What is it you do?

For Bazaarvoice's IPO, I boiled their purpose as an organization down to the bare minimum. The ad ran full page in the Wall Street Journal.

Brevity and emotion

It's a great feeling, nailing the emotional value of a new product category (Ultrabooks, in this case) in just 4 words.

Define a product category in two words

Two lessons for me here: Less is always more and the wrong art can bring even really good headlines down a notch or two. 

Trailblazers

For Take Your Own Path, Dell's first global brand campaign,  I hammered out banners, print ads and site content, including bios for Tony Wheeler, Joe Zenas and Linda Rottenberg. And the campaign worked wonders. More than half a billion consumers clicked through and Dell saw big increases in brand favorability (38%) and preference (26%).

Split-second timing

Time and corporate mergers wait for no one. One Thursday afternoon we learned that Dell needed a merger ad for The Wall Street Journal by Monday. We worked the weekend to build a dozen concepts, weeded it down to three late Sunday, and sold this one to Dell/Perot Systems Monday morning.

Hot spot

With just three weeks to go live and just 15 seconds to convey a long list of messages, offers and logos, time was not our friend. An elevator spot with no audio, this video offered precious little real estate, considering all the content required. We let symbols do the talking and kept copy to a minimum, relatively speaking.

A banner you can't refuse

When you're working with hardware, the obligatory product hero shot can cramp a writer's style - it's not always easy to make words dance with a black box. In this case, a wide screen and high definition opened up a world of possibilities.

Not even a nap

Here, I determined the one universal trait of this laptop's new security features and illustrated it with a fun-to-envision cliche: The sleeping security guard.

The Art of Literacy

Many educators think of graphic novels as little more than comic books. To introduce the TIMELINE series for Harcourt Achieve, I created a brochure to document the respect the genre has earned in literary circles.

Esoteric technology in plain English

I met with the content processing engineers, edited their white paper, talked it over with the PR manager and wrote this feature for non-technical audiences.

Introduce yourself to the group

Fast interworking is huge in this market, so labeling the chip an "interworkaholic" is high praise -- and fits nicely with the classic group therapy introduction. 

Ghostwriter in the machine

You're an information officer at a technology giant. You've had amazing success. Your approach has real value in the business world. But you're too busy to sit down and put it into words. AMD CIO Fred Mapp called me in for short weekly meetings. Together, we created and wrote the monthly column Mapping IT: Seven Initiatives for Success. Later, Fred published a book by the same name based on our columns.

Profiles in dot-com courage

2001. The bubble burst and dot-coms disappeared into thin air. But Click Commerce had scheduled "Click Summit: The Forum for the Multi-Channel Enterprise" months in advance. Should they ignore the elephant in the room or bite the bullet, recognize the problem, and offer solutions?

For the conference invite, I wrote:

"Dear Colleague, As is so often the case, the old adage is dead wrong. Great minds do not think alike. The fact is, the respected analysts in this marketplace are all over the board. At this precarious point in time there is no dominant line of thought, no clear path.

To sort it out, you have to put the great minds together and determine whose ideas hold water and whose are shot full of holes. Hence our Analyst Panel: 'One Marketplace, Four Views.' It's your opportunity to power shop the marketplace of ideas and find the research and opinions that make sense for your business."

The invite garnered a 20 percent response rate, the conference filled up, and Click Commerce was lauded for addressing the downturn head on.