RICK EVANS

Client: Airbnb
Agency: Direct Contract
Role: Brand Marketing Strategy LeadChallenge: Airbnb built its global business by mastering one market at a time. To accelerate European growth, leadership needed a unified understanding of guest audiences across a dozen culturally distinct markets.Strategy: I synthesized fragmented data sources into a single coherent audience framework, giving marketing leadership a clear and actionable picture of where European guests were similar, where they diverged, and what those differences meant for campaign development and media investment.Result: The framework was adopted as the source of truth for both European and North American marketing strategy, directly shaping regional campaign development and media investment decisions.

Client: Dove
Agency: Ogilvy
Role: Strategy DirectorChallenge: Generative AI was beginning to fundamentally challenge what real beauty meant. For a brand built entirely on championing authentic, unfiltered beauty, the question was not whether AI mattered but how to respond without abandoning the mission.Output: Through deep research including interviews with industry experts and stakeholders across WPP, I developed the first strategic perspective on generative AI for Dove's global brand team, informing the brand's ethical stance on beauty distortion and establishing a framework for evaluating every AI-related decision against the Real Beauty mission.Result: The perspective shaped Dove's long term global planning at a pivotal moment for the category, ensuring the brand's most important asset remained intact as the technology landscape shifted.

Client: Dove
Agency: Ogilvy
Role: Strategy DirectorChallenge: A viral TikTok filter called Bold Glamour was making it increasingly difficult to distinguish digitally altered beauty from reality, directly threatening Dove's thirty year commitment to championing authentic, unfiltered beauty.Strategy: Rather than managing the situation as a brand crisis, we identified it as a grassroots cultural moment waiting to be amplified. The strategy was to seed the movement from the bottom up, starting with real TikTok beauty community members before bringing in celebrities, ensuring the response felt authentic rather than corporate. The core strategy was conceived and briefed in under three hours.Result: The campaign increased purchase intent and brand trust in both the US and UK, and was awarded the Cannes Lions Media Grand Prix and Gold in Creative Effectiveness.View the Case Study Video

Client: Unilever Sustainability
Agency: Ogilvy
Role: Strategy DirectorChallenge: Product innovation alone cannot get a global conglomerate to its sustainability goals. Unilever needed a way to shift public behavior at scale, without it feeling like a corporation telling people what to do.Strategy: The insight was that the most important step toward sustainable living happens before the first step, in the decision to try at all. I led the creation of Step Zero, a standalone brand designed to aggregate collective action across social media through influencer-led sustainable living content backed by Ogilvy Behavioral Science. By letting creators lead with their own audiences rather than pushing a corporate message, the initiative felt genuinely grassroots.Result: On the path to reaching 1B people with tips and tricks to live more sustainably.View the Step Zero Website

Client: Visa EMEA
Agency: Saatchi & Saatchi
Role: Strategy DirectorChallenge: Almost everyone has a Visa card but almost nobody engages with Visa directly. For the world's largest payment network, invisibility had become a strategic liability, particularly as digital-first platforms were redefining what trust meant for a new generation of consumers.Strategy: The insight was that Visa is itself a marketplace, connecting merchants, banks, and cardholders in a multi-stakeholder environment where trust has to work simultaneously in multiple directions. Digital-first marketplace platforms like Airbnb had already solved this problem elegantly. I used those models as the strategic reference point to build a new trust framework that reflected how Visa actually operates and how it could earn direct engagement from each of its stakeholders.Result: The framework shifted the Visa EMEA CMO's understanding of how trust is built and earned across a multi-stakeholder brand, directly informing the brand's strategic direction.

Client: Andressen Horowitz
Agency: R/GA
Role: Strategy DirectorChallenge: Andreessen Horowitz wanted to build a first-of-its-kind invite-only community platform for an unusually diverse membership spanning technology founders, scientists, and cultural creators. The challenge was finding the single organizing principle that could make such a varied group feel genuinely connected.Strategy: Through deep stakeholder interviews and workshops with a16z partners and portfolio companies, we uncovered that psychological safety was the non-negotiable foundation for any community where vulnerability and intellectual risk-taking were expected. That insight drove every decision from platform design and interaction model to messaging architecture and communication cadence.Result: The strategic foundation earned direct referrals for future work from within the a16z investment portfolio.

Client: IKEA (Ingka Group)
Agency: R/GA
Role: Strategy DirectorChallenge: How do you reimagine a loyalty program for 100 million members that already works, without losing what makes it feel distinctly IKEA?Strategy: Rather than starting with the program mechanics, I started with the question the brief hadn't asked: what does loyalty actually mean to someone who already trusts the brand? Through deep stakeholder immersion inside and outside IKEA, I mapped the current value system and identified the opportunity to shift from transactional discounts toward interactions and rewards that create genuine relationship value.Result: Directly influenced the global roadmap for new sustainability and rewards initiatives, reorienting the program to support IKEA's commitment to becoming a fully circular company by 2030.

Client: Sanderson Design Group
Agency: EveryFriday
Role: Strategy DirectorChallenge: Sanderson Design Group held one of the world's most significant design archives, including work by William Morris and Frank Lloyd Wright. The opportunity was to monetize it through a new brand without cannibalizing the heritage portfolio or reducing a living archive to a nostalgia exercise.Strategy: The key insight was that young urban audiences don't value vintage for its origin but for its ability to create something uniquely theirs in a modern context. Rather than looking backwards, we compressed time, treating the archive not as history but as a timeless sourcebook with no beginning or end, just a continuous cycle of imagination, interpretation, and creation. This became the strategic and creative foundation for everything from the brand name to the visual identity.Result: The Archive by Sanderson Design Group brand was built from inception and launched at Selfridges in London on the strength of the brand idea, within a matter of weeks.Watch the Social Film

Client: Sanderson Design Group
Agency: EveryFriday
Role: Strategy DirectorChallenge: Harlequin, one of the boldest and most distinctive brands in the Sanderson Design Group portfolio, was experiencing a significant sales decline at the same moment it was adding a direct to consumer channel. The brand needed to rediscover its confidence without abandoning what made it distinctive.Strategy: Rather than softening the brand to broaden its appeal, we pushed in the opposite direction. The insight was that Harlequin's audience were people who treated their home the way they treated their wardrobe, as an expression of personal style rather than a set of safe choices. The repositioning spoke directly to that fashionable, design-confident consumer and gave the brand a platform bold enough to match its product.Result: The campaign earned this response from the Sanderson Design Group CMO Nigel Hunt: "Over time, Harlequin lost some of its magic. This creative campaign is boldly re-building the brand."

Client: Barclays
Agency: EveryFriday
Role: Strategy DirectorChallenge: Barclays was launching the UK's first travel-reward checking account in the middle of a global pandemic that had made travel impossible. The challenge was not just naming and positioning a new product but making a transactional banking offer feel emotionally relevant at the worst possible moment for the category.Strategy: Rather than leading with points, miles, and product mechanics, we shifted the entire value proposition toward the human experience of travel, from seeing places to seeing faces. That emotional reframe informed everything from the rewards structure to the product name and visual identity, making a complex financial product feel as human as possible.Result: The launch opened up significant new streams of strategic work across the Barclays business, including brand architecture, brand refreshes, and creative communications.

Client: Barclays
Agency: EveryFriday
Role: Strategy DirectorChallenge: Despite its global brand recognition, Barclays was not perceived as a genuine global player for individual international banking customers. The brand felt like an obstacle in the process rather than a facilitator.Strategy: Through stakeholder interviews and deep audience research, we identified the core tension: Barclays International Banking needed to shift from feeling like the dead weight in a complicated process to feeling like the force that actually makes things happen. That reframe informed a lifestyle-led creative approach that centered the human experience of international life rather than the mechanics of international banking.Result: The campaign outperformed historical benchmarks by up to 600% across key performance indicators, and opened up significant new streams of strategic work across the wider Barclays business.

Client: Bayer
Agency: Oliver
Role: Strategy DirectorChallenge: Bayer had developed a functional health supplement using natural ingredients to address real human health challenges. The opportunity was to launch it in a wellness category crowded with unsubstantiated claims, where Bayer's scientific credibility was an advantage but its pharmaceutical identity needed careful handling.Strategy: We built a brand that looked and felt more at home in a natural food store than a pharmacy, using Bayer's science-backed formulations as the differentiator while keeping the identity firmly rooted in natural wellness.Result: The brand generated enough excitement to secure CVS as a launch partner with premium shelf placement.

Client: Tequila Cazadores (Barcardi)
Agency: Virtue (Vice Media)
Role: Assoc. Strategy DirectorChallenge: The premium tequila category had become saturated with celebrity-owned and celebrity-endorsed brands. Tequila Cazadores needed to relaunch without the budget to compete on star power, and without abandoning the authentic craft heritage that made it genuinely distinctive.Strategy: Rather than chasing celebrity culture, I built a strategy that inverted it entirely. The real celebrities of Tequila Cazadores were the craftspeople, farmers, and culinary figures of Los Altos de Jalisco, the region where the tequila is made. An integrated world-building campaign across social media, out of home, experiential, and online video brought their stories to life, making authenticity the competitive advantage in a category drowning in manufactured glamour.Result: The campaign drove double digit sales growth over its first two years, demonstrating that cultural authenticity could outperform celebrity endorsement in a crowded premium spirits category.Watch a Campaign Film

Brand: (RED)
Role: Director of MarketingChallenge: (RED) had built its fundraising model around special edition physical products. As consumer behavior shifted toward digital and in-app purchases, the organization needed to find a way to translate its model into a new commerce landscape without losing the cultural cachet that made it work.Strategy: In partnership with Apple, I worked with 25 of the top App Store developers to create branded in-app purchases with 100% of proceeds going to (RED). Rather than imposing a single marketing approach, the strategy empowered each developer to lead their own campaign, trusting that they knew their audience better than any centralized campaign could while helping craft a relevant (RED) integration for each.Result: The initiative launched simultaneously across 140 countries on World AIDS Day 2014, raising tens of millions of dollars and establishing a first-of-its-kind charitable commerce model within the App Store ecosystem.

I believe that to change the tide of the climate crisis, we must reconcile our relationship with the Earth and all of its inhabitants.In this spirit, I created the Ecosystem Member podcast to explore the relationships a range of people have with the more-than-human world and how they bring that to their life and work.Past guests include Vincent Stanley, the legendary director of philosophy at Patagonia, Ersin Han Ersin, of the art collective Marshmallow Laser Feast, and Lylianna Allala, Climate Justice Director at the City of Seattle.Listen On:
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Scientists and experts assign about 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions to our food system. With many people in the West eating three or more times a day, that's a lot of chances to choose a more environmentally responsible diet.On You Can't Eat Money, I interviewed food industry folks from award-winning and Michelin Star chefs such as Dan Barber, Sean Sherman and Douglas McMaster to food thought leaders like Ben Aguilar of The (Wendell) Berry Center and Melina Shannon-DiPietro of MAD, Rene Redzepi's culinary industry non-profit about the connection between nature, ourselves and our food system.Listen On:
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Cannes Lions Live 2020At the start of the COVID-19 lockdown, one of my mentors introduced me to the idea of biomimicry.While I came across many resources that applied biomimicry to design and materials, there was nothing about more general business and cultural strategy - so I created something.Along with an amazing group including a creative director, artist and a leader in the design futures space, we created a panel for Cannes Lions Live and shared the wonders of nature and how it can inform our creative practices.Watch on LoveTheWork.com

Assignment PhotographerBefore moving to London in 2020, I had a chance to join my wife on a research trip to Côte d'Ivoire as a photographer.In addition to taking portraits of the weavers as the collective my wife was working with, I got a chance to snap these artists in action.A few of the photos I took were then used in the gift shop of The Metropolitan Museum of Art to accompany a collection of textiles from the weavers created in conjunction with a related exhibition.