Running accounts
since 2010.
Here's the work.

Research kept saying the same thing: Ontarians believed they already knew Ontario, so they'd book a flight to Iceland before considering their own backyard. The brief was to change that with no landmarks reel, no big reveal and no budget that matched the ambition.

I transformed what started as a single TV spot into a full 360-degree integrated campaign. That meant connecting top-of-funnel awareness to destination-specific social content and building out a comprehensive location database. I coordinated 250+ owned channels across Ontario and mobilised 13 regional tourism organisations to create custom content for each region. The campaign launched unbranded for 12 days, just the question "Where Am I?" over stunning footage no one recognised as Ontario. 30,000 guesses came in. Then the reveal. The audience became the media.

$32M in visitor spend. 38% YoY increase in 2-night stays. Client targets exceeded by 15%. TIAC Marketing Campaign of the Year. This was a year-long process including 24 shooting days at 17+ Ontario locations. The ROI was $7.32 for every dollar spent.

Guinness wanted to grow share across Sub-Saharan Africa. The existing approach was traditional promotional advertising. It wasn't working. The stakes were high: getting it wrong in markets where authenticity is non-negotiable would have done real damage.

I proposed the shift: from traditional promotional advertising to experiential marketing built around a high-profile athlete activation. I identified Thierry Henry: not just because of his global profile, but because his heritage and relationship to African football culture made him genuinely credible. I built the proposal and the ROI case, presented it to global teams and secured an additional £2M from Diageo's global CMO. Then I designed integrated pop-up bar events, digital campaigns and an earned media strategy across Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia and Cameroon, leading an inter-agency team of five.

160,000 cases sold. 88% media reach across target markets. 40% year-over-year account growth. It became an internal Diageo case study, cited as the brand's best-performing African promotion ever. Henry was honoured as "Igwe of Football" in Lagos, a fan-given nickname the campaign amplified rather than manufactured.

CAMH had awareness but not the fundraising muscle of major health charities. People would share posts about mental health, but giving required a different emotional commitment. The challenge was making mental health as donatable as heart disease research. Without leading with suffering.

The frame was equivalence, not charity. "Mental health is health" as a declarative statement. Billboards asked unanswered questions: "Why do some illnesses get treatment but others get judgment?" Real Canadians told real stories, including retired NHL goaltender Corey Hirsch. The campaign gave donors a position to hold, not just a problem to feel bad about.

The perception that "mental health is a key component of overall health" grew from 77% to 86%. Over 30M earned impressions, 89% positive sentiment, 11,000+ hashtag uses. The Difference Makers gala raised $2M in a single night. Zulu Alpha Kilo was named Strategy Agency of the Year 2018, with this campaign central to the award.

The Tim Hortons Hockey Cards brief was a massive multi-agency programme across the NHL, Upper Deck, celebrities, in-store, packaging, digital and PR. Complex by design. But inside it, the team found a real story: the Kenya Ice Lions, East and Central Africa's only ice hockey team, who had never had an opponent. Tim Hortons flew 12 of them to Canada, surprised them with Sidney Crosby and Nathan MacKinnon, and let the film be honest. The response turned a promo brief into a Sportsnet documentary.

Mike Johnson led this campaign. I was on the support team and what I learned from it was about sweating the details: screwing helmets together, vacuuming change rooms, making sure every logistical thing was right so the things that mattered could actually happen. The kind of work you don't see but that makes the whole thing possible.

The campaign significantly overdelivered on every target. Tim Hortons donated equipment and funded a development programme for the Ice Lions. In October 2024, Kenya was admitted to the International Ice Hockey Federation. A promotional brief became something that actually changed the trajectory of a sport in a country.

The camps had a perception problem. People assumed they were charity camps for underprivileged kids, a one-time handout. In reality, they're transformational multi-year programmes where kids return for five consecutive years and build life skills that follow them into adulthood. 275,000 youth over 45 years. The problem wasn't the programme. It was the story.

I led the stakeholder research that identified the perception gap and then repositioned the core narrative: from charity to transformational support system. That included rebranding the camps themselves: new name, new logo. Then I directed an authentic storytelling approach on a small budget, producing long-form content anchored in real camp alumni voices. No celebrity narration, no sweeping music, no manufactured emotional arc. The campaign featured real people, including Shelagh Cole, a camp alumna who later became a dear friend. When she says "camp was the constant variable in our lives that showed up and continued to say you can," that's not an advertising line. That's what happened.

$12.3M raised, the highest single Camp Day total in Foundation history. Beyond the campaign total, $35,000 in unsolicited donations came in from people who found the content independently and simply wanted to give. That's the signal that the story was working at a different level. A proof point that authenticity and fundraising ambition aren't in conflict.

Roll Up the Rim had a cup problem. Hundreds of millions of paper cups were being generated annually for a promotion built entirely around rolling up a paper rim. As pressure around single-use cups grew, the question became unavoidable: how do you preserve a 35-year ritual while eliminating the thing people were literally doing when they participated in it?

I led the multi-agency team that reimagined Roll Up the Rim as a fully digital experience. The 2020 campaign launched as a hybrid: physical cups for the first two weeks, digital-only for the remaining two. To incentivise the shift, guests who ordered with a reusable cup got three digital rolls instead of one. Tim Hortons distributed 1.8 million free reusable cups on March 10 as the opening move. The strategy reframed a sustainability problem as a loyalty opportunity.

58 million prizes won. 54% engagement lift. The digital transition that had seemed risky saw near-immediate adoption. The methodology became the blueprint for the full digital pivot in 2021, when physical cups were retired entirely. What started as an eco imperative became the most successful version of the contest the brand had run.

A Canada-exclusive Pepsi variant at a moment when Canadian identity was very much in conversation: the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan and the ongoing 51st state news cycle converging at once. Two very different reasons to feel Canadian. The challenge was making something that felt genuinely earned rather than just capitalising on the moment.

Led packaging design and social campaign for the Pepsi Maple Cola launch at Vocabulary. The packaging had to earn the maple leaf, not just wear it. The social strategy leaned into the cultural conversation with a dry, characteristically Canadian sensibility. The Dieline, one of the world's leading packaging design publications, featured the work.

Featured on The Dieline and covered across social and trade media. A case of the product and the moment arriving at exactly the right time, with creative that understood what it was actually saying.

My colleagues and I kept running into the same wall: no good source of timely, curated intelligence for fertility professionals. Clinical updates, business news, research that actually matters to operators. It didn't exist in one place at the right level. We were already writing our own notes on developments that mattered. We just weren't sharing them.

A fully automated weekly newsletter workflow using Claude Code and GitHub. Every week the system pulls the most important fertility industry news, evaluates what actually matters to professionals in the space and explains why it's relevant. We had the POVs. The pipeline just needed building. I built it myself. No engineering team, no agency, no budget. Just the tools and the problem.

The Buzz is live at thebuzz.kinbee.ca and delivers weekly to fertility professionals. It's a proof of concept that a non-engineer can build useful, automated publishing infrastructure when the problem is clear enough. This site was also built with Claude Code, which is how I understood what was possible.