Reading aloud can be scary for kids. 'What if I say it wrong?', 'What if someone laughs?' So, to boost their confidence and fast track their learning, we've created Dogphonics. A set of 5 books, specifically designed to be read to a good listener, someone who’s extremely patient, full of love and never judgemental. A dog.

It might sound like ad science, but Pedigree actually funded a study by The Waltham Petcare Science Institute, who found that a dog as a listener can improve a child’s sense of confidence, moderate feelings of anxiety, and provide support.

Book titles include, ‘It Was Not Me, I Did Not Eat The Alphabet’ and ‘Where Are My Pants?’, which is about a dog coming to terms with its bareness. ‘A Brief History of Squirrels’, and ‘The Ball That Lost its Bounce’ to follow. The books are available in stores, online and soon in every Dollar General in North America.

Technology is smart, but not smart enough to know the impact it has on our health. So, being the big phone-slinging telco, it’s Spark’s responsibility to make sure kids build a healthy relationship with it, and that starts with screen time. But this doesn’t mean policing it. Things like that already exist. It means giving kids a fun way to manage it themselves.

So we partnered with Gilbert Rugby to develop a smart ball that helps kids balance screen time with active playtime, minute for minute. They unlock badges for new throws, kicks and insane stunt bonuses while also unlocking screen time.

Play by Spark was the first initiative for the Play platform we developed, designed to help kids build a healthier relationship with technology.

Our bodies are generally quite disgusting, but not in Medibank’s opinion. The Australian health insurer believes they hold every ounce of our potential and understandably want to protect that. So, in between helping them navigate a pretty severe cyber attack, we’ve been busy building their brand with a nauseatingly optimistic tone of voice, which sits somewhere between Ted Lasso and Sir David Attenborough.

The cyber attack has delayed some bigger projects, but if I had to pick a few bits to date, they’d be these…

Bringing a zero beer to market in the craft category feels doable. But trying to encourage die-hard Export drinkers to go zero felt like lunacy, until we approached it with more lunacy - 15 average kiwi beer drinkers perform a feat of precision that would be impossible if they were anything less that 100%.

This film might be an unnecessarily elaborate response to old mate’s question: ‘Why are we drinking these?’. But it should arm Kiwis with the perfect rebuttal if they’re getting ribbed for drinking a zero beer.

I don’t want to pay for Squarespace’s premium subscription with extra gallery pages, so I’ve summarised the campaigns I’m struggling to let go of in a single piece of print, OOH or film.

Holding the world to ransom isn’t ok…unless it’s for a great cause. So in my spare time, Colenso BBDO kindly backed this proactive idea that I wrote and directed. It got a ‘lol’ from Richard Curtis, but a ‘please stop this’ from James Blunt’s manager. And while we didn’t get a yes, it resulted in a heap of social media attention for ReliefAid - a small New Zealand based humanitarian charity who most definitely deserve that attention.

A proactive idea that breathes life into the archaic subscription plan. By committing to a 300 year subscription you’re preserving the planet so National Geographic Magazine can keep documenting it. We’re still pitching the idea, but if you’ve got a contact…please forward it on. Also, please excuse the shameless plug.

Even though we’ve heard the fable a billion times, no kid wants to be the tortoise. So to give them more of a reason to act like the cool and composed reptile, we retold the tale for Transport for London. It was an easy job making the hares appear hare-brained. Giving a tortoise swagger was not an easy job, but Sarah Dunlop somehow managed to do it. The tired old fable felt more relevant than ever, and became part of a bigger ‘Think Slow’ initiative.

Raid71 did the supporting artwork that was clean-stencilled next to busy London roads.

Having created campaigns for Spark under ‘Little Can Be Huge’, I was tasked with coming up with the next enduring platform in hope that it generates a whole new brand universe of stuff. While ‘Update The World’ was liked, ‘Hello Tomorrow’ got the overall vote from client. It’s a simple piece of language that’ll set the tone for everything the New Zealand telco does, internally and externally.

The Royal Mail doesn’t just handle your post, they handle lots of personal information. So it’s in their best interest to make customers aware of the potential threats. To do this, we created a series of short films that demonstrate what your online behaviour looks like offline.

The symptoms of mental illness can be misconstrued as bad behaviour, sloppy attendance and poor grades. If you knew what those suffering from mental illness were going through, you wouldn’t laugh…so we got Michael’s classmates to confirm how unfunny it is. We didn’t tell them what he’d be talking about, so they’re all genuine reactions from the first take.

We worked with John O'Driscoll and co-wrote an adaptation of Stand Up Kid for a fringe theatre show. The playscript is below, although I’m not expecting anyone to actually read it all.

If I had to give this an AI prompt, it would be: ‘plant pornography’ , but Midjourney didn’t exist back then. Instead, I hand built everything and got Catherine Losing to do the photography.

The seedy book celebrates plant reproduction and proceeds go to The Bee Cause. The books sell at the Tate London Shop, The Design Museum, Magma London, and Artwords.

It sounds like a really bad episode of Black Mirror, but Baxter the singing dog somehow managed to win the heart of every animal lover in the UK. And not just because the voice behind Baxter was Rhys Ifans. Our aim was to do Gloria Gaynor's smash hit justice, and make an adoption film where the dog doesn’t meet their untimely demise come the end of the ad. I think we just about did it.

In an attempt to get kids eating healthily, Recipe Stories is a set of books that combine 'fun' narratives with simple recipes. The main character always succeeds by eating the right food for the job. The books are sold in Borders bookstores across the UK.

Yep, more dog stuff. This time it’s a global project for Pedigree adoption. We’re currently in treatment phase, but should be updating this part of the site soon.