What Were You Thinking?

Biggest sports gadget's rise and crash

Adam Selwyn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-selwyn-847a325/] wasn't meant to be an account executive. He admits it. His talents are best suited for a creative and strategy director. For his last assignment on the account side, he took over the communications of an upstart sports bracelet brand called Power Balance [https://www.powerbalance.com/pages/about-us]. Adam led the brand through a meteoric rise. He started by changing the narrative that culminated with a 5-page story [https://www.espn.com/espn/news/story?id=5660039] in ESPN The Magazine's coveted "Bodies Issue." After 18 months of unbridled chaos, full of highs and lows, Power Balance's owner's "flew too close to the sun" and they crashed spectacularly.

When you think like an outsider

Getting into a creative groove is like a runner’s high... without the bad knees. So says Producer and Editor Ayser Salman [https://www.aysersalman.com/]. While editing the content series Pose: Identity, Family, Community [https://youtu.be/Dapl4zFEnpE], she achieved that feeling. But not before struggling to overcome her imposter syndrome anxieties.  After editing at Miramax and The Weinstein Company for many years, Ayser took a leap of faith to become a freelancer. She was rewarded by working on the promotional series for the groundbreaking FX series, Pose. Tasked with a storytelling style vastly different than the bulk of her previous experience, Ayser leaned in to those differences and earned two Emmy nominations and a Clio award.

Understood launches program during worst time possible

The pandemic changed the way many work. Especially those in the creative industry. Understood is a non-profit dedicated to guiding and helping the 1 in 5 people with learning and thinking differences. The organization was in the middle of a rebrand and launching many new initiatives when Covid changed the way not only people work, but the way their children learn. Understood’s Executive Creative Director, Scott Cocchiere [https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottcocchiere/], leads the creative and production teams. In the middle of what he calls the worst moment in the history of time, he decided to go ahead and launch a program called “The Quarantine Chronicles [https://www.understood.org/articles/en/we-got-through-quarantine-what-happens-now].” The Quarantine Chronicles provided a personal look into the lives of families during lockdown. Sharing real stories and helpful advice from families in quarantine. Getting the Chronicles done required Scott and his team to trailblaze new ways of working and hope for the best.

The wheels came off during filming. Literally.

A broken race car suspension. Life-threatening severe thunderstorms. A bout of the stomach flu. These are just a few of the obstacles producer/director Barrett Tripp faced in a span of 48 hours while filming for Microsoft. The brand film he was producing for Microsoft, carried some heavy burdens: demonstrate his agency’s new integrated capabilities and marketing approach, and create a “big rock” that makes an impactful splash for his client. Three-quarters of the way into the shoot, things weren’t looking good. In this pilot episode, host Barrett Tripp [https://www.linkedin.com/in/barretttripp/] takes us blow-by-blow through his own story of creating the brand film "How Fast is Fast?" [https://youtu.be/2X2zO8HO9Ts] when he was an Executive Producer at Text100.