The client had been running variations of the same TV campaign for years and wanted the reason to believe behind the 100% clear skin claim brought back to the front. Not another anthem spot.

Three things had to happen inside thirty seconds: show the transition to clear skin, land intimacy and connection as the reason it matters, and carry the major statement. That is a great deal to ask of half a minute, so we made three of them instead of one.

Building them as vignettes meant the same footage cut down for social and became the backbone of a new consumer site, rather than needing a separate shoot for each channel. The risk copy got a designed home — a static, uncontested field where the audio and supers run clean — which is what allowed the cutdowns to work without the safety information collapsing.

We also shot two dosing videos outside the campaign, autoinjector and pre-filled syringe, so the instructional assets matched the campaign's visual language instead of fighting it.

Agency: Grey NY
CD: Gerard Adderley
ACD: Julia Hunter
AD: Gerard Adderley, Avrom Coodin,
Ed Lea
CW: Janhavi Dabir, Julia Hunter

A global HCP campaign built around the nearly 100% clearance claim for Taltz (ixekizumab), an IL-17A inhibitor for plaque psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis.

Most work in the category shows the skin. We went the other way and showed the moment after: the appointment where a patient hears they are clear.

Plaque psoriasis turns up on the scalp, elbows, knees, lower back, palms, soles, face and neck, and in places patients tend not to raise unprompted. The argument for skipping the before-and-after was simple — dermatologists already know what the disease looks like. What they respond to is what full clearance means to the person sitting across from them.

Rolled out across journal advertising, a global interactive sales aid and congress panels, with the concept holding at every size from a spread down to a booth graphic.

Agency: Grey NY
CD's: Gerard Adderley, Doug Flynn, Shawn Taylor 
ACD: Julia Hunter
AD's: Gerard Adderley, Shawn Taylor, Avrom Coodin
CW's: Janhavi Dabir, Julia Hunter, Shawn Taylor 

Pythian moves companies off on-site infrastructure and onto Google Cloud. The brief was a small-budget OLV campaign for YouTube and LinkedIn.

I was still onboarding and asked the usual question: do we have a CTO or a KOL who will talk about their migration? We didn't.

So who has the biggest, oldest data management system on the planet, and could genuinely use Google Cloud's AI to sort through it? Santa.

One day, one basement — our GM's — and under $15K. A short series on how Pythian helps Santa run the naughty and nice list.

Agency: Titan ONE
Creative Director: Gerard Adderley
Art Director: Gerard Adderley
Writer: Maggie Pycherek

Most quit-smoking communication asks for a lifetime commitment up front. The First Week Challenge asks for seven days.

That is the whole idea, and it holds because the first week is where withdrawal and cravings are worst, and because getting through it with a plan in place multiplies the odds of quitting for good ninefold.

Setting the goal at one week made the ask small enough to accept and the payoff large enough to matter. Everything else worked backwards from that.

Agency: GSW Canada
EVP ECD: Kevin Fox
ACD: Gerard Adderley
Art Director: Yaping Liu
Writer: Andrea Ashby

Fibristal (ulipristal acetate) treats moderate-to-severe uterine fibroid symptoms — heavy bleeding, the anemia that follows it, and pelvic pain — in women still in their childbearing years.

The brief was to launch a new treatment indication to ObGyns without falling into the category's default imagery.

The White Campaign was built on absence: what the symptoms take away, and what comes back when they stop. That gave us one visual system that worked across physician and patient audiences instead of two separate campaigns, and gave the sales team something recognisable to open on.

Agency: Healthwise Creative
CD: Brian Groves, Gerard Adderley 
Art Director: Kevin Buirst, Kevin Chiu, Gerard Adderley
CW: Brian Groves

Bayer's Contour Next has a feature called Second-Chance Testing: if the first blood sample comes up short, more can be added to the same strip instead of throwing it away.

The functional benefit is fewer wasted strips and lower cost over time. We went at it sideways. Not everyone gets a second chance.

The campaign ran on nostalgic high school photographs. Everyone has a version of themselves they would redo given the option, and a glucose meter turns out to be one of the few places you actually get one.

Developed as pitch creative.

Agency: GSW Canada
VP ECD: Susannah Curry
ACD: Gerard Adderley
AD: Gerard Adderley
CW: Greg Brown

The assignment was to adapt the US Red Fish campaign for Canada. The problem was that ASC and Health Canada rules would not let the branded version travel intact, and a diluted adaptation would have connected with nobody.

So we stopped adapting. We built an original unbranded awareness campaign about the risks associated with blood thinners in stroke prevention for atrial fibrillation, aimed at getting patients to raise the subject with their physicians rather than at selling a molecule.

Unbranded was the only route that carried the message at full strength under Canadian rules. It also let the campaign run in places a branded execution could not go.

If you’re curious about where it all began in the U.S., take a look at the spot here: https://bit.ly/2MSLNn5.

Agency: GSW Canada
VP CD: Susannah Curry
ACD: Gerard Adderley
Art Director: Gerard Adderley, Ilana Korn
CW: Mary-Ellen Ross

Until 26 April 1998, London, Ontario had no Sunday paper of its own. Sunday meant reading about somebody else's city.

The Sunday Free Press was written in London, for London. The launch campaign made ownership the whole argument.

The tone did the work. We took shots at big-city posturing, at pro athletes negotiating in the millions, at senators living well on the public dime. Local, and slightly amused by everyone else.

And if you are up for a challenge, see if you can spot me in those pages.

Agency: Tenzing
CD: Gary Lintern, Gilles Chateau 
AD: Gerard Adderley, Steve Priebe
CW: Gary Lintern

Lung cancer charities raise less than almost any other, because the disease carries a stigma: self-inflicted, preventable, your own fault. That is the wall any appeal has to get over before it can ask for anything.

Maclean's donated the placement. We had a pro bono series to fill it.

We kept people out of it entirely. From years on Pfizer Animal Health I knew that pet owners will act on their animal's health faster than their own, so we ran the campaign on pets and implied a rise in lung cancer among them. It was not true. It was a way to get somebody to sit still long enough to read the real number: over 30,000 Canadians diagnosed this year.

Lung Cancer Canada went with a more conventional message.

One thing we left out: dogs. Lung cancer genuinely is rising among them.

Agency: Titan ONE
Creative Director: Gerard Adderley
Art Director: Gerard Adderley
Writer: Brian Groves

Dexilant is a proton pump inhibitor for GERD, erosive esophagitis and heartburn, in a category where every brand claims the same acid reduction and differentiation has to come from somewhere other than the mechanism.

We built a character. The Dexilant Knight stood for continuous defence rather than a single dose, which is the actual difference in how the product works.

As the campaign ran on, we scaled him down. A knight the size of a spread is a mascot. A knight small enough to travel with the patient is a reminder that the protection goes where they go. Same character, different argument — and it gave the brand somewhere to go in year two instead of repeating year one.

Agency: GSW Canada
VP CD: Susannah Curry
ACD: Gerard Adderley
Art Director: Gerard Adderley,
Ilana Korn
CW: Mary-Ellen Ross

Jeffrey Simbrow and Associates was one of the more creatively ambitious healthcare shops in Canada, and later became GSW Canada.

They brought me in before I officially joined to work up a campaign around the line UNLEASH YOUR BRANDS.

The concept came from animals. Domesticated, they are pleasant enough. Released, you remember what they actually are. The same is true of brands that have been managed into safety — the power is still in there, it has just been trained out of them.

Agency self-promotion, which is its own kind of brief: no client to blame, and everyone in the building has an opinion.

Agency: JSA
CD: Elly Miller
AD: Gerard Adderley

Bridgestone's Off the Road division needed to move its sales force and pull traffic to a trade show, with VIP tickets to the Vancouver Indy as the incentive.

In forestry and mining, downtime is the entire conversation. If the tires, the technicians and the service crew are not ready the moment a machine stops, the client is already calling a competitor.

The Indy tickets handed us the analogy. The OTR team works like a pit crew — no uniforms, same urgency. We shot with the Indy's own photographer for the pit crew half, then went up to Northern Ontario to photograph a Mega Loader working.

Agency: Cormark Communications
Creative Director: Rob Porschak 
Art Director: Gerard Adderley
Writer: Cam Buchan

NuvaRing delivers the same hormones as many oral contraceptives, once a month instead of once a day.

We built a branded, indication-free digital and social campaign to drive curiosity. The concept was simple: men do not get it. Hand a guy a NuvaRing and watch him work out what it is for. Women got the joke immediately.

The client bought it. It tested as well as anything I had put in front of a group. We were casting in Montreal.

Then Ad Standards caught what none of us had. NuvaRing was the only product of its kind on the market, and the form factor was in the brand name — so naming the product at all effectively communicated the indication. Indication-free was impossible. The campaign breached Ad Standards, PAAB and Health Canada rules before a frame was shot.

The lesson has been useful ever since: never put the form factor in a prescription brand name. If it had been called almost anything else, that campaign would have run.

PRESEPT is a hospital-grade disinfectant in tablet form, effective on surfaces contaminated with blood and organic matter where lighter hypochlorites fail: MRSA, HIV, Hepatitis B, Herpes.

Infection control buyers do not need persuading that disinfection matters. They need to believe a product holds up under ward conditions rather than lab conditions.

So we made the tablet the hero and played it straight.

That's one tough tablet.

Annual reports were the bulk of my six years at Equicom, and the most demanding deadline work I have done.

An annual report is a regulated disclosure document that also has to argue a case. Investors, boards and analysts each read it differently, and the design has to serve the obligation and the persuasion at the same time without either one showing.

I led reports across liquor, biotech, retail, resources, software and intelligence technology — strategy and concept through to final design, usually against a print date that could not move.

This is also where I learned to sit across from a CFO and defend a layout on business grounds rather than aesthetic ones.