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

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.

Transformation takes a lot more than an ad campaign.

That’s why we’re always thinking about and making  a million things at once. Here’s a bit of what we’ve been up to.

From Scapegoat to Saving Grace

Healthy Conversations

Meet Limited Edition

The Fight to Save Democracy (and the USPS)

John McNeil Studio Expands Strategy Offering

The Case Against Content

John McNeil on Creativity, Leadership, and the Power of Advertising

Transformation takes a lot more than an ad campaign.

That’s why we’re always thinking about and making a million things at once. Here’s a bit of what we’ve been up to.

From Scapegoat to Saving Grace

Healthy Conversations

Meet Limited Edition

The Fight to Save Democracy (and the USPS)

John McNeil Studio Expands Strategy Offering

The Case Against Content

John McNeil on Creativity, Leadership, and the Power of Advertising

That’s why we’re always thinking about and making  a million things at once. Here’s a bit of what we’ve been up to.