Ron Schlessinger

It’s 2020. The pandemic hits and the planner at Superconductor has to write a new brief. He comes up with a good one. Everybody in California has a different reason to have an electric car. That’s 40 million reasons. We can’t do a shoot. Maybe we do something animated? How about a song? I pick up my guitar and write a few. They like the lyrics of one of the low fi tunes. They take the lyrics to a crazy music company and they make it way better. They find some stars. They do some crazy animation. Electric cars sell like crazy.

It’s late 2021. The Pandemic is over and we can do a shoot. The planner has another great brief. Let’s debunk the myths about electric cars. There’s a myth they’re expensive. There are no charging stations. They have no range. Who better to debunk myths than mythical creatures? Nobody. The campaign was selected for The One Show 2023 Shortlist and featured in Lürzer's Archive Vol. 3, 2022.

According to a Veloz press release on March 6, 2024, the campaign delivered unprecedented results: “Veloz’s 2022-2023 Myths Busting Myths Electric For All campaign, which rounded up Sasquatch, a family of Martians, a unicorn and the Tooth Fairy to build on the continued public interest for EVs and help overcome the “mythical” barriers to EV adoption, delivered unprecedented results including over 145 million impressions, 58 million video views and audio listens, over 1.13 million visits to ElectricForAll.org, over 77,000 consumer conversions and nearly 15,000 in-person interactions with campaign and EV education materials.”

There was also great press about the campaign's success in Ad Age in September 2024.

TBWA\Chiat\Day had just won the Pepsi account. They were launching a new campaign on the Super Bowl when they got word their Pepsi Max brand might want to join the fun. The Hall of Fame CD called Susan Alinsangan and me the Monday before Thanksgiving. By Tuesday afternoon we had the campaign idea. By Wednesday we had the idea for the spot and the iconic crushed can. The following week Pepsi bought “I’m Good” and “Ingredients.” A week or so later an amazing director would be on board. “I’m Good” would win awards at Cannes and the One Show and be named one of the Top 50 Super Bowl Spots of the last 50 years by CBS. To this day I do not have man boobs so the ads must be true.

One of my favorite CDs had a new client. He called Susan Alinsangan and me. As usual we came up with about 300 ideas. The CD immediately liked one a lot and tweaked the line to read, “There are lots of things to feel guilty about. ThinkThin isn’t one of them.” Then the CD told us to make these as funny as you can in the time we had left. So we did.

I’m freelancing at TBWA\Chiat\Day on another project and someone asks if I had bandwidth to come up with ideas for this new Nissan Electric car. The art director and I came up with a ton of ideas and one of them is about a world where everything runs on gas. It seemed funny. Then we learned another team had the same idea. No matter, the idea died and the LEAF launched with a cool ad where a polar bear hugs a LEAF owner. Both teams moved on to other work. Then we heard the idea was presented a year later and Nissan loved it. It was alive! A bunch of great writers and art directors produced the crap out of it and made it better than I could have imagined. It even won an award at Cannes.

What could be better than writing Hyundai scripts for “The Dude?” Working with all the nice and talented folks at Innocean over the years, that’s what. These are people who know in their hearts that a bear, some raccoons and a tarsier ogling a Sonata Hybrid is comedy gold.

Then there’s the Brett Favre Super Bowl spot. The line, “We don’t know what things will be like 10 years from now” turned out to be particularly prescient. At the time, Favre was retiring and un-retiring from football every day. The joke was that he might be playing several more seasons, not that he’d one day be embroiled in a Mississippi welfare scandal.

The Nissan Maxima has always been the 4-door sports car. Which means you don’t have to give up your Nissan Z when you have a baby. Just stretch it until it becomes a Maxima. The rare spot for one car that features two car models. A client’s dream. A few months after this spot ran, a smart creative team at TBWA\Chiat\Day produced a sequel for the Nissan Quest Minivan with the same couple at an ultrasound finding out they were having triplets. Even better.

I’ve done a lot of work with the good people at GTB, Team Detroit and Ford. These are a few of my favorite ideas.

As a musician, working with Yamaha is a dream come true. I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to write the website for their full line of pianos in the USA as well as their first ever holiday TV spot. Visit the full Yamaha Pianos website.

I got to work with SNL’s Bobby Moynihan. I got to travel to New York City (well, New Jersey) for a great shoot. I got to eat a ton of bacon and bang on strange instruments. All with the talented people at Deutsch/LA. My children still tease me endlessly about the last line in this spot which I swear I did not write.

The CustomInk logo is an octopus. I have a bachelors degree in Marine Biology and know the octopus, and cephalopods in general, are some of the smartest invertebrates you’ll ever meet. I couldn’t help myself.

I was part of the team that won the $300 million Visa account at TBWA\Chiat\Day and worked on everything from the Olympics and Small Business to NFL and Contactless Cards. I got to meet famous gold medalists, Super Bowl winning quarterbacks and come up with hundreds of creative ways to swipe, tap and hand over a Visa card.

Before there was Sirius XM there was Sirius and XM. I was part of the team that helped launch XM Satellite Radio.

Did you know where you live can determine how long you will live? I helped the California Endowment spread the word that doing little things like adding parks and grocery stores to a neighborhood or drinking fountains to schools can add years to people’s lives.

When two great things come together, that’s the sweet spot. Who doesn’t love a good Venn Diagram?

The Nissan Titan was built in America. Canton, Mississippi to be exact. Nissan regularly had the Mississippi Mass Choir at company events. Who better to sing the praises of this American-made beast of a truck than these incredible gospel singers?

Safeway wanted to launch their store brand of Organic foods. I helped come up with some ideas for that. Shout out to any Godzilla and Rodan fans.

DHF Technical Products refines precious metal into targets that are purchased by physicists, scientists and other PhDs for large scale vacuum coating manufacturers. But DHF is not only outstanding in gold, silver, platinum and palladium. They are outstanding in every element. From quality and service to innovation and vision. To demonstrate this, we created a whole new periodic table starting with Outstandingium 150. For six years running, the Beerium t-shirt has been the most sought after item at the Society of Vacuum Coaters trade show.

I still love these spots and print from the good old days. I got to shoot in McCovey Cove in San Francisco, had incredible Gumbo in New Orleans and wrote some fun headlines for motorcycles and beer.