Cat Footwear is an interesting marketing and creative challenge. In the US, CAT means industrial workboots and safety footwear. In other parts of the world, the CAT logo is a fashion brand. The tone of the headlines and the art direction of the ads really depend on which boot or shoe is being shown and where the ad is running.

WKLH is a classic hits format FM radio station that was number one in Milwaukee when this campaign was created. WKLH had a deep playlist and proudly boasted that they played careers not songs. This campaign was featured in Lurzers Archive and won an OBIE.

The agency had a relationship with the Milwaukee Women’s Center and plenty of research with key insights about domestic violence and negative family and social impact of domestic violence. This campaign was recognized by the United Nations, Lurzer’s International Archive and led to me getting a letter published in Dear Abby.

For nearly a decade I was able to work closely with the marketing team at SCHEELS, creating the SCHEELS experts campaign and taking it to TV, radio, OOH, and digital. It was a great relationship that yielded strong work and outstanding sales and customer loyalty that carried SCHEELS forward into numerous grand openings and expansions into a host of new markets.

We had a nice little run with Summerfest in the early 2000s. We were creating good work that also happened to be particularly effective at connecting and bringing the audience to the festival. The campaigns we developed coincided with three of the festival years with the highest attendence in Summerfest history.

For years and years, the Wisconsin State Fair advertising was built upon corny livestock puns that made me want to not attend the event. We got our hands on the account and said, “We’re not doing that.” We leaned into the craft, upped the ante on the art direction and headline writing, and created a campaign that was recognized by the OBIE Awards and Communication Arts.

If you’re a motorcycle rider, you might want to go to Daytona for Bike Week. And if you do, you might get hit by a car that isn’t doing a good job of sharing the road with motorcycles. This happens every year. The Motorcycle Safety Foundation asked us to create a campaign to heighten awareness of the presence of bikers and their vulnerability on the road.

The insight behind this work was that families get into a rut with dinner preparation and eat the same meals with very little variety. Over time, pizza becomes a little too familiar and pasta fails to impress. At that point, even frozen fish is seen as a step up. “Pizza Guy” won a Clio and the Milwaukee Ad Club’s best of show.

I have had a long relationship with the Potawatomi Casino and gaming in Wisconsin. Every time they were heading for expansion they seemed to be a client. When there was no gaming in Milwaukee, my first agency helped them get the votes to secure it. When they built their first “Vegas-style casino,” my agency did the grand opening. When they made a significant expansion, my agency did it again. I guess you could say they put their chips on my work.

St. Pauli Girl is a German lager best known for its reputation for high quality and the brand’s annual St. Pauli Girl pin-up poster. It’s a guy’s beer but it’s also specifically a beer for a guy with some experience and some money. Rather than objectifying women, we objectified objects to make the point. Fun fact: An outdoor board from the campaign can be seen in the background of a scene in “Exit Through The Gift Shop.”

Rowing is the oldest, and winningest, sport on campus at the University of Wisconsin. In 2024, the program celebrated its 150th anniversary. As a proud Badger rowing alumnus from a particularly successful era of the program, I was asked to create the website for the sesquicentennial. I agreed on one condition: That I’d get to pick the art director and the web developer for the project. I called my team in and this is what we put together to promote the event. It resulted in the largest athletics alumni reunion event in university history, bringing Badger rowers representing 8 separate decades back to campus for the reunion weekend.

Sometimes you just do the work because the opportunity presents itself and doing the work is fun. Silver Spur served good food, was run by a good guy and needed help because it was literally in the middle of nowhere. The ads did what they were supposed to do. They made some noise in the creative shows and created some restaurant traffic. And the client came back to us with two more restaurants and referred some additional business to us.

As higher education gets more and more expensive and the ability of students to fund their education decreases, scholarship aid becomes essential to fill the gap. Arsenal was selected by University Advancement to launch the Give Marquette scholarship aid fundraising initiative and brand. Our relationship with Marquette lasted more than a decade and included the most successful scholarship aid fundraising direct mail piece in university history.

At the height of the tech economy of the early 2000s, we had a nice run with tech clients. Enfish developed a technology that automatically organized alll of the user’s digital information on their desktop, files, email, and more making everything you are working on and looking for instantly accessible. Your information had never been more at your fingertips with a promise of optimized performance.

Headline 1: Give yourself bragging rights over the old you.

Copy: An upgrade in potential is just a download away. Enfish Onespace automatically seeks out new information from the web and brings it together with the information on your PC, pairing it in one space unique to you. So you’ll spend less time managing your information and more time unlocking the potential within it. And within you. Download your free copy at www.enfish.com. Take hold and work smarter.

Headline 2: We’re not introducing next generation software. We’re introducing next generation you.

Headline 3: Once again, intelligence outperforms effort.

These two campaigns for Johnson Controls were created for the Government and K-12 Education divisions, respectively. Here’s how it works. The government or the school district contract with Johnson Controls and they come in and make the facilities and the operations of the facilities so efficient that they produce savings that more than pay for the cost of the contract. The campaigns were successful. Johnson Controls was successful. And I’d love to tell you that the government became synonymous with efficiency and that the school districts used the savings to fund art, music, youth athletics, and increases in teachers’ salaries. But that’s not how it played out. Advertising can only do so much.

For three seasons, I got to work on the ad campaigns for the Milwaukee Brewers Baseball Club. At the time, they didn’t have a large payroll for the players and they were even more frugal with their marketing dollars. But they had some pretty good players and a scrappy manager and an ad agency that knew how to make a little go a long way.

Kathy’s House is a guest house for patients and caregivers from out of town who are receiving significant medical interventions at Froedtert Hospital. The former President and Executive Director of Kathy’s House is a dear friend so I attended their fundraising gala. The video they showed that night did not measure up to the power and impact of the work they do. As Kathy’s House was embarking on a path toward a capital campaign to build a new facility at a new location, I asked for the opportunity to get involved. They welcomed me in and the video we created together garnered numerous six-figure checks and helped them get their new location on the Froedtert campus. Super fulfilling.

“Fun Zone” could just as easily be the title for this entire website and almost my whole career. I make creative process fun for me and my creative partners. (If we’re not enjoying ourselves while we are creating and ideating, something is wrong.) I create work that works for clients so they have fun when it runs. And while money and awards are nice, I have a bit of that Foo Fighters ethos, believing that “whoever has the most fun wins.” Everything you’re seeing here brings me joy. I hope you enjoy it too.