Magnificent Monday

An intern spot written in the kitchen.

While I was interning at CP+B, they ran an internal jump ball for Coke Zero’s Super Bowl presence. I was an intern between years at the Brandcenter, and, due to crowding issues in the building, sat tucked at a desk shoved into the kitchen. To the tune of folks working the coffee machines and eating up Boulder-based burritos, I wrote a script, grabbed an art director to comp some keyframes, and turned it in on Friday morning.

If you hung out at the top of the stack of work on the GCD’s desk, you might get altitude sickness. So it was no surprise that I waited all day, all afternoon, and into the evening before I was summoned into Dave Schiff’s office to go through it. By the end of that conversation there was a job offer on the table, and the script had become the lead idea in the deck.

Coke Zero gives you real Coke taste AND zero sugar. So why can’t it give fans the Super Bowl AND the day after?

The whole idea was to let Coke Zero serve as the animating force behind a movement to make the day after the Super Bowl a national holiday.

The internship ended. I went back to school to finish up. And those left moved it into production.

The in-game budget collapsed. What survived was the campaign around the game: a push to make the day after the Super Bowl a federal holiday, an anthem film, and a hashtag. It ran in February 2012, by which point I was in my second year at the Brandcenter and had nothing to do with the production. But such is the fate of many great intern projects…

Epilogue

I turned the job offer down to go finish school. During my second year Rob Reilly, then CP+B's chief creative officer, came to speak at the Brandcenter. Before he started he asked out into the auditorium where I was. I put my hand up somewhere in the back half. He walked all the way up the stairs, shook my hand, and told the room I was the best intern they had ever had. Yeah. That felt pretty great.

By the end of the Brandcenter, CP+B offered me a job. But by then Schiff had left to start Made Movement with Alex Bogusky, and he offered too. And I took that one.