I had no idea this one sold through until I saw it up in the sky one day.

That was about a year after I’d done the work! I need to be clear about my role in this one: my old friends/coworkers at Mekanism needed some last-minute help landing a tagline for Alaska Airlines, so they brought me in for a half-day over the weekend. It’s a big account for them, obviously, and it was one of those all-hand-on-deck moments.

I did the usual. Write 200 taglines. Circle 10. Write 100 more. Circle 10. Send the selects. I heard back that there was some heart for three of them, including “Land Happy.” It needed something added to it. So I played around, added the first part, and banged out a manifesto.

Part of the deal with short-term freelance gigs is sometimes you don’t know where things netted out. In this case, I only found out my line sold through when I started seeing it out in the wild. In big type.

Again, these are not my ads. They are the work the Mekanism team did with the line I wrote once it was approved as the Alaska Airlines brand tag.

Am I promising you I can crank out a big tagline in a half day? Heavens no. We all know how these things go. But the page you’re reading right now, and the images herein, is proof that I can do that, and have done it.

It went way beyond billboards too. This line was a launchpad for some fun tv, plenty of brand swag, the requisite digital marketing campaign, and all the industry press that comes along with an overall effort of this order.