Coworking with Jonathan Ouellette

Each week, we spotlight Marketing Brew readers in our Coworking series. If you’d like to be featured, introduce yourself here.

Jonathan Ouellette is executive creative director of the studio Kill 2 Birds.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in marketing? When a brand has something to say, we help give it weight, shape, and presence. When it hits a screen, it pulls you in and makes you stay a beat longer. We create that split-second moment where something earns your attention, that “Wait, what was that?” moment. Then we build around it so the message sticks. Our approach is centered on capturing attention, no matter where the work lives or what medium it inhabits. That means thinking beyond the deliverable itself and focusing on intent: is it showing up on a television, a Times Square billboard, a transit station, or a phone screen in someone’s hand? Whatever the format, the goal is the same: make it matter.

Favorite project you’ve worked on? The Severance Season 2 digital out-of-home campaign. It was such an amazing experience getting to work on a campaign for a series you’re already a huge fan of. Pretty much everyone at Kill 2 Birds loves the show, so the bar was high and nobody wanted to whiff. The team at Apple was also incredibly talented and great to collaborate with. It was the kind of partnership where everyone genuinely made the work better. The brief focused on elevating Severance from a niche series into a cultural phenomenon, then putting it on screens that reach into people’s everyday lives, from 3D anamorphic billboards in Times Square to the London Underground and takeovers of the T-Mobile and Apple flagship stores.

What’s your favorite ad campaign? Right now, I’d have to say Spotify Wrapped. It’s such a smart way to turn user data into identity and build an entire campaign around it. And no media buy beats millions of people voluntarily posting their own results.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile: I’m a pretty avid hiker, and lately most of my vacations have revolved around long-distance walks in the 100- to 200-mile range. I recently walked Hadrian’s Wall and Alfred Wainwright’s Coast to Coast Walk route.

What marketing trend are you most optimistic about? Least? Most: Big screens taking over big spaces. Brands owning entire environments feels like a strong counterweight to fighting for scraps of attention across feeds and traditional channels. There’s something powerful about creating a shared experience in the real world.

Least: Hyper-personalization. I think if everything is tailored “just for you,” eventually none of it sticks. You lose the shared cultural moment, which is usually the stuff people actually remember and talk about.

What’s one marketing-related podcast/social account/series you’d recommend? Honestly, I’m more likely to listen to StarTalk or The Infinite Monkey Cage, but if I have to pick one marketing-related recommendation, I’d say The Fabulist.