We believe creativity is the catalyst that drives business forward.

Transforming the 40 year old leader in data warehousing as a next generation cloud-based powerhouse.

Teradata Brand Transformation

Showcasing the human side of data for the analytics company that puts people at the forefront. 

Contentsquare 

Leveraging the power of community to reimagine Tennessee Valley Authority as a timeless brand with a big future.

A bold identity for the new generation of women’s shapewear. 

Honeylove

Positioning Duck Creek as the new standard within P + C insurance.

Duck Creek

Featured

While perhaps we can all agree that a community is a group of supportive people assembled in a specific space, the logistics, geography, and manifestations of said groups have drastically changed in the technology age. 

It’s no longer about mere physical proximity— who we live near, who we see in the office, who our kids carpool with to school. Our communities have multiplied, and exponentially so. 

Communities by the thousands live in our phones, are tethered to apps, and center around particular interests, ideas, and obsessions. So what does that mean for a society of consumers? How does it change the way we relate to the things we buy, and perhaps even why we buy them?

It’s a trend that’s been growing since pre-pandemic days, and exploded once the world went into lockdown: people are looking for meaning. The absence of intentionality in our lives, our decisions, and our purchases is simply no longer sufficient. This is where community comes in, that thing which reminds us why we keep trying, why we endeavor to improve. Be it through activism, art, sustainability, or business.

In short, a brand can be a kind of community. 

And a synergistic one at that—something that can come to express much more than the mere products it sells, a kind of critical value larger yet more intangible than a bottom line. 

For Issue 2 of JMS Editorial, our team spent some time with this concept of community. In these articles, we delve into the changing landscape of communication, question our daily routines, and celebrate the ways in which community can be the lifeblood of creativity—even in times of unprecedented loss.

From Scapegoat to Saving Grace

CVS Health’s “Healthy Conversations,” Finalist for Creative Floor Healthcare Awards

When CVS Health tapped JMS to innovate new ways of sharing critical health information and stories from the COVID-19 pandemic, both teams were energized by the prospect of reaching an audience of healthcare providers in a time of crisis.

The resulting project, “Healthy Conversations,” is a first-of-its-kind, video-led content series aimed to promote an open dialogue centered on health insights and developments throughout the pandemic. The video component of the project allows for data to be highlighted in dynamic, digestible formats, while the podcast gives way to in-depth conversations among leading health experts. Additionally, a variety of social media content supports each narrative.

“Our goal was to reach a particularly time-crunched audience: healthcare providers,” explains Strategy Director, Sarah Jessee. “With so much COVID coverage out there, we found a disconnect between healthcare coverage that delivers the hard-hitting data providers want, and the human elements that make for a great story. We saw an opportunity for CVS Health to marry the two by utilizing proprietary data points from CVS's wealth of in-depth healthcare research.”

“Healthy Conversations” was launched in August 2020, and after just five months achieved an 18% engagement rate as well as a 92.8% video view rate and 19.5M+ total impressions.

Healthy Conversations

Every three months, we invite a new artist to interpret the possibilities of a singular 250 square foot wall in our studio, according to their creative practice.

This site is an archive of the continuing transformations of the space, and an introduction to the people who catalyze this process.

The project was realized in 2015 when our first featured artist, Jessica Eastburn, shared a piece for Limited Edition’s inaugural show. An exploration in what the artist calls “comics and cacophony,” the work is dynamic and full of movement and emotion. Since then, JMS has featured photography, sculpture, neon artwork, textiles, collage, and much more. 

Each quarter celebrates a different point of view, and enlivens the JMS space with the constant reminder that art can shape our days and offer endless inspiration when we choose to make a steady space for it in our lives, and our work.

Meet Limited Edition

 is an experimental community space in the heart of San Francisco. Ahead of the 2020 election, the PROXY team wanted to bring their community together around a common message of unity. JMS saw a bigger opportunity. What if we turned the traditional billboard on its head and created something that had never been done before?

Enter, Stamp Out. An interactive billboard where the community could come together and actively stamp out corruption. Our design solution created a powerful opportunity—one stamp, representing one voice, would show the power of democracy.And the message was threefold—people applying stamps to the billboard funded the USPS, supported mail-in voting, and spoke out against corruption.

The results? 30 Days, 10,000+ stamps, and the largest mail-in voting turnout in history.

The Fight to Save Democracy (and the USPS)

To further John McNeil Studio’s mission of delivering dynamic, innovative solutions to our clients, the studio has expanded its strategy offering. Our unique model encompasses the values of our studio—consistently putting creativity and brand at the center of all that we do.

“The type of strategic thinking of the past was pretty limited to marketing,” explains Founder and CEO John McNeil. “What we’re saying is that the type of strategy that comes from this mode of thinking can be infused across every aspect of the business.”

JMS combines three strategic disciplines—brand transformation, content and social strategy and innovations—to meet the needs of today’s digitally-driven business. “The days of ‘stay in your lane’ are over,’” says Sonia Minden, JMS Strategy Director. “Every strategist should think creatively, and every great creative is also a problem-solver. We try to strip away the traditional silos that get in the way of good work.”

Thinking creatively also requires the ability to be agile. “What makes us unique specifically in the innovations realm is the ability to think really quickly on our feet and adapt to the changing environments our clients live in,” says Remi Abbas, Executive Director of Strategy and Insight. “That allows us to move from the questioning and deep inquiry phase, to the solution that is needed to bring that to life.”

From those solutions, meaningful experiences are created for clients and their customers. The studio’s holistic approach works to consider this notion of experience from every angle, so clients can better understand their power and positioning, and avoid becoming stagnant. “In a world where experience is critical and the most valuable thing to any business,” McNeil adds, “bringing to life the customer and the customer experiences – their wants and needs and interests and loves – is very materially tied to how modern brands need to show up. And knowing that the work we do has had such an impact on our clients, we want to do more of it.”

John McNeil Studio Expands Strategy Offering

It’s an unavoidable truth: we live in an age of continuous content. 

This catch-all term has come to name everything we consume, from TV shows to memes, gifs to tweets, long form editorial to TED Talks, and everything else in between. Content is propaganda, truth, lies, prophecy, escape. All that we produce, automatically falls into this great big pool of content. Some of it’s good, some of it’s not. But hasn’t this always been the case with art? With story? With the various products of a society? The metric we use is perhaps not so simple—here I give you good content, there they give you bad. Perhaps it’s more about what resonates, what remains. It’s about what’s necessary, what has the power to redirect a conversation, or start an entirely new one. To make a person feel something deeply, to give them pause—is this what “good” content should do?

Content is propaganda, truth, lies, prophecy, escape.

For our first issue of JMS Editorial, our team focused on different aspects of the content economy, and questioned the ways it shapes our days and shapes our decisions. Because ultimately, content is something we can either be passive about, sifting through it indifferently and creating iterations of the same thing, or we can be active in this space, pushing boundaries and finding new ways of thinking that, in turn, inspire a chain reaction of more transgressive ways of thinking, too.

The Case Against Content

At some point in our history at JMS, someone wrote a headline for one of our clients. (Not a particularly spectacular opening line, I know, but bear with me for a paragraph, or two.) The brief was to recast a 30-year-old global technology brand as a vital, young software company, capable of competing with the likes of their smaller, younger Silicon Valley competition. The ad ran as a series of billboards on the 101, declaring to the start-up disruptors that our client was in the neighborhood, and there to compete.

The headline? “We start up every day.”

Just a line, of course. A solid interpretation of what we (as a creative company) are asked to do all the time. Meet the brief. Be smart. Be creative. Be memorable.

But as my own company’s age is now, also, in double-digit territory, I’m reminded of that line, and the intended truth of it—that to be great at what you do, to be vital, relevant, and valuable to the world, you have to do just that. Start up everyday.

That’s what I love about JMS. We are founded on helping our clients embrace, and make the most of constant change. We don’t rest on our laurels, or repeat the same old models defined by the creative agencies of the last century. That’s why, when we started 13 years ago, we didn’t want to be known as just an “agency,” hence the “S” in JMS.

As a studio, we’ve operated differently from day one. We treat our clients like partners. We make it a point to understand their business, and recognize that we are in business to leverage our creative talents in the service of what they need.

These past 13 years have been proof of that approach, every day. We’ve repositioned, redesigned, and relaunched global brands. We’ve weathered pandemics, won awards, cooked countless Thursday suppers, helped launch start-ups and transform blue chips. We’ve executed countless commercials, billboards, banner ads and social posts, sure, but we’ve also developed mobile games, AR/VR product tours and webinars, original content series, social newsrooms, executive thought leadership programs, influencer activations, and corporate culture initiatives.

We coded a cause-related social network within a retail website to activate and engage customers. We developed a web app that enabled kids to promote themselves, and receive funding for college from individual donors anywhere in the world. We created a rap battle to advertise networking equipment. We wrote and directed a musical parody that posed the question “was Thomas Alva Edison a d*ck?” We convinced the city of New York that a giant plexiglass cube full of old routers, switches, and cables was a public art piece. Of course all of this mayhem was driven by one primary objective: to provide value to our clients with surprising, engaging, smart, culturally relevant creative thinking in the service of their brand.

That was the thing. We recognized early on that if our clients and partners needed us, regardless of the assignment, it was the most valuable thing we could do. As the saying goes “Everything is a chance to build a brand.”

Come to think of it, a slight addendum. Not actually “regardless of the assignment”.

There was a moment when Juul came to us in the early days of their existence. They were still owned by PAX, and not the marketing plutonium of a brand they are today. This was the early days of the California legalization heyday, and we were excited to talk to anyone associated with PAX. But after one or two meetings with the incredibly nice, stylish 20-30 somethings who were talking to us about the potential opportunity we had with Juul, we politely declined. I looked around at the faces of my people in the meeting as they were enthusiastically absorbing the opportunity, and then as the enthusiasm drained from their faces once they realized the product they’d be marketing. I knew in an instant, this was not a brand we could believe in, or work for.
It was my proudest moment at JMS.

So, after 13 years of passion, inspiration, ingenuity, effort, and accomplishment what’s next?

Honestly, more change. If that last two years has taught us anything, it’s that surprise is always just around the corner. Whether good or bad, change happens and those who fear or rail against it are doomed to be part of the past, not leading the future. So stay tuned as we consider the evolving world of hybrid work, content at scale, inclusivity and accessibility, brand transformation and Tik Tok swallowing the media world whole. There’s no doubt that the result will be surprising ideas, compelling work, new relationships, and no end to exciting possibilities.

Here’s to wherever we’ll go! Thank you, JMS.

JMS at 13

JMS Founder and Chief Creative Officer, John McNeil, shares his journey into the world of marketing and advertising, from his first job in the art studio at Hill Holiday to future leadership roles at Ogilvy, McCann, and now his own studio. With podcast host Paul McEnany, John considers the role of advertising in culture, the process of whittling an idea down to its simplest form, and how his own leadership style has evolved over the course of his time in the industry.

At JMS, we think, collaborate, make and measure — all under one roof.