At the height of the pandemic, the Ad Council and the CDC issued an open brief to the largest media companies in the world — among them NBCUniversal, Disney, and Paramount. Our concepts were selected, and the winning work was adopted and run across those networks and platforms as donated media — a single creative approach that cleared federal public-health review and carried across the entire industry.

The Mask Entrepreneurs profiled young founders who had built small businesses around face coverings during the pandemic, produced entirely remotely under the same health protocols the work was promoting. It reached a younger audience through people already inside that community rather than through institutional messaging — the credibility coming from the subjects, not the brand.

A second concept extended the message to older audiences by drawing on WarnerMedia’s content library, using widely recognized characters to carry a simple, universal public-health point. I conceived, pitched, and sold the concept; it was produced by a separate team after my involvement.

Both ideas performed well enough to be adopted across additional studios, platforms, and broadcasters as donated media — a public-health message that earned distribution well beyond its original placement.