Dave Stinton

Rewards Network is a program that rewards its members for dining at in-network restaurants. (Members can earn cash, airline miles, Best Buy points, etc.)

The company's sales staff has the task of signing new restaurants to the network, but they had been using the same dry sales materials for years. They wanted a revamp.

I spearheaded this menu-themed folder design containing a series of sheets labeled “Today’s Specials.” Each page contained info explaining a different benefit of joining the restaurant to the company's network. The salesperson used this menu as a visual aid during face-to-face meetings.

Accompanying this menu piece was a “leave-behind”: a small, bartop-themed fold-out (complete with visual representations of coasters and other accouterments). Restaurant managers are notoriously busy and hard to nail down, so the salesperson could leave this piece at the restaurant as a summary for the manager if the scheduled meeting fell through.

Sears revamped their whole Wedding Registry experience, bringing a catered series of emails to guide the couple from the day they create their registry to the day they get married. (And beyond.)

This series of emails positions Sears (and Shop Your Way) as a friend you can count on through your journey, all the while playing up the advantages a Sears/Shop Your Way registry can offer you.

By 2003, McDonald's had been introducing so many new items (chicken sandwiches, salads, etc.) that they started to feel that they'd neglected their flagship sandwich. I created the phrase "Are You Mac Enough?" (which is still in use today, I am proud to say).

Here you see two print ads that ran in magazines, followed by a bag design that refamiliarized customers with the Big Mac.

In the same vein as the “Are You Mac Enough?” Big Mac campaign, this program aimed to reintroduce the Quarter Pounder with Cheese. The QPC was another staple of the McDonald’s menu that had gotten overshadowed in the wake of all the new sandwiches and salads being introduced.

I used the language of a personals ad. It was a fruitful way to tell the story of finding your perfect match in the crowd. Perhaps your soul mate was with you all the while.

Rewards Network, a hub of dining loyalty programs, wanted a series of videos for their annual sales meeting. I wrote this series of videos (“The History of Rewards Network”) to highlight the company’s strengths regarding social media, reviews, diner interaction, and other features, in a tongue-in-cheek manner.

Animation: George Eckart

Vocal talent: Amanda Cohen, George Eckart, Dave Stinton

The assignment: Write a humorous “Medicare 101” explainer for Jellyvision.

To keep it lighthearted and funny, while avoiding explicit mentions of medical issues (which I thought might be too dark), I created a werewolf spokesperson to walk the reader through how the program works.

Way back a hundred years ago in the spring of 2020, we were all hit with some new concepts: Self-isolation. Social distancing. Shelter in place.

Sears made some swift changes to address this. We replaced hard sells and price points with friendly touch-bases and a “we’re in this together” philosophy. The humanity was a pleasure to write.

Is Halloween coming up? Got a hungry pet? Special occasions call for special messaging, and I deliver the commercial needs spiced with humor and intrigue.

The word came down: Be edgier and funnier with our email sequence welcoming new members to Shop Your Way! These allowed me to have a lot more fun with the member-facing email copy.

Women were using Herbal Essences shampoos and conditioners. But the stylers were relatively unknown. The "Triple Hair Dare" campaign greeted these women in bars, restrooms, and buses to generate awareness for the entire collection, from wash to style.

Check out the bar coasters, bus ads, restroom mirror clings, and print ads that carried out this mission.

In 2009, I helped revamp iDine, the flagship program of Rewards Network. Members who register their credit cards with iDine can earn a percentage back on what they spend at participating restaurants.

The ask was for a fun, funny, and lively approach. Irreverent but not crude, smart-alecky but very friendly.

This is a series of emails you’d get upon first signing up for the program. Which emails you’d receive would depend on your behavior. Did you immediately eat at a participating restaurant? Have you been idle for a while? Did you start signing up but never quite finish?

Food language and food imagery offer a lot of inspiration, and I had fun exploring.

By 2008, Head & Shoulders had been doing a lot of marketing to women.

Suddenly, they realized they may have been neglecting men. So as part of a campaign to make sure men stuck around with the promise of “awesome hair,” I wrote “The Awesome Song.”

It never moved beyond the concept phase, sadly. It would have been featured online as part of a Jib Jab-style animation, where users could upload their photos and watch themselves dancing and singing this humorous ode to how awesome it is to be a guy. 

(NOTE: This is a partial song, to give the client a flavor of the attitude. Had the idea been picked up, I would have fleshed it out further to speak more directly to low-maintenance hair. Also, I kind of had “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” in my head as a melody, if that helps.)

This is all true! NORAD tracks Santa every year because of a typo in a Sears ad.

The subject line for this email, "Oops! We goofed. (60 years ago.)," is playful. But maybe more importantly, it taps into some nice, hard data. Subject lines containing the word "oops" get high open rates. People love hearing about your screwups.

These headlines are from when I was the Advertising Manager at University of Illinois Press in Champaign. They are old and cheesy, and I was just out of college. But I keep them here because I'm proud of them.

Generally, University Press ads are just lists of titles and headlines like "New from University of Such-and-Such Press." But I introduced humor and wordplay to the mix, and it was kind of revolutionary.

When I interviewed for a similar position at University of Chicago Press, they actually recognized my work. And that is the dorkiest claim to fame I think I have ever enjoyed.

Anyway, forget you saw these.