Media: Print

Fila was one of the first accounts I worked on in my ad career. While at Merkley, I was part of the team that helped pitch and win the sports and apparel account. As most pitches go, the work we did to win it was much edgier than where we ended up, but nevertheless it was a cool experience for me (as a collegiate athlete) to work on the account.

During my time working on the Fila account, a lot of the ads we produced were focused on promoting news shoes for a range of sports. With that came the opportunity to work with a handful of Fila’s top athletes. We were fortunate to meet and work with Grant Hill, Claudio Reyna, Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa and Jennifer Capriati to name a few.

The Fila baseball ad you see here celebrates Barry Bonds and Sammy Sosa’s homerun hitting record season. It was also was the first work I won an award for. But even better than that, was showing it to my family in the Sports Illustrated special edition.

Fun fact: While shooting a video with the athletes mentioned above, I was able to hit a couple of balls with Jennifer Capriati and kick the soccer ball around with Claudio Reyna and his wife (another soccer star). I grew up playing soccer and at one point had Claudio’s poster on my wall, which as you can imagine, made that moment even more special.