Highlighted Work.
Dasani
The Narrative
America had a quiet vitality crisis hidden in plain sight. People were tired, chronically tired. They knew hydration was the answer. Science said so. Their bodies said so. But the solution available to them, tap water, had been quietly poisoned by decades of infrastructure neglect and chemical treatment. It tasted bad. It smelled faintly of the pipes it traveled through. And building your own home purification system was an act of either wealth or obsession.
The cultural contradiction was intimate: the most essential substance for human life, freely available in every American home, had become something people didn’t want in their mouths.
That was Dasani’s myth to perform.
Not just water. Purified water, scientifically treated, mineral-enhanced, consistently clean and fresh-tasting, in your hand, right now, wherever you are. The myth wasn’t premium versus value. It wasn’t even health versus indulgence. It was vitality versus depletion, performed as asimple, democratic, daily choice.
Taste was the battleground because taste was the barrier. Every strategic and creative decision flowed from one conviction, if it doesn’t taste clean, none of the rest matters. And if it does, if that first sip genuinely delivers, then the brand has fulfilled the myth it promised.
Radically alive, one bottle at a time.
Six-market global research. A positioning that claimed the sensory and emotional territory between luxury and commodity. And a distribution system that made the myth universally accessible, which was itself the deepest expression of the brand’s conviction..
Everyone deserves to feel this good.
The Result?
The world’s #1 bottled water brand. $4B+ in U.S. revenue. 12% global market share. Built from nothing, no spring source mythology, no European heritage, no legacy, just on the power of amyth the culture was ready to believe.
U.s. wildlife refuges
The Narrative
560 refuges. 150 million acres. The largest network of protected lands on earth and one of the least visible national assets in America’s cultural imagination.
Most Americans couldn’t name a single wildlife refuge. They knew Yellowstone. They knew the Grand Canyon. The refuges were invisible.
The cultural contradiction - Americans have a deep, mythic relationship with wildness, with the idea that something untamed and irreducible exists inside the national character. The refuges are that wildness, federally protected and perpetually overlooked.
The engagement built a cultural identity for a national system, not a conservation campaign, but a myth. A myth that said..
Before there were parks, before there were monuments, there were refuges. And they belong to you.
The Result
A brand platform that gave the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service its first coherent national identity. The language, the positioning, and the story architecture to make 150 million acres of American wild feel like a birthright worth defending.
COke Zero
The Narrative
America had a problem. Men wanted to be healthy. But men refused to drink diet soda. The cultural contradiction was precise: wellness had been coded feminine, and an entire gender was opting out.
Coke Zero didn't solve the contradiction. It performed it.
The "Taste Infringement" campaign in which Coca-Cola's own executives threatened to sue Coke Zero for tasting too much like the original, turned a product liability into a cultural myth.
Zero became abundance. Optimization became the masculine alternative to dieting. A product positioned as a compromise, became a badge of unapologetic living.
This is the Iconic by Design framework being fully fulfilled. Find the cultural contradiction, build the myth that resolves it, speak with the rebel's voice, and perform the myth until the culture believes it.
The Result
The most successful Coca-Cola product introduction since Diet Coke. 3.8% of the total U.S. soda category. Expanded to 160 countries. Volume up 13% in Q4 2024 and still growing nearly two decades after launch.
Canon & arcules
The Narrative
The AI surveillance category had a visibility problem. Not a technology problem, but a story problem. Every competitor was racing to claim the same territory involving smarter AI, faster detection and better data.
The result was a category that spoke entirely to fear and liability, and not at all to the humans those systems were built to serve.
The cultural contradiction was precise. Security technology had been positioned as the thing that watches over people, when its actual value is that it frees people to think bigger, move faster, and achieve more than they could without it.
Mytheos’ engagement flipped the entire script. Rather than leading with surveillance, we led with human potential. “Arcules Augments Human Greatness" repositioned an AI video management platform from security infrastructure into a force multiplier for human ambition.
The myth wasn't we protect you. The myth was we set you free.
The brand refresh delivered strategic direction, a new value proposition, a visual identity system, a brand film, a complete website rebuild, a media campaign, and a trade show presence built around that singular idea.
The Result
Q3 showed a 600% increase in qualified leads over Q1. One month alone delivered a 1,327% increase over January. Webinars, the channel most directly shaped by the new brand narrative, carried the highest close rate of any channel at 21%.
U.s. Department of energy
The Narrative
America had an innovation problem hiding inside an energy problem. The clean energy future existed in garages, university labs, startup pitch decks, and community organizations across all 50 states. What didn't exist was a bridge.
Government funding was slow, complex, and structurally inaccessible to the entrepreneurs most likely to solve the crisis. The best ideas were dying in what insiders called the “valleys of death", the funding gaps between breakthrough concept and commercial reality.
The cultural contradiction was this. The nation that invented the internet, put a man on the moon, and built the interstate highway system had locked its own innovators out of the clean energy revolution.
American ingenuity wasn't the problem. American bureaucracy was.
American-Made was the myth that resolved it. Not a program but a declaration. A declaration that grassroots ideas matter. That a startup founder in rural Montana and a college student in Atlanta deserve the same shot at shaping the energy future as a Fortune 500 R&D department.
The brand work built the Five-Year Impact Report as a cultural manifesto, a document that made 650 funded teams, $260M in prizes, and 17 national laboratories feel not like a government report, but like the origin story of a revolution.
The American-Made Manifesto, “Equal parts grit, grace, and genius" became the emotional anchor. The hero was always the innovator. The myth was always America's.
The Result
Five years. 70+ prizes. $260M+ distributed. Submissions from all 50 states. A brand platform recognized with a National Association of Government Communicators Blue Pencil and Gold Screen Award, the rare instance of a government program earning a brand award.
