Life on the Cliff

While at BBDO in 1985, I introduced Visa to sports marketing via the AT&T Tennis Challenge setting the table for decades of Olympic success. Proving that a young guy at a large, great agency could make a difference by selling the clients (VP Advertising Jan Soderstrom and SVP Marketing, John Bennett) on what was right…some people you never forget!

At A&W Brands in the late 80’s and early 90’s I helped develop a series of annual Halloween successes featuring properties including “the new” The Munsters TV Show, The Addams Family Movie, the beloved radio personality Wolfman Jack and the still classic Snoopy and The Great Pumpkin!

In the early 90’s I served on the advisory board of the Adam Walsh Children’s Fund and was later elected to the Board of Directors for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). I created a platform for the NCMEC with Major League Baseball teams called Child Safety Awareness Nights featuring the distribution of tens of thousand’s of “Having Fun and Playing it Safe” player posters. John Walsh taught me, he taught a lot of people, the power of child safety awareness. I also went on to create and hold over 50 local community safety awareness seminars. While my grass roots program was featured in the NY Times, more than anything, it proved to me early in my professional life, that marketing creativity could help sell more than soft drinks or other consumer products!

At Nabisco in 1993, I continued my attack on Halloween fun by helping introduce Milk Bone Flavor Snacks in the shape of witches, monsters and pumpkins. I unburied, through exhaustive research, that dogs love Halloween too!

Then in 1994 while still at Nabisco, I found out men love football and grilling -what a wow- and created the A1 Steak Sauce “Masters of the Grill” integrated marketing event featuring players from every NFL team! It drove the brand and helped change how “retail” thought of grilling -as a leadership platform- forever!

In a trade publication article (Promo Magazine) in 1994, I introduced Nabisco to the concept of “Fact Based Passion”. CEO John Greeniaus immediately understood its transformative potential of leveraging data with passionate advocacy and asked me to create an organizational communication and seminar platform that ran throughout 1995 into 1996. Fact Based Passion is still discussed almost 15 years later by Nabisco employees of that era.

With the help of some special people, at the end of 1996 I created my own intellectual property development company and creativity consultancy. Throughout the late 1990’s Clifford Medney Enterprises “CME” created a series of innovative original kid’s properties. The first, Slimamander of the Soapy Lagoon, “A Mander on a Mission of Fun” was licensed to KFC as an international kids meal event resulting in 6 million toys being produced and distributed. Golden Books produced a series of tub books about the Mander and his best pal, Leap the Frog.

Slimamander’s success lead to KFC licensing CME’s story of six tree living animal pals, the Treeples. Almost 5 million toys of Rachel Raccoon, Stevie Squirrel and their Treeple friends followed KFC’s Star Wars event in 1999.

CME’s most important property Shoulders, was licensed by Aetna US Healthcare along with Johns Hopkins University Medical Center for their Intellihealth web-site partnership. PBS’s acclaimed Frontiers of Medicine devoted a story to Shoulders and its content as an innovative “Internet-age” source of support and information for kids and parents.

In 2003, I joined Eastwest Marketing Group first as the VP, Director of Concept Development and later as the Chief Marketing Officer. This was a great six year run with many great team building and client successes. I created the “The Totally Insane Room of Your Dreams” for Discovery Kid’s Trading Spaces program, as well as, created Freak Week for their Halloween period. I also proactively developed health and wellness themed events for DK called “What’s Your Spring Thing and “Play the Summer” that helped bring in Subway as a partner. When I arrived at Eastwest, I “invented” the Hallah-ween Breakfast…an agency wide hallah-fest that spead bigger each of my six years at the agency to eventually include clients on both coasts.

I lead the agency in Eastwest’s biggest win in it’s 25 year history in an RFP shootout for Kraft in 2006. The agency won significant business in desserts, beverages and snacks based on a focused integrated/360centric approach. I was proud to have also created a range of memorable and successful campaigns for Kraft including: “Taste the Madness” for it’s multi-year NCAA March Madness partnership; “The Best Year Ever” for consecutive annual Back to School scale events and “Never Stop Believing” for its IMC multi-brand Polar Express movie event.

I am also very proud to have helped Eastwest win a range of meaningful business over my six years: the Godiva business (and helped Godiva win an “Experiential” Gold Reggie in 2008 for the successful launch of their Chocoiste franchise), Sports Club LA and more Kraft business, by leading the development of an innovative and aspirational B-school recruitment/leadership campaign called “Be Inspired, Be Rewarded, Be Yourself: Be Kraft!”

I have written numerous articles for Ad Age, Brandweek, Promo Magazine, Media Post News, etc. on thought leadership, creativity and integrated marketing. And, have given dozens of speeches to numerous companies, trade associations and conferences. If there was a prize for loving to speak or write about creativity and positive empowerment, I probably would have won it.