William is a 20+ year veteran of graphics, brand development and marketing. He has worked with Fortune 500 companies, not for profits and small businesses, to help increase their profiles locally, nationally or internationally. He has won a variety of awards, including Best Corporate Identity from the Waterloo Region Ad and Sales Club.
William is also the founder of 100 Men Who Give a Damn Waterloo Region, a crowd-sourcing group that helps local charities raise funds in a quarterly meeting.
William has experience in theatre and film, sales, teaching at the secondary and post-secondary level, and has spoken internationally on the subject of branding.
I created brands for a variety of companies, sometimes starting with the ‘look and feel’ and leading to the ‘soft branding’, other times working with the client to align their brand internally, then establish printed and online material. For many years, my stock-in-trade was telephone answering services and their associations – both in Canada and the United States.
Branding Breakthrough was a web and print branding project I took on with my web guy. We started with no collateral and ended up with a comprehensive package that the principal could then hit the streets with, attract clients and follow up with them in a professional – and appropriate – manner.
Initially my web guy and I were brought in to re-do Salama’s web site. In discussion ALL of the talk was about brand, not web – even though the words ‘web’, ‘web site’, etc were used. We ended up creating their full print and online presence. My biggest accomplishment with them was creating a dimensional mailer, which when couriered to a select list of former donors received an 80% response rate and opened them up to $10m in donations.
Starting in the Norwich Union days, AIG and then BMO were an ongoing client both for design and for branding. Much of the work done for them was adapting designs based on changing brand guidelines. Some branding was done when product lines were extended and new brands created. Part of the ongoing contract was updating their PowerPoint presentations for internal sales.
When time allowed, pro bono work was my way of reaching out to the community. As an offshoot of this I started 100 Men Who Give a Damn Waterloo Region. This has been going for 5 years now, and we are just short of 1/4 million dollars in monies collected.