BUILDING THE CONDITIONS FOR GREAT CREATIVE WORK.

At Brooks, my role sat between creative leadership and operational strategy. I helped lead the creative team alongside another Creative Director while working across Lottery and Gaming brands where the demands ranged from daily production to integrated campaigns, digital experiences, motion, retail, and large-scale launches.

I saw an opportunity to create greater clarity around the environment surrounding the work. How people understood their responsibilities. How goals connected to their work. How feedback happened. How assets moved through the organization. How people understood their growth.

The goal was never more process. The goal was better conditions for creative work.

There was one significant challenge. We could not use the artist's name, likeness, tour identity, or other licensed intellectual property.

Instead of treating that as something to quietly work around, the creative leaned into recognition. The campaign used cultural cues, visual references, colour, typography, symbols, and Easter eggs that devoted fans could decode while maintaining a distinct and legally compliant identity.

The question became less about how closely we could reference the artist and more about how little we needed to say before fans understood.

The visual identity borrowed from the language of fandom without borrowing the artist's identity. Purple, pink and pastel colour, expressive serif and script typography, holographic gradients, friendship bracelets, guitars, cats, symbolic photography, and hidden references created something recognizable to fans without ever needing to say the name.

Even the prize mechanic contained a wink to those paying attention. The winner could bring thirteen friends.

The restraint was part of what made the idea interesting. People had to get it.

The campaign began with a two-week teaser designed to create speculation before the product was fully revealed. Social, influencer partnerships, radio, and high-impact placements at BC Place encouraged people to guess the mystery artist and helped turn the licensing constraint into part of the experience.

Once launched, Concert of a Lifetime expanded across retail, social, digital, influencer partnerships, pop-up activations, partner marketing, BC Place advertising, and a live Golden Ticket Tracker that showed how many top prizes remained and where they had been found.

The campaign became more than advertising for a Scratch and Win ticket. It became a hunt.

The campaign extended deeply into the physical world. More than 15,000 point-of-sale elements were deployed across the retail network, while a major partnership with Parkland transformed more than 165 locations through gas-pump signage, windows, floor decals, digital displays, counter cards, and other campaign touchpoints.

Eight pop-up activations across Vancouver's Lower Mainland created another layer of participation. People lined up before events began, collected campaign merchandise, shared the experience socially, and moved between locations looking for tickets. All eight activations sold through their allocated inventory in under an hour.

Helping lead the campaign meant thinking beyond any single execution. The idea needed to remain recognizable across the Scratch and Win ticket, campaign creative, video, retail, social, influencers, partnerships, experiential activations, and BC Place while working within legal, production, timing, and channel constraints.

That required collaboration across creative, strategy, account, production, motion, client teams, media, retailers, and external partners. My role was to help maintain the creative thread as the campaign expanded, giving teams enough clarity to build from while protecting the idea that made the work distinctive.

The campaign connected with both traditional lottery players and a younger audience drawn to the cultural relevance and exclusivity of the experience. Demand moved quickly from intrigue to participation, delivering strong commercial results while demonstrating a different model for what an Instant game could be.

Total Sales

$5.7M

Tickets Sold

235,899

ROI

17.7:1

• 93%Sell-through
• 8Pop-up activations sold out in under an hour
• 45+Earned media stories
• 120K+Views on a TikTok influencer post in under 40 hours
• 59%Of U35 players surveyed learned about the ticket through social media

My time at Brooks reinforced something I've come to believe more strongly as a creative leader. Great creative rarely comes from process alone, but unclear roles, disconnected systems, poor feedback, and operational friction can make great work much harder than it needs to be.

The operational work I helped introduce wasn't about adding process for the sake of process. It was about creating clarity so talented people could spend more of their energy solving interesting problems.

Concert of a Lifetime represented the other side of that equation. An unusual opportunity, a hard creative constraint, a lot of collaborators, and an idea people genuinely wanted to engage with.