VH1

VH1 needed a marketing campaign to launch the first-ever Hip Hop Honors show, an annual TV special honoring old school rappers and other hip-hop contributors, so I was called in as a copywriter to help.

As I was thinking of campaign directions, I noticed a couple things:

1. All the event honorees represented one of the four elements of hip-hop culture: rapping, DJing, graffiti, or breakdancing.

2. Each hip-hop element came from seeing relatively mundane objects as tools for creative expression (e.g. mic for rhyming; cardboard for breakdancing; spray paint as a paintbrush and walls as canvas, etc.)

From these insights, I created a simple campaign that paid homage to the visionaries that turned these objects into tools that shaped the foundation of a global culture.

My print and poster executions inspired a commercial with the same concept – and the whole campaign helped to create a 1-night show viewership of approximately 1 million total viewers.

See below for the campaign executions.