Kim Nguyen

I have always thought most commercials would be improved if they just had marionette characters. 

When DIRECTV needed ads for their service with no wires, I finally had the perfect opportunity. 

No matter how much you love your house, there’s always one little thing wrong with it. But whatever that little weird thing might be, you can always bundle your home and car insurance with GEICO.

Donate Life America manages the national organ donation registry, and they always need more people to sign up to be donors. Instead of making a campaign for a general audience, we wanted to reach a niche group of passionate, generous folks. We found them in the Dungeons and Dragons community. This group is surprisingly large with millions of player around the world. Our goal was to make something that fit neatly into their game, but also gently nudged people to become registered organ donors. So we came up dice with organs in them! If you’re into DnD, you get it immediately. If you don’t, that’s ok, they’re still really cool dice.

No two customers have the exact same insurance needs. But GEICO has all the coverage and service for anyone and for anything that might happen.

So in this campaign, we introduced unexpected combos of stuff and situations could be covered with GEICO.

Because whatever you need, you get more with GEICO. 

The Gecko’s arch-nemesis is Will Arnett.

That’s the idea.

Oh and Will also tries to help people get GEICO insurance.

That’s the other part of the idea.

When you’re in the market for a new home, you look at a lot of houses before you find the perfect one. But at least GEICO makes it easy to get home insurance.

In this campaign, we introduce two real estate agents who try their hardest to sell not-so-perfect homes to their clients. The agents appeared in multiple TV spots and a Tiktok campaign targeted at potential home buyers.

In this series of spots that launched during the Oscars, we see how classic and modern films would be a little different if the characters just had a little help from Google Assistant. Turns out, Google’s tech would have made these stories much shorter. With my friends at Arts & Letters, I helped create this concept and listed literally hundreds of famous movie scenes to make a little better with Google. Unfortunately, Gremlins 2: The New Batch did not make the cut.

The things that happen in sports just don’t happen anywhere else. And ESPN has always gone beyond the stats and straight to the heart of the stories that make sports a part of us. This spot launched the new brand campaign that I helped create with the team at Arts & Letters.

All these GEICO RV spots start the same. So the thumbnails of the spots all look the same. That is on purpose.

This 15 second campaign shows how an RV adventure with GEICO could start at one place and end up anywhere. They all have different outcomes determined by the direction the family choose to drive.

Whenever you saw one spot, the next spot served to you would have a different ending.

A Mother’s Day pro-bono campaign for Science Moms, a non-profit group of climate scientists that are also all moms. This is possibly the piece of work that most accurately reflects my natural speaking voice, which is soft until it’s SUDDENLY SURPRISINGLY LOUD.

Shortlisted for a Green Pencil at The One Show.

This DIRECTV campaign featured 80s heartthrob, Rob Lowe, and NFL athletes playing horrible versions of themselves, which is obviously the best way to show that DIRECTV is better than cable .

A few of the characters I helped create include Meat Head Rob Lowe and Arts-and-Craftsy Tony Romo.

Venmo needed to introduce itself to new users as the best way to pay your friends back quickly and without all that check-splitting awkwardness.

So we created a fully integrated campaign called "Pony Up with Venmo"... with actual mini-ponies. 

Priceline wanted to throw out their decade old campaign, "The Negotiator," featuring the Star Trek icon, Williams Shatner.

When we pitched for their business, my partner and I came up with a totally new campaign structure would keep their beloved Williams Shatner as a narrator, rather than a negotiator. 

We also decided their lobby needed these emoji puzzle posters too. 

DIRECTV needed to show their customers that giant cable companies provided completely inferior service.

So we created a campaign about the clueless buffoonery of DIRECTV's competitors with the fictional companies Cable Corp and CableWorld. 

In this series of spots, Cable Corp merges with CableWorld to become a giant cable conglomerate that tries to take on DIRECTV.

Unfortunately, their board members are not so bright and their business solutions are equally dumb. 

Here are a few spots that I wrote for the NFL's "Together We Make Football" campaign. The first two appeared in two separate Super Bowls.

The other two sent me on a multi-week tour of NFL players' childhood homes and NFL stadiums across the country.

I ate a sad/impressive amount of nachos during this time of my life. 

During a freelance stint for Mass Appeal x SoundCloud, I creative directed and concepted SoundCloud’s first ever global campaign. “First On SoundCloud” celebrates the inspiring stories and raw energy of artists who started on SoundCloud first - before they became the influencers they are today.

We highlighted 10 groundbreaking artists from across SoundCloud’s global community. Spanning hip hop, electronic and pop, these artists represented the more than 10 million artists heard on SoundCloud every month.

From their first SoundCloud uploads, to their first album, festival appearance or Grammy nomination, these amazing artists’ stories were brought to life across SoundCloud apps, playlists, social feeds and newsletters, as well as social and-out of-home advertising.

After seeing the injustice of the not-guilty verdict in the Trayvon Martin shooting, a team of creatives and I crowd-sourced funds to create a PSA.

We raised only five thousand dollars to make it, and shot it ourselves with the help of some friends in the industry. We used the real 911 calls made by people in the area on the night Trayvon Martin died in the video. 

"Stand Up to Stand Your Ground" was made in 2 weeks, from crowd-sourcing to finish. It was only posted on YouTube and had no other media buy, but the video went viral. Within two days, it had appeared on all of the major news networks and been written up in dozens of news sites. 

In this project I spent a significant amount of time yelling at a Google Assistant to make sure all these lines actually worked. A super fun project with Google and Arts & Letters and actress/rapper/cat lover, Awkwafina.

Crate&Barrel people aren't people who hate the holidays. They are people who LIVE for the holidays. It's their time to break out all the good stuff, find their favorite recipes and make their homes look like Christmas on crack.

Here are a couple holiday campaigns I wrote and creative directed for Crate&Barrel. The latest work stars Reese Witherspoon and lets us take a peek at what goes into her hosting skills. 

My partner and I were asked to create a campaign that included all of the varieties of Fruit Snacks, which include: Gushers, Fruit by the Foot and Fruit Roll-ups. 

So after eating countless boxes of Fruit Snacks and staring at the wall, we thought, "My god, I want to live in a world made of Fruit Snacks."

And FruitSnackia was born.

Bumble set out to be more than a dating app with it's new platform, BumbleBizz. Now the female-centric app was helping its users find business connections, mentors and investors. 

To launch the new news, we created a massive OOH national campaign called, "Now We're In Business." And given the on-going and problematic treatment of women in the workplace, we set out to make statements that were modern, topical and supportive with a bit of an irreverent wink. During SXSW, we followed up with an activation to help fund female start-ups that was a literal Elevator Pitch.

While freelancing for Wieden + Kennedy in Portland, I got to concept and creative direct this fun piece for Secret Deodorant. The “Pinball” spot launched their new adorable, portable deodorants on TV and in social media.

Since Secret Freshies go everywhere you go, we wanted to show what a woman’s chaotic day feels like. Basically, it’s like your stuck in a giant pinball machine and bouncing from place to place - hopefully, while a happy song plays in your head. 

When AT&T acquired the DIRECTV brand, I was part of the team that pitched and won the new business. 

We created a launch spot and additional campaign to announce the new merger. 

Crate&Barrel needed a social campaign to get couples to think about gift registry in a new way.

So we asked real couples who had their wedding registries at Crate and Barrel to tell their stories and give some advice to couples who are about to get married today. We used their stories as social videos with the hashtag #WelcomeLoveIn and asked Crate fans to share their stories too.

We even found one couple who made their wedding registry at Crate over 42 years ago, and they still use the wine glasses they got on their wedding day.

People love talking about love...and their wedding gifts. 

Bud Light wanted to tie their NFL sponsorship into their "Up For Whatever" campaign. 

So we created a series of spots that encouraged Bud Light drinkers to put two plans on the table and use the football game's coin toss to decide what they'd do for the weekend. 

Keystone Light's spokesperson is the smoothest dude on earth, Keith Stone.

This fully integrated campaign featured TV, radio, outdoor, online videos for Facebook and social media posts.

Our digital videos had Keith Stone celebrating random holidays on Facebook and giving pieces of advice that we called "Smooth Musings." We made over 20 different short videos that rolled out throughout the year.  

Here are a few things I did while I was at MTV Networks.

I worked on brand and show campaigns for VH1 and BET.

One of the highlights was creating the brand voice and launch of a new channel, Centric.