VICE

Role
Brand Strategy
Creative Direction
Art Direction
Design

Year
2014-2020

The Voice of a Generation

Legacy media segmented youth culture by topic and talked down to it. VICE treated it as one conversation: music, food, fashion, politics, war, weed, sex. And took all of it seriously.

VICE told stories that could only be told at VICE. It defined the voice of youth culture, challenging convention and helping people understand the world and themselves. People worked at VICE because it let them make work that mattered to them, and in turn, mattered to an entire generation.

From 2014 to 2020, Gerry played an integral role in the brand's visual language, identity, and marketing across every global line of business and market, helping build VICE into the largest independent youth media company in the world.

VICE News

No desks. No makeup. No sets. No suits.

VICE News prioritized cultural insight and immersive reporting over formal credentials. Its journalists were culturally embedded in the stories they covered, and they went to the places legacy media wouldn't.

Gerry contributed art direction across VICE News, including campaign development and event marketing.

VICELAND

VICELAND translated the VICE editorial sensibility into a 24-hour television network led by Spike Jonze, built on radical empathy. Gerry helped shape the channel identity and led art direction and creative direction across campaigns, content branding, and global market launches. Each show carried its own personality but lived within the same restrained framework. The channel's coverage of the Women's March on Washington earned an Emmy. The visual language was later adopted across all of VICE.

VICELAND Brand Studio

VICELAND Brand Studio reinvented how advertising was done for television. Separate from Virtue, the Brand Studio integrated partner brands directly into the VICELAND and VICE ecosystem. VICELAND launched with the lowest ad load of any channel on television. Working with internal production teams, we leveraged on-air talent, internal employees, and the office itself to develop low cost, high impact branded content that extended from broadcast into VICE's full digital network.

Geico
Geico insures motorcycles, boats, cars, houses, and it turns out, nearly anything else. The strategic platform we built across every piece of work was simple: More Than Car Insurance.

One series featured VICELAND employees calling Geico Customer Support to ask what else they could insure: a crystal ball, a slinky, a petting zoo without peacocks. Longer cuts became plainspoken explainers for young audiences. We extended the platform into VICE's digital ecosystem, including a How to Be a Person spot with Neko White profiling a couple who lived in their van across the US, all insured by Geico. No geckos, no cavemen. Real people, real lives. The result was significant sign-ups for Geico across auto, renters, and home insurance.

T-Mobile
T-Mobile signed on as VICELAND's charter advertiser, committing before the channel had a single viewer and betting on an ad model no other carrier was willing to try. Instead of running a traditional on-air spot, we built This Is Not An Ad using b-roll and cutting room floor footage from across VICELAND's programming, tagging each spot with attribution to T-Mobile. T-Mobile didn't interrupt the show. T-Mobile sponsored more of it. Viewers tweeted and called in saying they were switching carriers. Some backed it up with receipts.

Shinola
Shinola is born and bred in Detroit. The brand makes watches, leather goods, turntables, and bikes with high craft and care, employing a significant number of people across the city. In 2016, with the national conversation focused on American manufacturing and jobs, Shinola had a story worth telling. Instead of putting the product front and center, we put the people who make it front and center.

A short documentary series on VICELAND followed the watchmakers, leatherworkers, bike builders, and Detroit collaborators connected to the brand, each telling their own story about their craft, job, and city. As part of the broader partnership, VICELAND also aired Shinola's 360-degree VR tour of the Detroit factory, led by Luke and Andrew Wilson. The result was major upticks in brand trust, relevance, and sales.

Mailchimp
Mailchimp empowers businesses, big or small. VICELAND had a global television network. Mailchimp had a global network of small businesses, many of whom could never afford a national on-air spot. We make big commercials for small businesses. We selected brands with stories that would resonate with the VICELAND audience: Heatonist hot sauce in Brooklyn, Flow+Theo vegan skincare, Tattly temporary tattoos. Each told its own story, produced to look like VICELAND content, with Mailchimp surfacing at the end as the platform behind the growth. Empowered by Mailchimp, anything is possible.

VICE Digital

VICE's digital ecosystem spanned VICE.com and a network of editorial verticals: Noisey for music, Motherboard for technology, Munchies for food, Broadly for women's perspectives, i-D for fashion, and more across sports, gaming, health, finance, and social justice. Each vertical was built by the people living in the culture it covered.

The editorial language born from these verticals informed the VICELAND identity. In turn, the visual language developed for VICELAND was extended back across the digital ecosystem, unifying platforms that had previously operated independently.

VICE Experiential

Most media companies were losing live audiences to streaming and digital. VICE built a real-world business around bringing its readers, listeners, and viewers into the same room. Villain in Williamsburg became the permanent venue. Advertisers paid to be inside. What looked like marketing was a commercial line in its own right.

VICE Night Market
Night MarketA bi-weekly Friday night market at Villain in Williamsburg, run in partnership with Smorgasburg from 2018 through 2019. Food vendors rotated weekly. Noisey programmed live DJs. Broadly ran astrology readings. The market turned a VICE audience into a physical community. Gerry led creative direction, art direction, and environmental and spatial design across the event identity.

VICE Newfronts
The annual pitch event where VICE brought advertisers into its room. Gerry led identity and spatial design for the 2018 event, working with artist Matthew Bellosi on the artwork that anchored the platform.

Virtue

VICE understood how to talk to young audiences. Virtue turned that understanding into a creative agency, built on the premise that brands could reach people by behaving like culture, not advertising at it. Gerry helped position the agency and contributed creative across dozens of client partnerships, including AT&T as agency of record, Unilever, Under Armour, Budweiser, and T-Mobile.

VICE x Google
A global partnership with Google integrated VICE's cultural authority with Google's MyMaps technology, turning neighborhood-level storytelling into a navigable product. Contributors including Andrew WK, Awkwafina, and Dave 1 from Chromeo mapped the places worth knowing about, away from tourist traps. Gerry led creative direction, art direction, and design on the launch, which also helped launch VICE Travel as a vertical.

Mad Decent x Bud Light
Bud Light was the official sponsor of Mad Decent Block Party, a festival produced by Diplo and touring 18 US cities. Putting a logo on the stage wasn't enough. We wanted to give people at the party something to talk about.

We worked with 14 artists and illustrators to create 31 unique can designs, including four hero cans. Then we went deep into Bud Light's packaging and production teams to make it real at scale. Using HP Indigo digital technology, we generated 31 million unique label variations across roughly 200,000 cans with no two being the same.

Collectively
VICE's mission to help people understand the world extended to how they live in it. Collectively was a nonprofit editorial platform launched through VICE and born from conversations at the World Economic Forum in Davos. It brought together more than 30 Fortune 500 companies and direct competitors, including Unilever, Coca-Cola, Google, Facebook, Marks & Spencer, and BT, alongside NGOs, to make sustainable living feel culturally relevant rather than like a corporate initiative. The platform produced original content including the documentary America's Shrinking Farms, and was chaired by Keith Weed, Unilever's CMO and the most influential CMO in the world at the time.