The Record

The naming does the work. 143 = I love you. Pager code, old as dirt, universally decodable by anyone over thirty and instantly teachable to everyone else. It hands you a time of day for free, and a time of day is the one thing a movement can actually own. Not a hashtag anyone can squat. A recurring alarm on a real phone.

From there the whole architecture writes itself: Join (say yes, lock in) → Daily 1:43 (alarm goes off, ask who needs love today, pour it out) → Share (tell the story, pull others in, local circles grow). Missions are numbered and repeatable. The 143% tip. The 1:43 minute of eye contact. The 1:43 ask-me-anything. The movement ships content that is also instructions.

And the alarm answers the 2026 problem. Every movement rents its reach from an algorithm now. A phone going off at 1:43 is reach nobody can deprioritize.

Named for the Mac screenshot shortcut. The whole product was one question, show us your desktops, and one incentive: submit a screenshot of your workspace, and your post carries a link to your portfolio and your Twitter.

Creative people will give you an enormous amount of free content in exchange for a backlink and the chance to be looked at. That’s not cynicism. It’s the entire operating principle of the internet. The trade has a name now, the creator economy, and a couple hundred million people run it. This was a small clean proof, fifteen years early.

Seeso was NBCUniversal’s all-too-short-lived ad-free comedy channel: $3.99/month for on-demand shows, stand-up specials, films, and a Monty Python collection you couldn’t get anywhere else.

We were tapped to introduce it to the world and explain how it worked. We were also tasked with tickling people’s funnycarriages. So the explainer went full Python, which is the only correct answer when the Python library is the thing you’re selling and you have wanted to do this your entire life.

Every streamer fights the explain-yourself fight now, with bigger budgets and worse jokes.

A short film called “Thank You” for the Center for Civil and Human Rights.

The smallest entry in the Record and the one I’d point a client at if they wanted to know whether I can write. A young woman sings a slowed-down, acapella I Thank You while she walks MLK’s Atlanta. The birth home, Ebenezer, the Morehouse statue, the mural, the street sign, the tomb. She ends up inside the Center, in front of the March on Washington. Forty-five seconds, no voiceover, no argument. The original script survives, word for word.

Short-form is a whole economy now. This was just the right length for a thank-you.

CHoA.org served families on the worst day of their lives and needed to behave like it. We went Agile: transformed the look and feel, pulled the client directly into the process instead of presenting at them, and steered a large stakeholder group through it without the thing dying in committee. That is the actual difficulty of hospital work.

Plus the brand anthem: at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, your little heroes are ours, too.

Three programs: the Buckets campaign (:30 TV plus a live event recap), Holiday Means across site, billboards, radio and social, and then Snowpocalypse.

When Winter Storm Leon shut the city down and stranded people on the interstate overnight, we put out real-time Southern hospitality instead of a brand statement. Help, offered plainly, while it was still happening. It’s the smallest work in this list and the best example of a brand reading the room in under a day.

Real-time response is an industry now, with war rooms and software. It was a decision then.

SweetWater partners with retailers every year to raise money for Waterkeeper Alliance, which protects rivers and waterways. They wanted a bigger year. There was little budget and less time, so it got cracked on nights and weekends. During one appropriately beer-fuelled session, the line surfaced: No Water Means No Beer.

Then we built everything around it. A parallax fundraising site. Beer Fishin’, a drinking game we invented from nothing. Beer trivia. Custom pint glasses, coasters, sell sheets, swag.

The budget was beer and lost sleep. Those are still the two most convincing currencies there are.

Three programs for the Corps: the Semper Fidelis All-American Bowl (:30 TV, :60 radio, and a six-spread story in the game program), Marine Week Cleveland as an integrated event campaign, and the USMC + IRONMAN partnership.

The Ironman piece is the one to look at. A fan sign is the most disposable object at any endurance event. So we didn’t make a sign. We modelled it on the ammo cans recruits lift during PT. On race day, tens of thousands of spectators were holding them overhead. The sign became the exercise.

The feeds pay for that move now. They call it participation. This ran it on asphalt, a decade early.

Coke wanted its flagship water to stop being admired for working and start being loved for what it stood for. It launched DASANI Drops into a category that didn’t exist yet. The goal was badge-brand status, the Apple-and-Target kind.

So we stopped selling hydration and started selling a disposition. A brand for people determined to stay young at heart, whatever the traffic’s doing. It was called #AnythingButDry, and yes, we heard the pun every day. That was the point.

Hashtags aged out. Selling a disposition didn’t.

A brand with genuinely raving fans and no plan for what to hand them between meals. We built a social and content model called Bite-Sized Delights. Small, simple, authentic servings sized for how people actually browse: five minutes on a phone at lunch, two hours on a laptop at night.

We launched Chick-fil-A’s official Instagram account and shot the first Instagram and Vine videos the brand ever made. Also #NeverEndingMoo, a Napkin Poetry series, and a Bad Lip Reading spoof for the premium salads, which is exactly as stupid and as good as it sounds.

Feeding the scroll is every brand’s whole job now. In 2012 it needed a name and an argument.

Two Georgia-born businessmen wanted to launch a clear whiskey in the South and wanted a Georgia company to build the brand. Cardinal & Company was one month old. So instead of presenting a deck, we spent days making a physical prototype bottle from scratch. Mould, label, back label, the whole object. Then we put it on the table.

Out of roughly 150 liquor bottle shapes in the world, we had picked the exact one they wanted. They took the brand identity too.

You could render a hundred and fifty bottles in an afternoon now. The one somebody built by hand would still win the room.