All Google wanted for Christmas was their first retail experience.
The short version of the brief went something like this: What’s Google’s version of a mall santa? I was part of the multi-multi-disciplinary team at Autofuss tasked with answering that question.
The answer turned out to be a 25-foot snow globe with a phantom camera on a robotic rig under Hollywood-quality fake snow. But that was just the centerpiece of this unique project that brought physical, digital, and social together in malls (and one high-profile NYC park) scattered across America.
The results were anything but cold: 10 million people saw the Wonderlabs in person, press led to an additional 427 million impressions, and the work was shortlisted at Cannes.
In addition to ace creative director Jeremy Stewart and the fearless and tousled Autofuss brass, our team included architects, furniture designers, graphic designers, app developers, snow consultants, robotists, a DP, and original music, plus the more traditional production elements for creating OOH and digital ads that drove awareness to the Wonderlabs.
My role in all this, as the lead copywriter, started with naming the experience itself, then extended into copy for the signage for the physical footprint, all the app copy for the “lineless line” and social elements, headlines for the ads, and I’m sure I’m forgetting about five things.
Watching it all come to life was pretty astonishing given the scale and tight timeline (3 months!).
I would be derelict in my duties as an enjoyer of horror films if I didn’t point out to you that the woman in the beanie in the above poster is none other than Jocelin Donahue, star of The House of the Devil. I don’t think our clients noticed that part.
What they did notice was the wild amount of coverage the Wonderlabs received in all the major markets they popped up in. Those included The Washington Post, The Verge, Business Insider, and plenty of nightly news segments like this one.
I ended up getting to be Googly a bunch more times over the years.
After Autofuss and its robotics operation Bot & Dolly were bought by Google, I spent a stretch of time in one of those secret Mountain View hangers full of future tech. This one was called Acme Labs and my role their was working with the engineers to craft narratives around the potential retail/physical implications of their inventions and innovations.
When I started longing for a consumer-facing audience, I transferred to the Google Brand Studio, where I was one of the writers on the team that launched The Google Store.
From there I hopped to New York for a long gig at B-Reel, where one of my projects was the (at the time) all-new Google Calendar, for which I scripted a popular product video.
And later, working with my friends at Bonfire Labs, I was the Creative Director on an ambitious project for Pixel, as well as some edutainment for Google Workspace that we decided to plot out as if it were a thriller.
Across all of it, it’s always a challenge messaging around technology and features that don’t always exist at the time of concepting (and sometimes filming!), but I’ve found Google is Google for reasons that go beyond the things they bring to market. You have to be able to move fast and adapt your process…but if and when you do that well, they’ll pull the right levers to make sure you can make the work the best it can be.