My love for ads started when I was a kid and stayed with me my whole life. My favorite ad back then was the

Diet Coke Batman 1989 commercial. I was 7 when it came out. And that is to this day my favorite ad (here's a link).

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My interest in creating an ad campaign started when I was 17 or 18. It all started with John, Paul, George, and Ringo. I was getting into The Beatles, John became my favorite, Imagine became my favorite song and I started to learn a lot about him. One of the things I learned was that he and Yoko created an ad campaign for peace, which was the War Is Over campaign, and I liked the idea so much that I wanted to do the same some time in the future. That eventually became my Pass It On Peace spec campaign (located in home page link).

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The idea of studying advertising never crossed my mind. I wasn't interested in it, I wanted to be a filmmaker. So I started college at Hunter College in New York back in 2002 and chose Film & Media as my major. But after being disappointed by the limited amount of film classes I decided to drop out to pursue filmmaking on my own like many filmmakers do.

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Usually, what filmmakers that didn't go to film school do is that they raise funds and go and make their film independently. I had a different plan. I had recently come up with an idea for an ad campaign that I thought would be great for Nike. The idea was to have athletes forming the peace sign and send a positive message about peace (here's a link to see what it looked like originally, and here's a link to the see the video of a later version). The plan was to sell it to Nike, ask them to let me write and direct the commercials, and use those commercials and the payment to get a start in the film business. But after many years of reaching out to ad agencies, people in the advertising world, and trying other things without any success I stopped. And that's how that pursuit ended. Here are some of the things I did: link. The final thing I did for that campaign was that I turned it into a spec campaign for the LA28 Olympic games for my portfolio (it's the one located in the home page link)
 

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Then one day I bought MasterClass–the online classes taught by famous people–and it changed my life and where it was heading. I got it because I was interested in watching all the film and TV classes they had but I also started watching other classes of subjects I'd always liked. One of them was an advertising class, Jeff Goodby & Rich Silverstein Teach Advertising and Creativity, where I learned that if I created a portfolio with ad ideas and product ideas that it was possible to get a job in advertising. So I started working on a portfolio.

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I already had the product ideas from something I did in the past, and I had the 2 campaigns I came up with years earlier, and that was going to be my portfolio. But then one day I came up with a campaign idea for the United Nations that came from something I had written for the Athletes Forming the Peace Sign campaign, so now I had another one. And then soon after that I started having ideas for ad campaigns for different companies that I could use to build my portfolio. That's the story.

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I ended up making over 70 spec campaigns because along the way I discovered that I love creating and designing spec campaigns, and because I wanted to give it my best to try to get a job in advertising. At some point I thought, "I'm going to make it very hard for them to say no to me when I apply for a job."

 

One day Imagine was playing on the radio and I realized for the first time that all of my campaigns and this portfolio wouldn't have happened if it weren't for that song and the War Is Over campaign.

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