomfort
Curiosity
Tenderness
Tension
We found value hiding in the footage
We weren’t clipping scenes
We were revealing moments
The system followed a simple set of principles:
- Preserve cinematic rhythm
- Remove context, not feeling
- Use minimal copy
- Maintain elegant typography and restraint
- Design natively for aspect ratio and platform behavior
- Treat the Apple TV logo as the period at the end of the sentence
The goal was never
to overwhelm the footage
with too many elements
Only to frame it
Emmy Nominations 2025
2M views
Instead of adapting
to social’s visual language
we adapted social to ours
Millions of people watched these ads
yet most never experienced them as advertising
We saw the comments
“Apple TV doesn’t market their shows”
The marketing was there
They saw it
They shared it
They talked about it
Pre-Premiere Teaser
3M views
In a feed built on noise
negative space became signal
The goal was restraint
Remove as much visible marketing as possible
until only feeling remained
A pure taste of the product
No artificial packaging
The elegance lived
in the production design
of the show
The wit lived
in the brevity of the ad
A Slice did not explain the plot
It invited curiosity
It trusted the audience
And remained emotionally truthful
to the source material
December 2025
7M views
This was not a format
It was a system
Generating thousands of ads
over a two year span
A repeatable method for translating
premium storytelling
into native social behavior
We looked for cultural backstops
Moments in culture
conversation, mood, or timing
That could connect footage
to the audiences
most likely to care
Timing was everything
Rhea Seehorn Golden Globes Win 2026
4M views
Real-time marketing
The right asset
at the right time
Editorial judgment applied to timing
platform behavior
audience anticipation
and story
We didn’t market around the shows
We marketed through them
The smaller we looked
the bigger the canvas
S2E06 tune-in
9M views
The system proved transferable
across genres and audiences
From comedy to thriller
to prestige drama
Across thousands of executions
for over 300 titles
Ted Lasso, Severance, The Studio, Pluribus, and more
It didn’t feel like
typical marketing
The ad was always as original
as the Apple Original
The results scaled
2B+ organic views
No dependence on large paid campaigns
No compromise in brand expression
They never ran on TV as an ad
Only as news
March 6, 2026
We used slices to announce news
And tout reviews
Critics Slice
2M views
One shot
No cuts
Some moments took on lives of their own
March 2025
4B views
Why did it work?
Because social rewards emotional reaction
Apple rewards emotional craft
Slices compressed premium storytelling
into emotionally complete fragments
Designed for feed behavior
without sacrificing aesthetic integrity
We hooked people visually
Kept them interested emotionally
Rewarded them intellectually
Rather than chasing platform culture,
We found a way to perform
natively on social
without becoming social-looking
Filmmakers loved it
EPs loved it
Most importantly, audiences loved it
We turned the show itself
into the ad unit
iPhone Concept Ad
The idea was simple
The seeing was not
back to work