Josh Denberg

The last campaign I worked on for Stytch was based on an insight that everyone understands, “passwords suck”. So the campaign focused on the benefit of a Passwordless internet. This campaign is much more focused and talks only to developers. And it’s safe to say almost no one else understands it. This is by design. It allows those who "get it" to share something with Stytch and, therefore, it helps build an emotional connection to the brand. Read more about the campaign HERE.

Agency: Division of Labor.

My friend Nick Cade called and asked, “Dude, you like football? Wanna work on a cool project?” NBC Sports wanted ideas to promote Sunday Night Football and Nick was putting together a group to collaborate on ideas. Week four, the Sunday Night Game was Brady and the Bucs vs. Mahomes and the Chiefs. The best QB of all time vs the best QB of his generation. And we had the perfect song.

Agency: Ugly

Properly pairing food and wine is a culinary art. But a bottle of Bogle pairs better with a ball game, a book club, or a movie night.  Bogle is one of the best wines out there for around $10. So it’s for regular people who love wine, not wine snobs. And that was the insight that led to this campaign; “Better with Bogle” is based on the notion that plain, old everyday life activities are made just a little better with a glass of wine.

Wrote and directed some videos for Live Nation as part of a big content package to play at Live Nation venues across the country. Rodents on Turntables took off on the interwebs after Vimeo named it a Staff Pick. And thanks to the internet's mildly twisted sense of humor, it got well over a million views and was picked up by publications around the world.

This campaign for Statsig is a great example of simple outdoor and awareness building that drives traffic to the website of a series B startup and helps the sales team close deals by creating talk value and name recognition that can help with conversion. Statsig built a product development platform that helps technology companies use feature flags, A/B testing and other tools to test and experiment with different product features. I worked closely with their internal team to understand their product and develop messages that got the right people talking in the San Francisco product development community. The campaign drove a significant increase in web traffic and helped Statsig convert new customers and drive revenue. Read more about the campaign here.

California Forever is a real estate development corporation that bought up 50,000 acres of land in Solano County California with the hope of building a brand new city from scratch. This will be a project that helps bring affordable housing and thousands of good-paying jobs to an area that has been lagging behind the rest of the Bay Area for years. But before anything can happen, we need to win a ballot measure that will change the zoning in the county so discussions with the community can begin.

Why hire me for your next political campaign? CLICK HERE

Palm Tree Photo by Matthew : https://www.pexels.com/photo/low-angle-shot-of-tall-palm-trees-2843581/

The universal hatred of passwords is the campaign theme for Stytch’s inaugural advertising campaign. I worked with the San Francisco startup through Division of Labor to help remind the world of what we all already know; passwords suck. And Stytch is going to help the internet Go Passwordless.

If you like this, check out this campaign for Mandiant.

The first season I worked with the Sharks, they went to the Stanley Cup. Obviously, I had nothing to do with that, but come on, the power of advertising. I wrote and directed these spots and got to work with Burns, Thornton, Pavelski, and the whole team. A great bunch of guys. The Sharks For Life campaign won an Emmy and I still work with the Sharks to this day and hope they’ll be playing hockey at the Shark Tank again soon.

Press from ESPN and the NHL:

http://es.pn/2iXNzWc

http://atnhl.com/2jQMON3

http://atnhl.com/2dAXiOT

El Camino Health has been the hospital of Silicon Valley for 60 years. They recently expanded adding a network of doctors and specialists across the South Bay. But in a community that expects the very best of everything and with Stanford just down the street, it was important for ECH to share its unique point of view. They believe world-class medical care should be delivered with respect and compassion. Innovative treatment options and cutting-edge procedures should be administered while treating people like, well, people. El Camino Health does not answer to any for-profit body, but instead answers only to the community. And they believe you should Accept Nothing Less.

How come gas is the only product that never goes on sale?

That question is the premise behind the first Ford campaign I wrote. It was picked up by Ford dealer groups across the country and aired in New York on the Superbowl. It was directed by Neil Tardio.

The next campaign I wrote after getting a call from Global Team Blue in Detroit just before Christmas. I was told, “We have this strategy; ‘And is better than Or’. But we don’t have any scripts that work.” So Paul Hirsch and I wrote this campaign and Tim Godsall directed. There were, I think, ten spots total and they did really well for Ford, testing through the roof and airing nationally for months.

Problem: Most museum visitors were members and were going in for free. We needed to increase revenue by targeting a whole new audience.

Solution: This campaign speaks to San Francisco tourists and ties the city's top tourist destinations to the museum's most famous artworks. The campaign used digital and social to build awareness and then outdoor and geo-fenced mobile on the ground.

Results: The campaign increased museum attendance by 48%, increased website traffic by 35%, and increased the average ticket price by 14%.

Advertising campaign to launch Raytheon’s new Future of Aerospace and Defense campaign. I wrote this while working with the ad agency Doremus. Editorial and production was with 1606 Studios. Josh Locker Art Director, Paul Hirsch Creative Director.

I've been fortunate to work with Nike on a number of projects over the years, including: Nike Mountain Biking with the GT Team, ACG Hiking, Women's Crossfit and Nike Snowboarding. I also worked on Nike Cycling with Lance Armstrong following his first Tour de France win, before everyone realized what a scumbag he was. 

Marin Foster Care needed to get the community to realize that there are a lot of kids in the county that need help. Sure, Marin is a wealthy place, but there are plenty of kids in the foster system that need care and a place to live.

Raley’s was launching its delivery service and needed a social campaign that built awareness and encouraged trial. Since 80% of social video is viewed without sound, we developed a visual idea that brought the concept to life. Trial was up 5x over previous digital efforts and CTRs exceeded norms by 3x.

“Solutions Before Problems” was the first tagline I wrote for Pagerduty. But I had to write, like, 100 more before they bought it and launched the campaign. I also wrote the digital, social and outdoor executions but it was a great collaboration with Pagerduty’s internal marketing team. Their attitude and ability to convey the brand personality was instrumental in the work. I worked closely with them to write the website, as well, which required really digging in, and learning about their operations and how they help so many Fortune 500 companies. The campaign increased brand awareness and drove trial amongst developers and c-suite executives. Thanks to Collins for their incredible brand design work. Your visual language made all this possible.

This campaign helped launch Opendoor in new markets across the country. The spot brought to life everything the company was trying to change about the home selling process. And in just three months in our first test market, the campaign more than doubled brand awareness and market share; Results that had taken 5 years to achieve in previous markets.

Over 2,000 outdoor and digital units for the streaming service Roku, including page takeovers, train station takeovers, sides of buildings, and more. The campaign increased holiday sales by over 30% two years in a row in every market that ran the campaign. And it got at least one complaint from a librarian who thought that books have tremendous value without being turned into movies. I agree. But it’s still funny.

Situation: Millions of people were already using Dropbox at home. But most didn't know that Dropbox offered a distinct business product. 

Results: This campaign more than doubled unaided awareness and more than tripled aided awareness putting Dropbox on par with Google Drive. Plus, the campaign drove over 14,000 conversions and ran successfully for over two years.

You want talking animals? We got talking animals. The good folks at Doremus asked me to work on a campaign for RXO and Hans Segar and I came up with this. I got to do the voice of the egret, as well. So if you need a writer who can also sound like a neurotic Jersey longshoreman stuck in the body of an endangered species who eats insects off the hooves of cattle, I’m your man.

The University of California San Francisco Hospital does incredible work. They develop innovative cancer therapies, explore treatments to combat aging, research pain, fight cardiovascular disease, work with stem cells and so much more. This outdoor campaign was designed to build local awareness of the important work being done right here in San Francisco.

A campaign to launch MetroMile, pay per mile car insurance that charges you only for the miles you drive.

The biggest thing a person can do for the environment is to switch to an electric car. But people in the Bay Area are already pretty environmentally conscious. So you have to give them credit for all the small things they do and then encourage them to step it up. I’m proud of this campaign because it directly sold 87 electric cars in 6 weeks; that’s, like, two cars a day. And the media spend was only 14k on social media. That’s less than $150 bucks per car. (I can do math sometimes too.)

The Detour is a TBS comedy created by Samantha Bee and Jason Jones. It’s funny and pretty messed up. So we did a series of animated videos starring a depraved stick figure family.

There are tons of great craft beers out there. But too many behave more like wine. So we took craft beer back from the hipsters in skinny jeans crowd and returned it to people who just love drinking great beer. 

Raley’s Grocery is a California based chain of about 140 stores. For their Something Extra Savings program, I wrote a series of instore and outdoor signage and photographed actual customers with the foods they purchase most. The photographer is Cody Pickens.

While BART commuter trains actually run over capacity, off-peak ridership was somewhat low. This campaign tells people about all the great things in the Bay Area, besides work, that are Bartable. 

A manifesto video I did with the folks at Doremus and 1606 Editorial when we launched their Stay Relentless campaign.

How do you get someone to consider becoming a foster parent? It’s not like getting them to buy your socks or try your bleach. It’s a major commitment. And the truth is all of us want to believe we’re good people. Even though all of us, sometimes, do things that are not so good. That’s where the human insight for this advertising campaign comes from. Becoming a foster parent makes up for any cruddy thing you do. If someone pulls their huge SUV into a compact spot, they’re a jerk. But if you find out they’re a foster parent? Well you park anywhere you want, you foster parent you. Fostering. It makes up for a lot.

Problem: Ambassador was a dusty brand that needed to be discovered by a new audience as cocktails and spirits were increasing in popularity vs. beer and wine amongst a younger demographic.

Strategy: Embrace what makes you different and turn the perceived negative into a positive. “Scotch from another era” took the outdated thinking of the past and made fun of it to make a point.

Results: An award-winning POP campaign that increased distributor awareness, orders, and shelf space at retail.

Raley’s holiday campaign is based on the notion that a diverse group of people call Northern California home. And no two families are alike when it comes to holiday traditions. With different family structures, dietary restrictions, beliefs, rituals, and quirks, it seems everyone does the holidays a little differently. But we all still have a lot in common.

I’ve written a lot of campaigns for food brands and packaged goods. This campaign for TFK, Eat More Color, is more a design exercise where the writing is meant to support the beauty of the photography and the combination of macro food shots mixed with more traditional arrangements.

Part of being a copywriter is knowing when to stop writing. Scott Aal, Faruk Sagcan and Drew Weber also played big parts in this campaign.

Some of the work I've done for different startups in the Bay Area. A film for Groupon, another to launch Klout. (Wait, what the hell is Klout?) And a few campaigns for software startups Prezi and Asana. 

Other job sites brag about their sheer number of job listings. This campaign encouraged people to focus on finding that one job you'll actually love.

Rock Paper Photo is one of the largest collections of historic rock and roll photography in the world. We were given access to the full collection in order to create this campaign that ran inside Live Nation concert venues across the country. 

To launch a new sitcom on TBS, we aired a commercial in Boston promoting the fake sitcom barbershop where the show takes place. Then we created the Bad Haircut Hall of Fame and invited the internet to send in their worst haircut tragedies.

Problem: No one knew what ETFs were. And institutional brokers made more money selling mutual funds.

Solution: Make brokers feel like dinosaurs if they weren’t in the know about ETFs. Tagline: Keep Evolving.

Results:

> iShares awareness rose and made them a household name in ETFs.

> BlackRock bought iShares and made them even bigger.

This video for Groupon won at the AICP awards and is now included in the archives of MOMA.

Just a few of the radio campaigns I've written. There's a lot more, but let's be honest, it's radio. Right?

Some work for Discover Card, Directed by Peter Care. Cracker Jack, directed by Joe Public. Chef Boyardee, directed by Phil Morrison. TNT, directed in collaboration with Turner Productions and Chicago’s power company, ComEd, starring a mess of plastic snowmen, directed by Sam Jones.

Chronicle Books published our book Stop Tweeting Boring Sh*t after a poster series we made took a viral trip around the internet and caught their attention. The book takes a humorous look at how people work in today's office environment. Besides creating some guidelines for the modern office worker to follow, we also studied the behavior of 750 actual office workers around the country. And we gathered statistics to quantify such important topics as, "The most vile office smells and "The percentage of people who steal office supplies."

I write this commercial at the height of the dot com boom while at Goodby Silverstein and partners. The company went out of business years ago, but the spot still gets viewed online in multiple places. Todd Sandler is the actor who made it so funny and Tom Routson directed with the famous Vilmos Zsigmond as the cinematographer.

Consumer Campaign: The majority of people don’t know what health savings accounts are. So for Lively to dominate the category, we had to grow the category.

Trade Campaign: At the same time, we had to convince brokers to not make their HSA an afterthought.

Both the consumer outdoor and the trade digital worked in concert to achieve both goals; increasing signups and adding accounts.

Additional writing credits to Drew Weber.