Short film conceived with Work-Order Design for People For The American Way Foundation as a pro bono project to defend the U.S. postal service during the pandemic and the electoral process.
The spot received over 1 million views. Retweeted by Norman Lear, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Ava DuVernay, Barbara Streisand, Bette Midler, Dan Rather, Judd Apatow, Sarah Silverman, Kerry Washington, Ron Howard.
Multiple campaigns for Kate Spade.
Ten year anniversary campaign for Kate Spade. For this ten page insert with a running narrative, we threw a party at New York's vivid, compelling Explorer's Club, invited friends, shared a costume closet and Jessica Craig Martin shot it. We ate like Stevedores!
Agency: Kate Spade
Copywriter: Risa Mickenberg
Photographer: Jessica Craig Martin
Creative Director: Julia Leach, Andy Spade
Created the advertising and brand image for Whole Foods Market with Partners & Spade
It brought all of the work that Whole Foods Market does to the fore by connecting the benefits of food to the way it's grown and raised.
It worked to overcome peoples' fears about the brand's elitism and get to the groundbreaking, important work they do to provide markets for more sustainably farmed food, and better farming conditions and to improve the food supply for everyone, and everything, in the food chain.
BRAND MANIFESTO:
We are freaks of nature.
Passionately principled.
Wild enthusiasts.
We are hunters and gatherers of what’s right with the world.
There’s so much greater out there that we have no shelf space in our hearts for anything lesser.
We don’t believe in putting our customers in a position to compromise. We stand firmly on the ground of good, of better and of best.
We won’t stand for selling what we can’t stand behind.
We believe in healthy skepticism.
We think labels give room to explain, not hide.
We think profit and value can be measured in lots of different ways. We think movements get momentum when they feed the greater good. We think good needs to include betterment of all living things.
We are champions of the plant and animal kingdoms.
Whole Foods Market.
Agency: Partners & Spade
With Anthony Sperduti, Christine Gignac, Elizabeth Dilk, Tina Smith
Target needed a long term campaign to elevate the style credibility of Target as a whole and work across everything Target would do.
I developed the campaign "Target-style" which created a template for Target's brand work that has run for four years now and counting.
BRAND MANIFESTO:
We see the world, Target-style:
Where style doesn’t live in a bubble,
it lives in everything.
In bright blue of a sweater and tights and All and Cheer.
It brings everything in our life into play.
Tea lights, chalk stripes…
Mossimo, Nabisco…
Target gives it all style.
Because, for our guests, style isn’t a separate department-
Style lives throughout.
That’s why we love to come to Target.
Target gives us something beyond great design for a great price:
It inspires us all to live life with style.
It inspires us to see life, Target-style.
Agency: Mother New York
Design Director: Michael Ian Kaye
Creative Director: Risa Mickenberg
Created the platform, tagline and language for the Jaguar Gorgeous campaign. It spoke to the unique appeal of Jaguar cars: the instinctive, emotional, even irrational pull of they have on people.
JAGUAR: GORGEOUS. MANIFESTO
Gorgeous deserves your immediate attention.
Gorgeous is decadent.
Gorgeous doesn’t have to lift a finger.
Gorgeous stays up late and still looks gorgeous.
Gorgeous doesn’t need to rationalize.
Gorgeous doesn’t care about logic.
No matter how gorgeous behaves, gorgeous is always forgiven.
Gorgeous doesn’t care at all about what others are doing.
Gorgeous is used to attracting attention.
Gorgeous can be as daring as it likes.
Gorgeous doesn’t care what anyone says.
But everyone cares what gorgeous says.
Gorgeous gets in everywhere.
Gorgeous can’t be ordinary even if it tries.
Gorgeous always looks like it’s never worked a day in its life.
Gorgeous can get away with anything.
Everything comes easily to gorgeous.
Infuriating, isn’t it?
Life’s gorgeous when you’re gorgeous.
It’s Pavlovian.
It turns desire into need.
It’s the human response to a Jaguar:
Gorgeous.
Agency: Euro RSCG
Copywriter: Risa Mickenberg
Creative Directors: Hal Wolverton + Alicia Johnson
This Volvo campaign was about the feeling of safety between people that the safety of a Volvo can strengthen.
I didn't write that tag line but did create these three commercials.
Agency: Euro RSCG
Art Director: Julie Lamb
Creative Director: Jeff Kling
Creative director: co-created and ran, for three years, the first ever national campaign for Snapple Natural Beverages which introduced Wendy The Snapple Lady as the brand's spokesperson.
It was 100% real: real letters, real customers and Wendy, who answered the mail at Snapple and was 100% natural.
The campaign ran for three years, made Snapple a huge success, and made the irresistibly endearing Wendy a classic spokeswoman of advertising.
Agency: Kirshenbaum & Bond
Copywriter: Risa Mickenberg
Art Director: Amy Nicholson
Producer: Bruce Wellington
Director: Steve Kessler
Editor: Chris Franklin
Chico's had a cultured, stylish, vibrant customer and target: mostly women in their 40s and up. This embraced self-confidence and a "lifestyle" of cultural activities and literary affections and created a enlightened, joyful insight into the psyche of the Chico's customer.
Agency: Toth Brand Imaging
Copywriter: Risa MIckenberg
Art Director: Kimberlee Etan
Photographer/Director: Pamela Hanson
An international campaign that simply equated drinking water with beauty. The campaign itself was a thing of universal beauty; when it ran as we intended - with no copy at all, it transcended all language and cultural barriers and defining a universal kind of beauty by not depicting people at all.
It launched in the Time Warner building with rows and rows of flowers in Evian bottles and, anecdotally, was put up on teenaged girls' walls the way they used to hang up Absolut ads. :)
EVIAN BRAND MANIFESTO:
Can beauty come from a bottle?
The simple answer is yes.
Beauty can come from a bottle of Evian.
With its single, perfect ingredient: true, pure mineral spring water.
Evian is a simple source of nourishment, sustenance, vitality, life.
It changes your body. Moisturizes and nourishes your skin. Helps you thrive.
Because every drop of Evian comes from a pure, natural spring, deep in the heart of the French Alps, where it’s filtered for over fifteen years through pristine glacial formations.
Evian has the naturally-occurring minerals, purity, and perfect pH-balance that make your skin glow. It makes you bloom. You feel it immediately.
Can beauty come from a bottle? Drink it and see.
When you choose a bottled water to believe in, consider the source.
Agency: Euro RSCG
Copywriter: Risa Mickenberg
Art Director: Chris Shipman
Brand development and campaigns for Chance, a brand developed by Kate Spade creative director Julia Leach.
CHANCE: Brand Manifesto
A line that stays in your mind.
A line that rings true.
A line that sums it all up.
An evocative line.
A line that stays with you.
A line that’s a classic.
The unexpected, the discovered, the personal, the things that ring true to us, all find us.
A place, a person, a thing that clicks.
That stays with you.
The things we love most are the things we find by Chance.
*********
To introduce the striped themed clothing line, the campaign around a character living an ideal time alone, in nature, creating, and discovering lines by chance..
The shoot took place on Fisher's Island with DP Kyle Kibbe.
Kate Jones, designer of Ursa Major jewelry, was the model.
Photographer Chris Shipman took the beautiful on set still photographs for the print campaign.
Ambre Kelly and Andrew Gori were the art department.
Director+Creative Director: Risa Mickenberg
Agency: Chance Studios/Julia Leach
Oscar, a made-from-scratch new health plan created to be part of the Affordable Care Act in New York needed a voice, a brand positioning and a graphic identity that both introduced the Affordable Care Act to a confused and sometimes hostile audience, and made an unheard of health care company seem approachable, inclusive, trustworthy and vital for a wide New York audience, particularly for young people. It also had to cut through during a time of fear and confusing and feel understandable and optimistic about the future of health care.
OSCAR BRAND MANIFESTO
We want to introduce people to the idea of great health insurance.
We want to introduce it to people who’ve never had health insurance…
And to people who’ve never had great health insurance.
We did it by making the kind of health insurance we’d want to have:
Health insurance that looks for, and finds, ways to make itself great.
By being simple.
By being thoughtful.
By being friendly.
By making it easy to find a doctor in the middle of the night.
By making it understandable.
By working in more intelligent, more helpful, more useful ways.
By doing the things we all wish health insurance would do.
All of the things we know it can do.
Making it both as human, and as intelligent, as humanly possible.
Because health insurance should act, as much as an insurance company can, like a caring and thoughtful, fellow human being.
It’s finally possible.
Hi. We’re Oscar.
Agency: Partners & Spade
The "after" campaign talks about the emotional and well-being aspects of exercising in the of "BEFORE" and "AFTER" construct. It redefines 'being made over' into a sense of well-being that exudes strength, power, calm, clarity and energy. All internal, not external benefits that show how exercise improves you, in deep, desirable, actionable ways.
For this campaign, we collaborated with female Japanese illustrators to illustrate the feelings of calm, power and energy and putting a collection of those free postcards of their work into womens' magazines was part of the print campaign.
"After" stickers were also put on sink mirrors in women's locker rooms so it said "AFTER" as women looked at themselves in the mirror.
Agency: Weiden & Kennedy/Tokyo
Creative Directors: Sumiko Sato, John Jay
Copywriter: Risa Mickenberg
Art Director/Photographer: Chris Shipman
Launched the brand Old Navy Active with a tagline and campaign to lend real athletic credibility to Old Navy and give it an identity on par with major athletic brands like Nike, in an inclusive way.
Built For Play touched on the universal human emotion that transcends ability, leans toward fun and functionality, and let us speak to the technical capabilities this new line of activewear had.
BUILT FOR PLAY MANIFESTO
We’re built for waking up early and getting out.
We’re built to chase.
To stretch.
To think fast.
To go as fast as our legs can carry us.
We’re built to join in.
To compete.
To chase each other.
To have fun.
We’re built for speed.
We’re built to go the distance.
To perform at our peak.
To be outside.
To brave the rain.
To be in the sun.
To work hard at playing.
We’re built for feel good doing it.
Active by Old Navy
With Go Technology.
We’re built for play.
OLD NAVY. BUILT FOR PLAY.
Agency: James Spindler & Co.
Worked with Work Order Design to create the branding and language for ZOA, a new biofabricated leather developed by Modern Meadow in Brooklyn. It is from yeast combined with the DNA of any animal. The material was launched at MoMA's IS FASHION MODERN exhibit.
THE ZOA PROVOCATION:
What if we started from the beginning?
What if we made things out of something that never walked in the fields?
Or grew in the ground.
But was still a part of the natural world.
What if we got primordial in our thinking?
Began at the liquid level
Took everything we know about cellular replication
Put biology to work for us
And grew a material from natural origins
combining the intelligence and conscience
of nature and nurture?
A material that could inspire new ways to make things
that come from nature
without extracting or detracting
from its beauty.
What would people make of it?
For goods without the baggage.
Grown of ZOA.
I was a Consulting Producer on Michael Moore's film CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY. I also wrote this teaser trailer for the film. When it ran in theaters, just after the bailout for the banks, ushers actually came up and down the aisles and collected money.
This was the first campaign from Nike to women in Japan, China, South Korea and Vietnam.
At the time it launched, very few women used gyms at all, and sweating or looking muscular was not considered feminine and was almost never depicted in advertising.
This was a series of two campaigns and it featured women of a range of ages and depicted the beauty of a range of visible physical strength to women's culture.
The first campaign defines your 'body type' as what your body likes - to get up early, to run, to stretch, to sleep... It creates body types as appreciations of the body; rather than expectations of it.
Agency: Weiden & Kennedy/Tokyo
Creative Directors: Sumiko Sato, John Jay
Copywriter: Risa Mickenberg
Art Director/Photographer: Chris Shipman
The Never Stop Growing campaign depicted Keds' unique role as a beloved sneaker from girlhood through old age in women's lives.
Keds, a great American company, has remained a vital, female-driven brand.
Copywriter: Risa MIckenberg
Art Director: Pam Clinkard
Agency: Kirshenbaum & Bond
Director: Tony Kaye
Image campaign for Kate Spade.
Created the long-running slogan that appears on the spine of Elle Magazine: Cherchez La Femme!
This line spoke to the more influential and relevant position the magazine wanted to take; one that matched the role of women in the world.
More about the origins of the phrase Cherchez La Femme! here.
Voice and brand identity for Frances Valentine, the newest venture from Kate Spade founders.
Agency: Partners & Spade/Frances Valentine
Copywriter: Risa Mickenberg
Wrote Dennis Hopper's narration for this documentary by Hermann Vaske for ARTE-TV.
Also wrote the narration for Why Are You Creative, a film based on the book by Hermann Vaske, with interviews by creative people from Billy Wilder to Laurie Anderson to Gunter Grass. Forward by His Holiness The Dalai Lama.
Directed by John Walter (How To Draw A Bunny, Theater Of War), the short film THE PINK PONY, starring, and choreographed by Annamaria Mazzini of the Paul Taylor Dance Company, premiered at the Dance On Camera Festival with the Film Society Of Lincoln Center. I wrote the screwball comedic dialogue.
From the program, "A musical comedy in the spirit of Ernst Lubitsch, The Pink Pony tells the story of a blind date that starts off on the wrong foot and ends quickly."
A brand reset for Old Navy - creating a voice, style and point of view for Old Navy's entire brand that was inclusive and inviting and truly stylish and gave style for everyone in the family its uniquely Old Navy position.
These photographs are from Old Navy headquarters in San Francisco
OLD NAVY BRAND MANIFESTO
We believe in the democracy of style.
People give style power.
Style gives people spirit.
Color deserves a bullhorn.
Stripes deserve a stadium show.
Newness needs an all-access pass.
Style suits everybody.
Everybody deserves to have it, to make it their own, and to share it with each other, with ease and all in good fun.
So our prices make everyone feel welcome.
Because style is an open invitation.
And it’s more fun when everyone can play.
Art Director: James Spindler
Creative Director Julia Leach
I contributed a piece for an art exhibit called Sorrows For Sale at the Partners & Spade gallery space.
The piece was an empty ring box, for sale, with the following explanation:
EMPTY RING BOX
We’d been dating for only two weeks when he gave me this box.
Two weeks, but it felt serious to me.
I’m not a ring kind of girl.
But in this relationship I found myself wanting things I didn’t think I wanted.
Erasing lines I’d drawn in the sand.
Thinking that maybe I’d really wanted all along was as simple and played out as something you could get in a box.
It seemed, as he handed me the box, like he knew me to my very soul.
Knew me better than I knew myself.
He watched as I opened the box.
A spring-loaded paper bauble popped out into my face.
It was a joke.
From the joke shop.
Ha ha! The box was empty.
The joke was on me.
That ole dollar-snatcher trick of the heart.
I do love practical jokes. Oh yes I do.
We dated for another six years. Give or take.
I also have some leather chairs from that relationship.
I’ll keep those.
An early Kate Spade campaign that featured mothers and children. It was still unusual to see stylish mothers in the context of their ordinary lives in advertising with their children when this campaign ran.
Photographer: Chris Shipman
GREY GOOSE: ON LUXURY
Luxury is a game of true and false.
It’s not a label that can be imposed.
Luxury is authentic. Inimitable.
Created with a singular vision.
Luxury is rare. It spares no effort or expense.
It refuses to be compromised.
Luxury embodies quality.
It knows the difference between lesser and greater.
It is knowledge. Tradition. Expertise. And vision.
Luxury is not staid. Or quiet. Or ordinary.
It is innovative. It is imaginative.
It inspires.
And it aspires to that rare feat of alchemy- the vision that elevates the exceptional to the sublime.
It isn’t fleeting or superficial.
It’s intrinsic.
Which is why it moves you on a deeper level:
True luxury impresses from the inside out.
GREY GOOSE.
Art Direction: James Spindler, Anne Johnson
Agency: Radical Media
The idea was to make a classic, dusty, sexy, French commercial for Moët & Chandon simply, quickly and inexpensively.
Features the Serge Gainsbourg song Je T'aime Non Plus.
A winning performance by a bumble bee from whose wrangler I learned that bees cannot be wrangled or trained; but that you have to encourage them by getting them to do something they would already want to do.
Created the campaign that won, and launched Microsoft's Cloud computing business across four different Microsoft brands. Did multiple five campaigns to introduce the benefits of cloud computing to I.T. people. The campaign ran globally for several years and cloud computing successfully began to drive Microsoft's business.
MICROSOFT CLOUD POWER MANIFESTO
Cloud Power is going to change the way you do business.
And it’s going to change your definition of power.
Cloud Power gives you the power to think big
And be small.
The power to be big
And act fast.
The power to change. And grow. And shrink. And not suffer for either.
The power to be liberal with your ideas
And conservative with your cash.
The power to give IT more brainpower and less drudgework.
It’s about democratizing information in your business.
Sharing, rather than cloistering.
It’s the beauty of technological consensus.
The power to be everywhere.
To be inclusive.
To be expansive.
To be orchestrated.
To be on the same page.
With familiar tools that are simply more expansive, more accessible, more user-friendly to more users.
Letting people do what they need to do
Without limiting them by place or language
Or device.
The power of mind over matter and ordinary matters.
The power to let developers go wild, and go live, fast.
The power to turn wishful thinking into a solid business plan.
The power to stop saying no.
And Microsoft is making it easy.
With an all-in commitment to Cloud Power that gives people as much or everything they need to move their businesses, seamlessly, into the future.
Enabling us, all of us, to be what’s next.
Putting power unlike any the business world has ever seen, in your hands.
Microsoft.com/cloudempowerment
Agency: Deustch New York
Art Director: Chris Shipman
Cloud Power Logo created by Jen Moy
BRAND MANIFESTO
Grouping things together is fun for the things. They like it.
This chair craves a blanket.
Little things change everything.
A dimmer. A great ice cube tray.
Ideas are as important as pieces.
It’s not what you have, it’s what you do with it.
History is an accordion.
Things cohabitate. This from then, and this from then.
We don’t worship things; we just love the stuff we love.
Reverence for things is dated. Ideas overlap.
Beauty is no big whoop if it’s not beautiful to you.
Stuff is different when it becomes your stuff.
We aim to un-intimidate. We aren’t afraid to marry. We’ll go out on a limb. We’ll build a tree house in our store. We believe in firepits and fireflies and garden gnomes and poufs.
We think houses are places to grow things.
Our stores are hot houses for ideas.
It’s not just how a chair looks: it’s who you feel like, sitting in it. We believe in taking liberties with modernism and with the idea of a store that furnishes your life. We are the next generation of modernism.
We are Modern Together.
Agency: Weiden Kennedy Tokyo
Print and TV campaign to introduce Nike Shox technology across Asia.
Art director: Chris Shipman
Campaign for a start-up, women-owned lingerie company in NYC.
Ad Age magazine called it "a prototype of guerrilla marketing," It inspired the cover for the definitive book on the ad agency Kirshenbaum & Bond where I worked as creative director at the time.
A television show for cats and the people they tolerate.
Created by Meow Mix, this was an actual TV show/infomercial starring Annabelle Gurwitch, pictured here on the absurd Meow Mix Meow TV premier step & repeat with the fabulous Sandra Bernhard.
Created sketches, theme music for intro and outro, voice over and the songs Let's Get Spayed and Let's Get Neutered with co-composer Joel Shelton.
Agency: Kirshenbaum & Bond
Producer: Elyse Roth
During an NYC transit strike Risa appeared on the Conan O'Brien Show.
Then she disappeared from The Conan O'Brien show.
You can see this exciting performance at minute 1:30.
A series of artworks depicting frequently used materials:
Charcoal On Paper, Oil On Canvas, Marble, Gelatin Silver Print, Oyl On Canvas....
Contributed a piece to this book, published by J. Crew and Partners & Spade
Other contributors: Miranda July, Hugo Guinness, Glenn O'Brien
Published by Chronicle Books. With photographs by Joanne Dugan. Design by Brian Lee Hughes
