I help brands
Shape the narrative
Define the voice
Craft the work
Make it feel
Different
Work
Severance. Ted Lasso.
Deadpool. Twilight.
On paper, they have almost
nothing in common.
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.
For the past 15 years
I’ve worked across
entertainment, social
and creative marketing.
I started on the strategy side
developing ideas for
agency partners
to bring to life.
Eventually, I taught myself editing
and design software
so I could close the gap
between strategy and execution.
Writing
Editing
Design
I make ideas real.
I don’t think of social
as a subdivision of marketing.
I use it to understand
how stories
move through culture
in real time.
As an English major,
I was taught to look closely
at language.
Not just what was said,
but how and why it was said.
Subtext. Intention.
Why something lands
and why it doesn’t.
For most of my life,
I’ve been studying culture
Movies, TV, books, commercials, music.
Like an LLM with taste.
Now I use that instinct
to turn cultural signals
into marketing
that cuts through.
Severance
was not a TV show,
it was a cultural phenomenon.
In the lead up to Season 2,
we brought the severed world
into the real world.
It became the most watched show
in Apple TV history.
Here’s the case study
Role: Strategy, editorial narrative, scripting, creative development, case study video edit
“More TV Shows Need To Take a Page From Severance Marketing”
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How To Make the News
Step 1: Find an old photo of Adam Scott on the internet
Step 2: Photoshop in Ike Barinholtz
Step 3: Send it to Adam to post on Instagram
Step 4: News reporter writes about it on CNN.com
On January 14, 2025
We put the cast of Severance
in a glass cube
in Grand Central Terminal
Here’s the case study.
Role: Concept, social amplification, video edit
Press
“The Genius of Severance’s Grand Central Pop-Up”
‘Severance’ Cast Brings Lumon Offices to Grand Central Station”
‘Severance’ Pop-Up Sends The Internet Into A Meltdown”
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Slices
A Case Study
At Apple TV, we set out to bring Apple’s singular simplicity to entertainment marketing.
What would entertainment marketing look like if it felt unmistakably Apple?
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.
The work needed to feel cinematic, elegant, restrained. Apple.
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 seem.
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 .
A slice wasn’t just social strategy.
It reflected a belief:
The way something is marketed
should reflect the way it is made.
What if the best marketing for our shows was the show itself?
3M views
The insight was deceptively simple:
Hidden inside long-form storytelling
were emotionally complete fragments
Already capable of 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 late-night talk show.
Tablescraps from the trailer cutting room floor.
Not applause lines.
Emotional residue.
Discomfort. Curiosity. Tenderness. Tension.
We found value hiding in the footage.
Moments others weren’t looking for.
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.
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 thousands of comments:
“Apple TV doesn’t market their shows.”
The marketing was there.
They saw it.
They shared it.
They talked about it.
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.
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.
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.
The system proved transferable across genres and audiences
From comedy to thriller, prestige drama to cultural conversation.
Across thousands of executions for over 400 titles including
Ted Lasso, Severance, The Studio, and Pluribus.
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.
Some moments took on lives of their own.
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.
Rather than chasing platform culture,
The work aligned with platform mechanics while remaining unmistakably Apple.
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.
The idea was simple.
The seeing was not.
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