DUNKIN X SMUCKER'S

Role: Creative Direction / Brand Strategy (independent concept, full creative ownership end-to-end)

Scope: Campaign Strategy • Brand Identity • Packaging Design • Retail & Environmental Design • Digital & App Design • Motion & Broadcast THE OPPORTUNITY

Dunkin' is built on joyful, on-the-go indulgence. Smucker's has spent 125+ years perfecting fruit preserves. Nobody had put them together. I saw an opportunity neither brand had asked for and built the creative case for it — not as a single product idea, but as a full seasonal platform capable of sustaining momentum for a year, not just a launch.

THE IDEA

The Good Stuff Is Inside™ — the moment Dunkin's baked goods meet Smucker's fruit expertise. A three-tier collection system (The Classics, The Orchard, The Reserve) gives the platform a built-in seasonal rotation: familiar flavors lead, bright seasonal fruit sustains momentum, and a premium fall/holiday tier creates urgency — all unified by one visual language — the full logo lockup, fruit-icon patterns, and a collection seal that scales from a coffee cup sleeve to a billboard.

WHAT I BUILT

Working without a client brief meant defining the full scope myself:

• A complete campaign identity system — primary mark, three collection identities, typography, color, and a partnership lockup built to run at any scale

• Packaging engineered to real-world specs: donut boxes, three Munchkins box formats, cup sleeves, and takeout bags, built to scale from a single donut to a full dozen

• A full retail environment system — exterior signage, drive-thru menu, window campaign, interior digital menu, interior signage, mobile order pickup station, and takeout packaging, designed as one continuous guest journey from parking lot to purchase

• Digital and mobile experiences — a dedicated in-app collection hub, kiosk ordering flow, and website landing page

• An omnichannel media plan spanning social, transit, and billboard, plus a 12-month seasonal rollout roadmap

• Motion and broadcast — a :15 television spot and :30 brand film, storyboarded and produced start to finish

THE PROCESS

AI accelerated the production. The concept, strategy, design system, art direction, and creative decisions remained mine.

I used generative AI as a production tool throughout the campaign — Claude and ChatGPT for prompt development, Grok, Firefly, and Gemini for image generation, Grok and Firefly for motion. Each output was directed, selected, refined, composited, and integrated into the larger campaign rather than treated as a finished asset.

For motion, I built the :30 spot shot by shot across 12 individual scenes: writing the script, directing and generating a source image for each shot, directing and generating each motion sequence from that image, then editing all 12 into the finished commercial. The :15 cutdown was edited from the completed :30.

One recurring challenge: getting a falling Smucker's jar to read correctly required multiple rounds of re-prompting and manual correction — early generations produced physics that didn't track (the jar hanging mid-air, spinning the wrong direction), illegible label text, or a legible label mounted upside down. Getting one clean, physically believable, correctly branded frame took repeated iteration and hand correction in Photoshop before it worked.

This was my first time running a fully AI-assisted production pipeline end to end. I've since refined the approach — standardizing on a single generator per output type for tighter visual consistency and building a more repeatable production workflow from image generation through motion and final edit.

AI compressed the production pipeline. I made the creative decisions.

THE OUTCOME

What began as a single campaign concept scaled into a ten-page capability demonstration — proof that one creative vision can carry a brand system from strategy through final production without losing its shape at any touchpoint. No client brief. No handoffs. One point of view, executed end-to-end.