Vicki Miller

Columbus Academy’s academic record rivaled any independent school in the country, but too few prospective families knew it — or understood that the school pairs that rigor with a genuinely whole-child approach to mind, body, and spirit. The brand platform “Joyful Excellence” gave the Academy language and imagery for both halves of that story.

The “Ready to Thrive” admissions campaign broke from the genre’s usual three-kids-in-a-tree photography, instead cropping tight on more than two dozen students looking straight into camera against stark white grounds — headlines daring them to take the world on. A companion campaign, “Give Your Child the World,” turned the Academy’s 231-acre campus into the visual argument, shot from the ground and the air. The identity extended into a redesigned alumni magazine — six issues that turned a newsletter into something alumni actually wanted to keep.

Three of Columbus’s most beloved stages — the Palace, the Ohio, and the Lincoln Theatres — are turning 100 within a three-year span. CAPA needed a single celebration strategy that could hold all three histories at once without becoming a nostalgia piece; the brand still had to say something about where these theatres are headed, not only where they’ve been.

The centennial identity centers on an animated “100” mark and a line that plays double duty as an invitation: “We’ve saved you a seat.” Each theatre’s own seats — Palace, Ohio, Lincoln — appear together across print, broadcast, and in-venue advertising, digital kiosks, and anniversary films. A longer-running storytelling initiative is collecting the community’s own memories of these buildings — their architecture, their performers, their audiences — for a documentary and exhibition still to come.

IGS Energy was a conventional energy retailer that needed to become something else entirely: a purpose-driven company built around sustainability, with a new customer base to match. That’s a four-year repositioning, not a campaign — consumer segmentation and personas, a new brand narrative and visual identity, and a product architecture organized around a single promise: Source, Manage, Protect.

The launch campaign, “Let’s Go Green for Good,” carried that promise into print, billboards, digital, and animated spots, followed by an activation campaign aimed at the very real overwhelm people feel about climate action — making the case that switching to green energy is quicker and easier than the guilt suggests. A later solar campaign extended the identity into a new market. The repositioning moved the numbers that matter: measurably higher awareness, improved brand perception, and revenue growth.

Ohio State’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion runs dozens of programs, centers, and services — so many that the office risked being understood as a list of offerings rather than one felt idea. The brand strategy distilled ODI down to three pillars any audience could recognize themselves in — You Belong, Changemaker Makers, Here and Now — converging into a single essence: Transformative Power.

That essence became an elevator speech for the Chief Diversity Officer, an internal rallying campaign (“I have transformative power”) for students, faculty, and staff, and a set of external brand expressions — “This Is Your Time,” “Go Big,” “All In” — built to recruit and welcome the next class of changemakers to campus.

OmniSeq launched out of Roswell Park Cancer Institute as the first real fusion of clinical genomics and information technology built specifically for oncologists — precise, fast, actionable results for lung cancer patients, in a category that had, until then, kept physicians waiting weeks for answers that mattered urgently. The challenge was making a deeply technical diagnostic platform feel like a physician’s ally rather than a lab report.

The brand organized OmniSeq’s offering into three plainly-stated pillars — the power of precision (OmniSeq Target), collaboration (Genomic Network), and knowing now (OmniSeq Connect) — under one promise: “The more connected we are, the more powerful we become.” The identity and messaging carried through trade-show experiences, sales collateral, and the brand’s launch website.

The Columbus Foundation’s Gifts of Kindness program had already done real good in the city — it just hadn’t reached beyond its existing donors. The brief was to turn scattered giving into a movement: a campaign built to reach more than a million Greater Columbus residents and get everyday citizens, not just philanthropists, to claim kindness as something the whole city does together — a brief that only grew more urgent as the work developed through 2020.

As creative director, I led the concept work behind “Kind Columbus: We’re all kinds of kind” — a mark and message built to travel from community-sourced video and editorials to outdoor advertising, alongside a companion direction, “Let’s Be Kind Columbus,” built around a public pledge. Both concepts were designed to turn a foundation’s philanthropy into something citizens could join, not just watch.

Amphora — Evofem’s non-hormonal, on-demand contraceptive gel — needed an emotional territory in a category crowded with hormones, side effects, and compromise. For the national pitch, I concepted four distinct creative platforms, each pairing the product’s actual science — a gel that regulates vaginal pH to control sperm activity — with a different way in: “pHemale Power” cast the science itself as a kind of feminism; “Smiling V” and “Wink” leaned into candor and humor between women; “A Real Choice” put the absurdity of existing options on trial.

The range gave the client four genuinely different ways to sell a genuinely new idea — from empowerment-led brand films to a friend-to-friend social campaign — before a single line of the eventual launch was locked.