PLAY WARM

If you're cold, you're thinking about being cold. If you're thinking about being cold, you're not thinking about the game.

As interns at W+K Portland, Jay Kamath and I created “Play Warm” for Nike’s Cold Pro line, producing TV, radio, print and some other knick-knacks. It was my first project in advertising. Some say I started at the finish line.

And yes, the VO is me. Last residual check was $.000014 after taxes.

NERDS hadn’t much of a social presence until I started writing rhyme couplets for them….to the tune of 129.6% rise in sales.

MOST INTERESTING MAN IN THE WORLD

The man, the myth, the advertising juggernaut. I wrote countless social posts for this award-winning rake. Here are just a handful.

My favorite kind of assignment: write ten thousand headlines to get New Yorkers excited about animals.

Here are a few I penned for my friends at Six+One.

To date, I have written over a dozen cartoons for the New Yorker, collaborating with two fantastic illustrators:

Harry Bliss is an acclaimed cartoonist and hilarious human being. I emailed him asking if he'd draw up some of my ideas. His response: "How’d you get my email?" The rest is history. In addition to the New Yorker, our joint works have appeared in the LA Times, Boston Globe and Chicago Tribune.

Corey Pandolph is another crazy talented artist. Here you'll see our cartoons tagged "Pandolph/Baldo" ...because those are our names.

Honestly, writing for these guys is way easier than winning the New Yorker cartoon caption contest.

I bet you didn’t know that guy from Breaking Bad was also an expert on cyber security for your work laptop. Now you can rest easy.

I wrote and copy supervised this series of online videos for HP featuring Jonathan Banks.

1% cash back at purchase. 1% cash back when you pay your bill. That right there is DOUBLE cash back!

Actually most cards at the time offered at least 2% cash back. What Citibank did was clever, breaking up when the loot arrived back in your pocket. Seeing savings at the register and on bill-pay day gave us a unique story to tell.

We even helped design the card.

While I can’t take credit for penning “The Future of Awesome,” I did write a nice TV spot and encompassing print/digital for Xfinity’s WiFi FOR ALL campaign.

I lost the battle over soundtrack. Client voted Flo Rida, whose song “My House” was featured in 1,306 other ads at the time.

DON'T WORK IN THE PAST
Brand Launch

In this OLV series, we featured Gary Cole in the role of Bill Lumbergh from Office Space as the perfect relic of a business past we're all trying to leave behind.

 

No matter the product, I always kick off scripts – “OPEN ON A BEACH IN HAWAII.” So when the work sells, we get to shoot in Hawaii. Thanks Craig!

For First Hawaiian Bank, we knew the spots would shoot in Honolulu. No need to ‘open on a beach’ there.

So the spots sell, and off to Hawaii we went.

Or off they went. Freelancers weren’t sent on shoots.

We’ll meet one day, beach in Hawaii.

LESSONS IN 3CONOMICS

My first full-time ad gig and I end up creating a global QSR campaign, writing and producing over two dozen TV and radio spots.

Directed by Chris Smith (Fyre, American Movie, Wham!), the campaign helped Wendy's eclipse Burger King in sales during the ‘08 recession, while earning me a Golden Bagel at KBS. Also, check out a young David Dastmalchian (Dune, Oppenheimer, The Dark Night, Suicide Squad). Great guy who still sends me whacky holiday cards.

Ad Age wrote: "Wendy's has done a nice job in positioning its menu of inexpensive sandwiches under the '3Conomics' banner. And – even more refreshing – it has not resorted to a desperate hard-hitting tone in the work. Instead, it's continued with the effective use of humor, while clearly expressing the 3Conomics value idea. Who says you can't sell with a smile in hard financial times?"

ALWAYS AL DENTE

Lovely little one-off for Barilla, shot on the Amalfi Coast. I love telling stories through pasta or anything you toss at me.

GENERAL BRAND

Ad Age: Where’d ya get your start, Randall Park?

Randall: Bringing Craig Baldo’s razor sharp copywriting to life in Verizon commercials.

From sizzle reels to TV one-offs to print campaigns, my time freelancing on Verizon at mcGarrybowen was its own sizzle reel.

TOMORROW WIDE OPEN

What the average retirement plan lacks is the idea of a future that is constantly evolving. Best keep tomorrow wide open. Our campaign featured TV, print and radio (not featured).

I love this spot. I remember my first time witnessing the magic of an animation house, where you just hand them a dry script and they create a beautiful world for it.

For seven Emmy-award winning seasons, I served as the warm-up act for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Having done warm-up for years for the likes of Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, Jimmy Fallon, Hasan Minhaj and many others, I feel that constantly generating new material for an intelligent, millennial/gen Z audience is the ultimate form of creative exercise. It's basically cross-fit for my brain.

With literally trillions of hits, my Modern Love piece about divorce was 'most shared' in the Times for the week of November 6, 2017. So mind-shattering, they translated it into Spanish.

After writing the first few posts as Trojan Man, my creative director said to me, “Wow, Craig, you really nailed the voice.”

“Oh you mean the voice of a guy who speaks in sexual innuendo?”

Real stretch.

MAKE THE WISER CALL

Targeted toward male sports fans who might typically drink beer on game day, we came up with fun, familiar scenarios evoking bar smarts – the same smarts you’d use to order whisky over beer. 

Not only did we create a slew of 30s, but also OLV featuring recaps of the spots with, might I say, hilarious commentary.

When I look back on the ads I've seen, I remember a bunch of smart, funny, shareable lines. I try to tweet lines like that.

If working in the Nike Quad at Wieden doesn't turn you into a sneaker head, it certainly rouses you to invent a custom wooden drawer component designed to resemble classic Nike shoeboxes neatly stacked for housing dozens of pairs of kicks in any spatially challenged room.

Behold the Nike Kickstack.

My stand-up has always informed my work as a copywriter. It's essentially the same insight-excavating muscle.

Nike Backyard was a line of branded game sets and swag that celebrated backyard sports like tetherball, horseshoes and badminton. We still rallied you to Just Do It, but in this domain with less intensity, more joy and nostalgia.

Wieden + Kennedy loved our Backyard idea and featured the work in their annual "Wild Pitch" presentation to Nike.

I've been part of major, real-time social response war rooms for events including the Oscars and Superbowl XLVII for Samsung, as well as the AMC Critic's Choice Movie and TV Awards.

I was a staff writer for the 2013 MTV VMAs where I penned presenter copy for Taylor Swift, A$AP Rocky and a host of other enormous egos. Point is, I can churn out poignant, fact-checked, spell-checked pieces of copy in under 140 characters before Kanye can hijack the next acceptance speech.

SOBRO – A WEB SERIES

This is what happens when I go too long without a gig that allows me to write witty dialogue.

SoBro (South Brooklyn) is set in the trendy, child-riddled neighborhood of Cobble Hill. It revolves around two 40-something dads who struggle to advance their lives despite being stunted, self-sabotaging man-children. Only now, the race is on to make something of themselves before their kids are old enough to recognize failure.