Randall is a record-setting, award-winning Executive Creative Director with broad industry expertise in everything from CPG and Retail to Automotive and Pharma, able to bring out the absolute best in creative personnel. With 15 plus years of proven ability to create compelling stories that help brands reach consumers, meet objectives, and drive incremental revenue. And 10 years shepherding one of the most influential, innovative, and powerful brands in Canadian history.
Copied by Drake and Gary Vaynerchuck, Randall delivers disruptive creative that can’t be ignored. As creative director of MuchMusic, he and his team won more Global and North America PromaxBDA Promotion, Marketing and Design Awards than any other department in North America. And was featured in Brief Magazine’s profile of the top 14 Creative Teams in North America. In 2013 he played the pivotal role in Bell Media Agency winning Global Marketing Team of the Year at the PromaxBDA Awards. And in 2014 single-handedly secured an unprecedented back-to-back win. He helped launch Much Digital Studios a social influencer program, and helmed a viral “Phreak615” MuchMusicVideoAwards campaign, staging a fake “hack” of MuchMusic airwaves that was so compelling the engineering department almost shut down the channel because they thought it was real. The stunt was covered by major news outlets and lead to record viewership. He was also among the first Bell Media employees to win a Bravo award for increased revenue.
As VP Creative Director for Beleiveco, he created industry attention-earning work on Balzac's Coffee, Cavendish Farms, Beam Suntory, and Expanded category experience into Pharma with work on AstraZeneca and Abbott, including AOR-winning creative for Janssen.
As head of Bell Media’s Brand Partnership and Commercial Production division, Randall has produced award-winning spots, activations, and placements for Subway, Starbucks, H&M, Coke, Ikea, Virgin Mobile, Chevrolet, Kia, Kit-Kat Doritos and more.
He has extensive experience in every advertising medium and additionally is an award-winning commercial director and producer. He has spent 30 years studying creativity and is a lateral thinking and brainstorming coach. He backs his creativity with a bachelor’s degree in Sociology from the University of Western Ontario with an emphasis on marketing, strategy and advertising, supplemented with a minor in both English and Film. As well as a 2-year communications program at Ambassador University in Big Sandy, TX. And is a graduating member of Tom Monahan’s Ad Hell Camp in Rhode Island.
Select Case Studies
Balzac's Coffee Roasters
30 years ago Balzac's started as a single coffee cart in Stratford Ontario. Inspired by European coffee culture and Honoré De Balzac, they can now be found across the country. To celebrate they wanted to make a spot, the catch was a limited budget of 50k.
107 hours building miniatures, 7 sets and 1 dexterous hand model later we had this. (Right down to a faithful recreation of the coffee cart that started it all).
The spot had a staggering 22% interaction rate (1 percent is average and 6% is considered very strong) and garnered over 1.2 million impressions in its first week.
Cavendish Farms
Think you know the first thing about french fries? Think again.
Doritos + Much
Circa 2010 this campaign became the gold standard of Much Brand Partnerships. An authentic integration between platinum selling recording artists, Down With Webster and Doritos that launched client relationship for close to a decade. I toured with the band for about a week through California. Falling asleep in my little bunk on the tour bus after each show, and waking up in a completely different city every morning. Wild times.
MMVAs: Save Your Screams
The Much Music Video Awards were a beast. The ultimate team effort. Massive teams of producers, pr, sales, marketing, digital, design, and much more all bringing their collective might together. We usually started preparing 6 months out. For all the years before my tenure as Creative Director at Much the marketing for the show had been one-off themes (I had come up with two or three of them myself). But I wanted to build a campaign that would be impossible to forget. This campaign ran for half a decade, and we created dozens of spots that won dozens of awards. These are a few of my favourites.
That Much Closer
It’s no secret that YouTube demolished the MTV and MuchMusic of my youth. The music video audience evaporated seemingly overnight and we had to make fundamental changes while still retaining the brand essence that made us “cool”. This pivot towards reality and teen drama programming meant we would need to get creative with our brand in commercial and interstitial time. Part interview, music video, and station ID, the That Much Closer series became a staple of the channel for many years.
North Park
When you promote a show, or advertise a product, you usually have said show or product in hand. When you’re promoting a show that’s made the week it airs, not so much. South Park was a massive hit, but when it moved from Comedy to Much we had challenge. We needed something that really stood out, but that didn’t rely heavily on show assets. Welcome to North Park became the highest awarded campaign in Bell history. It was also tremendously fun.
Kit Kat + Crave
Our friends at Kit Kat really liked a partnership between Netflix and Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream called “Netflix and Chill’d” in the US. They asked if we could come up with a true-to-brand integration between Kit Kat and Crave. This spot is currently the longest running partnership in Bell history. Can’t agree what to watch? Grab a Kit-Kat.
More Work,
Can be found in my blog The Starfighter Chronicles.
MuchMusicVideoAwards Teaser
An homage to Jack and the Beanstalk, I had originally envisioned the end of this spot to be a 24 hour time lapse of an electric guitar "growing" out of the concrete. A sign of the magic yet to come with the MMVAs. But shooting at iconic Dundas Square in downtown Toronto made it unpractical. Still, this is one of my favourite spots of all time.