Chief Flynn, Milwaukee's Chief of Police, gave us a rare opportunity: the chance to turn bureaucracy into a thing of beauty.

This website is the first-of-its-kind for a law enforcement agency, establishing a new standard for real-time communication and transparency between the force and the community.MilwaukeePoliceNews.com offers full-context news, straight from the source, uploaded by the MPD Public Relations team via an easy-to-use interface which simultaneously updates the site and the department’s various social media accounts. 

The site has received some nods from the industry, from Creativity's Pick-of-the-Day, to Site of the Day on www.thefwa.com, to a nice write up in Smithsonian online magazine and a feature on FastCo Create.

Credits: Matt Rand, CD // Shawn Holpfer, Designer // Chris Miller, CW // Robin Griffin, Interactive Producer // LISS Interactive, Dev Partner // Jeff Salzer, Photographer

In the summer of 2007 we worked with our client, 7 Eleven, to transform the beloved 7-Eleven store into the oh-so-much-more-beloved Kwik-E-Mart, in time for the summer release of the Simpson's movie. Photographer Jack Thompson was commissioned to cover 24 consecutive hours of 7-Eleven's transformation into the Simpsons Kwik-E-Mart. He took over 800 photos, so here's like, 18 of them. 

For the 12 stores that were chosen, the overhaul included everything. The outside. The inside. The characters. The products. All the way down to a "Krusty's Kids" donation jar on the check-out counter that people actually put money in. The end goal was simple, give each and every shopper who visited the opportunity to escape the shackles of real life and be in a cartoon.

Credits: Matt Rand, CD/AD // Ryan Blum, CW // Sterling Hayman, AE

We just launched a new eCommerce and Flash experience for our client Tiki Torch. A great company and a staple of Americana, Tiki has been hidden under it's parent company Lamplight Farms. On a short timeline and low budget we worked with some great partners to give Tiki a facelift and bring them to the forefront in the interactive space. 

Check it out here. This site was also shortlisted on the FWA and was an OMMA finalist.

Credits: Matt Rand, CD/AD // Matt Herrmann, ACD/AD // Greg King, CW // Susan Bishop, AE // Robin Griffin, Producer

Spice Islands has been one of my favorite clients that I've worked with thus far. They're small. They're scrappy. They love to do great work that sets them apart from the competition.

In 2011, Spice Islands goal was tell the world about why their vanilla extract was so much better than anyone else's. Part of what makes them great is how they source their product. They go to the source and they keep it as pure as possible, which is a great story to tell.

The campaign consisted of both traditional and non-traditional tactics. From standard magazine print in Food&Wine to creating vanilla-based cupcakes with a popular mobile cupcake truck in Chicago to be sold along with a sample through Groupon, which at the time, no one had used Groupon in that way before.

In the digital space, we created ad units placed on recipe sites that detected if the recipe you were viewing used vanilla as an ingredient. If so, the ad unit would feature the name of the recipe you were viewing along with a plea to not compromise the quality of that dish by using an inferior product. Those then pointed to our new Facebook page.

Credits: Matt Rand, CD // Jim Root, ACD/AD // Sandy DerHovsepian, ACD/Writer

If personalized tacos could start a cult-like following anywhere, it would be right here in Austin, Texas. To promote Archer Malmo’s newest office during SXSW 2016, we created a cult called ‘La Tortilla Bendita’ and offered all who were curious a chance to receive a blessed tortilla bearing their likeness. SXSW saturates the city with branded promotions, so we gave people something miraculous; a no-strings- attached experience online and on-site.

We wanted people to feel as special as Jesus on toast. So, if they tweeted a selfie with #TortillaBendita, they had the chance to see their selfies laser-etched on tortillas. Using Twitter as the primary channel, every user received updates on the status of their offering. Social campaigns, taco street teams, a hidden video, PR, tarot card decks, posters and the website all led people to the in-person event during SXSW Interactive. There, blessings were shared and eaten around the La Tortilla Bendita shrine.

In just three days during SXSW Archer Malmo saw:

•    581% INCREASE IN TWITTER PROFILE VISITS
•    169% INCREASE IN WEB TRAFFIC
•    479% INCREASE IN SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT
•    450 CONVERTED BELIEVERS

As well as receiving influencer endorsements including social media pioneer Gary Vaynerchuk, Forbes contributor Jean Case, celebrity chefs Jose Andrews and Ming Tsai, and Austin’s Mayor Steve Adler.

This is a tiny project with huge implications. The women on my team came to me with a big idea on exposing the gender pay gap with something subtle but extremely in your face. We developed a Google Chrome extension that works on the web's most powerful e-comm sites like Amazon, Target and Walmart and on any product page where a price for an item exists, the extension creates a pop-up with the price women would have to pay with the pay gap calculated in. Not only is that powerful in and of itself, but the team didn't stop at just "women", they continually updated the extension to illuminate the the gap for black women, latina women, Native American women and so on.

Credits: Matt Rand, CD // Cat Albritton, Art Director // Shannon Murphy, Art Director // Laura Jackson, CW // Abhi Shamsunder Developer

KMFA 89.5 is Austin's Classical music radio station. KMFA is one of a few stations in the U.S. that curates their playlist. A vast majority of stations across the U.S. play a single syndicated playlist creating a virtual sea of sameness. That's what makes KMFA so special. It's music is curated by Austinites for Austinites.

As part of our pro-bono rebranding project for them, we created a data visualization art project showcasing our unique connection to Austin. This fully functioning metronome is powered by the tweets of Austin area residents and reflects the beat of the city. The more tweets there are, the faster it moves. It lights up a night too. Not only is it backlit, but the arm itself changes color as the speed changes. 

As part of our ongoing relationship with Implus and their house of fitness and wellness brands, a large part of our responsibility was and still is to create and utilize a single template that every Implus brand can fit into yet still maintain it’s independence in both tone and feel. Functionally, we took Implus brand sites from image and art based sites with little to no thought regarding SEO or ecomm optimization to sites that are highly visual yet easily crawlable to boost their search rankings and sales.

When you’re drenched in sweat, muscles shaking, doing one more rep becomes a test of mental toughness as well as physical endurance. But with the right mindset, and the right gear, lifters can overcome fatigue, ditch their doubts and try anyway. To show how it helps athletes push past their limits to get the most from each workout, trusted gear leader Harbinger Fitness challenged our team to create a series of spots born from the gym. The One More campaign, which also extends across digital and social, taps into the heart of every lifter who has pushed her or his training past exhaustion. The spots, which feature real athletes, dramatize the moment when a lifter has nothing left. Each spot ends on a cliffhanger (think...the end of Inception) because that nearly endless moment of struggle—seemingly one of weakness—is actually the moment when strength is built.

Credits: Matt Rand, CD // Dan Crumrine, CW // Cedric Guerin, Art Director

Summer of 2015 we got an emergency call from the director of marketing at Malibu. The designs they were presented by their agency for that year's catalog weren't cutting it and they needed fresh eyes and concepts. We stepped up and in and gave them what they needed for both their brand catalogs.

Credits: Matt Rand, CD // Cat Albritton, AD // Cedric Guerrin, AD

The Long Center was in need of a brand overhaul and we gladly stepped in to work side-by-side and create a new look and feel the reinvigorated Austin’s very own Performing Arts home.

Credits: Matt Rand, CD // Cat Treviño, ACD // Shannon Murphy, Art Director // Laura Jackson, CW

Destruction, for whatever reason, has always been easier than creation. With a mean word or phrase a person's world can crumble. We wanted to counteract that. With Secret Deodorant, we created a place for women to be nice behind someone's back. Since it's launch it has become a huge community of girls and women sharing stories, righting past wrongs, and spreading good graffiti around the internet.

And by "has become a huge community" I mean in the first 36 hours we garnered an addtional 209,000 fans on Facebook for Secret and the Mean Stinks program combined. Now, Mean Stinks has over 350k alone. This is one of the best programs I've ever worked on and am proud to be a part of it.

This was a One Show interactive finalist.

I may have learned more here than anywhere else.

Drumroll is a passionate and driven company full of young, raw talent. All in all, we stood at 40 people when I left. When I started, we were half that. Of that 40 about 17 of them made up our creative group.

The DNA of Drumroll is a bit different than other agencies. While we loved campaign work, Drumroll is much more about creating a long-lasting relationship between a consumer and a brand.

Being the digital and social agency of record for Microsoft Store for example, we were given immense responsibility to grow and shape the perception of the brand through outstanding and impactful customer touch points.

Our work sits under a strict NDA, which is why you won't see any work on my site, but what I can tell you is that in my time there we became one on a very short list of preferred Microsoft vendors and Microsoft Store has also broken the threshold of becoming a billion dollar entity. This work and it's effectiveness has allowed us to double in size as our work gets shown around the Redmond campus as a standard for other agencies to meet.

Using great creative, strategy and insight combined with immense amounts of data we have more than doubled Microsoft Store's email program revenue each year for the last three years.

To give a better (and authorized) understanding of the work and our process, check out Drumroll’s site.

Due to our pre-existing relationship with the Dallas Stars Hockey organization, we were commisioned to create outdoor boards for the 2007 NHL All Star game hosted by the Stars in Dallas. All four ran in and around the DFW metroplex. These were also featured in Communication Arts Advertising Annual

Credits: Julie Bowman, GCD/Writer // Matt Rand, Co-AD

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The Stars also wanted to create something experiential for their fans. Something that can be used again and again. Game after game. So we built a one-of-a-kind machine. A pimped out Zamboni. 

We concepted and created the new beast outfitted with chrome wheels, smoke machine, ground effects, a lounge area with a fridge, flat screens and XBOX 360's. They wheel this monster out for lucky fans selected out of the crowd between periods.

The HFL was built to house a one-of-a-kind competitive social network for one single action. The high five. HFL players submit photos and videos of their greatest high fives. The highest scorer in the league is named the HFL MVP and the best high-fiver in the world.

Because most high fives don't happen when you're sitting your lazy keister in front of a computer screen, an iPhone application was developed to be the weapon in the field for capturing and uploading high fives to the player's profile. We also developed special media kits to be sent out to those we thought could really get the word out, filled with goodies like HFL-branded hand sanitizer and High Five League jerseys.

The site is no longer live. Sorry.

Credits: Matt Smith, GCD // Matt Rand, CD // John Jaeger, ACD // Jason Shipp, CW // Matthew McFerrin, AD // Bryan Lee, AD // RED Interactive Agency, Web Development

Mountain Dew Fans border on the insane when it comes to picking new Dew flavors. They're not short on opinions either. So we gave them a way to battle it out head to head. Eight flavors. Two finalists. One winner. To pick the new Diet MTN Dew flavor the fans will decide through a bracket-style challenge. Erin Andrews and Kenny Mayne also made the experience that much richer. Erin Andrews did anyway...

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FanDEWmonium Spec: King of the Mountain
Well, sometimes something you love dies. We felt we could do much more than a simple voting concept. We wanted to push the boundaries a bit. King of the Mountain is a race using location-based services like the now-defunct Gowalla or Foursquare to ultimately decide the new Diet Mountain Dew flavor. Fans can check-in to any location to claim their flavor’s territory. Each claim earns their flavor one point. The biggest flavor territory wins.