I worked with Yield on a print and radio advertising pitch for the Toronto Parking Authority’s Green P street and lot business in late 2011.

We didn’t win it, but I couldn’t bin it

Below, some roughs I worked on, produced by art director Ryan Fox.

As often happens with this man, I came up with the art direction ideas, he the copy.

Smart parking, aka Smarking

We also created several pieces promoting Green P as the smarter way to park. They even have an app for it.

Some radio

‘Smarking I’ – 30”

(Two cheerful men in a car, looking for parking, SFX: engine, traffic)
Hamish: Risking presupposition, it would appear our parking prospects do not give rise to optimism.
Raphael: Afraid I must assume a degree of culpability, for I had earlier neglected to mention one Green P smartphone application.
Hamish: And what, oh ever-sagacious one, is that?
Raphael: It is no less than an inspired scientific marvel enabling one to prelocate Green P parking facilities prior to exodus.
Hamish: Rather a smart approach to parking, I should say.
Raphael: Smart parking, indeed!
Together: Smarking!
VO: With the Green P smartphone app, you’re no longer parking, you’re smarking.

‘Smarking II’ – 30”

(Two guys driving, SFX: music, traffic)
Rick: Wow, is she wearing skorts with her windblazer?
Dave: Yup, she’s packing massive ladytude!
Rick: You’re so wittarious today.
Dave: Mayhaps, but I can occasionally be doofiotic.
Rick: Hey, why so scritical?
Dave: Because I forglected to download the Green P smartphone app. It lets you chout all their parking areas, preparture.
Rick Wow, talk about smart parking.
(SFX pregnant Pause)
VO: The Green P smartphone app. It’s not parking, it’s smarking.
Dave: Okay, intellinouncer!

‘Casanova’ – 30”

Woman: (smooching sounds) Mmm, you kiss like a god.
Man: Thanks, you’re pretty amaz— Oh no!!
Woman: What?!
Man: Gonna get a parking ticket! Be right back!
Woman: But… (sigh)
SFX: Door swings open, left banging on the wall, footsteps echo off into distance.
VO: Announcing the Green P smartphone app. It let’s you pre-plan where you park, and set yourself an expiry reminder, plus you only pay for the time you park. You’ll never have to interrupt anything again.
Man: (rushing back, breathless) OK, where were we?
Woman: Sorry, your time’s up here, too, buddy.

‘Assistant’ – 30”

(SFX: Street sounds, man and woman walking quickly)
Mr Abernathy: Okay, got the briefs?
Jane: Check.
Mr Abernathy: Got the concepts?
Jane: Check.
Mr Abernathy: Excellent.
Jane: Um, I also took the liberty of pre-parking us, Mr Abernathy.
Mr Abernathy: What?
Jane: That’s right sir. I downloaded the Green P Parking app onto your smartphone and found the closest Green P lot to our meeting. On arrival, I’ll set an expiry alert to beep us so we don’t get a parking ticket!
Mr Abernathy: Well done, Lisa.
Mr Abernathy: It’s Jane, sir.
Mr Abernathy: It sure is, Jane.
VO: Download the Green P parking app for your smartphone. It’s got your back.

Kingspan, an Irish manufacturer of architectural insulated mental panels for buildings, wished to make clear to its marketplace just how serious it is about sustainability, sourcing-to-disposal .

Kingspan commissioned my client Jib to create this website, pathtonetzero.com. I was asked to write it up.

It speaks volumes for itself, so I need not.

SOFA — that’s Source of Furniture and Accessories — is a brilliant Toronto invention. It’s 200,000 square-foot section of the International Centre is devoted to the furnishings & interior design industries of Canada, the US and beyond.

SOFA leases fully customizable private showroom spaces to manufacturers who use them to market products to the design and architectural trades.

I’ve worked with SOFA for a couple of years, writing the website, print ads and collateral for their team of very hardworking women. It’s a fairly new destination and not in the most glamorous of locations — Airport Rd — so it’s not the easiest of sells. But these girls hustle and are getting it done.

Jib has been jamming its proprietary SEO skillz with creative advertising techniques. This job, for which I wrote the print, online and direct response copy, was a exceptional example.

Jib created an papercraft architecture competition for Irish construction materials company Kingspan to pump up SEO and draw prospects’ eyes to their insulated metal panels. These are high-end panels used as cladding on prestigious architectural projects.

We launched with print ads in architectural trade publications, DR and eblasts announcing the competition and directing people to an intriguing microsite created for it, legaciesarebuilt.com.

Woven into the program was a story about the ‘Unknown Architect’, a fictional visionary from today times whose works are unearthed by future archeologists long after a rather nasty apocalypse. The key idea was that legacies are built of strong stuff like Kingspan. The winner got a university architecture bursary created and named in his honour.

A Marcom award is won

The campaign won Platinum at the Marcom Awards. My hat goes off to senior designer Ben Allison of Jib for coming up with the idea and handing it to me, which made the writing pretty much self-execute.

Earth Inc., the ideally named, intensely creative landscape architecture firm that makes gardens so serene people never want to go inside and then wins every award there is, asked me back in 2011.

I’d done their first website about seven years ago, and was honoured to be re-engaged.

In the end, most of my wordage wound up in the bio section where, other than accolades and degrees, I made almost everything up based on interviews.

Though I am partial to words, I can’t fault the Earth people for going minimal — not when their product looks like this.

My client Jib has established a new search engine optimization service called the PAGEONE Program. The offer: Give us a reasonable sum of money (it’s generally under $5k) and we’ll get your website onto page one of a Google search for the keywords you want associated with your site and business — all within 60 days. They guarantee it and they’re getting it done large scale.

I was brought in to write the DM and website for the service, and also to edit a 60-page DIY book on maximizing SEO by Rob Campbell (aka Smojoe), who runs PAGEONE, a book they have decided not to publish. Why give away the golden goose?

When the supremely talented Laura Wills of Messenger — who has designed virtually the entire Southbrook brand from the ground up — asked me write their new website, I felt a distinct thirst for experience with this brand growing in me.

Among the world’s great wine makers Southbrook Vineyards of Niagara is a relatively new arrival. Organic, biodynamic and an exemplar of entrepreneurial shrewdness, the business is owned and operated by the husband and wife team of Bill and Marilyn Redelmeier. The wines produced at their small holdings draw international admiration. The vineyards and winery are a masterstroke of design and nature at its most elegant, while revealing the Redelmeiers’ mindblowing vision.

In the end, it was all pleasure. The work was often more of an edit, as the briefing notes I’d been given were so well written and frequently poetic — to the point where I sometimes struggled to improve on things.

Well, the Redelmeiers were happy and so was I, especially when I received a case loaded with Southbrook’s finest, including several vintage bottles.

Call it a thirst well quenched.

I began working with this alternative energy provider years ago, when I was asked by Jib to create a name for the then-fledgling company — and that name was Potentia.

Last fall I was brought in to update Potentia’s new website — and once again this past winter, when the company shifted its focus to purely rooftop solar PV energy.

Our approach was to make Potentia an approachable creature with a simple business model: Renting large roofs on which it builds solar panels, which it owns, manages and maintains for 20 years. The juice is fed into the grid at a profit.

Potentia is now a very big boy in rooftop photovoltaic; backed by nearly half a billion dollars in new financing from the likes of OMERS, it recently signed the largest solar PV contract in Canadian history — a 20-year deal to install, maintain and sell energy from large solar arrays on the roofs of a number of Toronto schools.

Enwave is the company that built and runs the network of pipes, pumps and heat exchangers that draw great volumes of icy water from the depths of Lake Ontario to chill the majority of large buildings in Toronto’s core. Aside from their Deep Lake Water Cooling, Enwave also owns significant district heating operations, warming many of those same buildings in winter from central plants downtown.

I was approached by Meta to exact an enlivening on the copy Enwave had provided for the website redesign. This consisted of tidying up, and condensing text, adding heads and subs and pulling together info chunks from disparate sources and unifying it into a whole. Note: I neither wrote nor edited the landing page copy — the rest, yes.

Toronto-based nonprofit energy efficiency experts GreenSaver spent decades building a respected name through the supply of weatherproofing, insulation, heating/AC consulting and solar-thermal hot water systems to homeowners.

Approaching design house Meta and myself for a full rethink of greensaver.org, they also charged us with raising the profile of their lesser-known services — consulting with renovation companies, energy providers and apartment owners and managers on energy efficiency for houses and buildings.

Some screen grabs…

We kept the down-to-earth, occasionally humourous, tone I’d helped develop on previous GreenSaver jobs directed at homeowners, while adopting the necessary tonality for the other three verticals.

Go get ‘em, GreenSaver.