Show don’t tell, how creativity can help see the future.
Seeing over the horizon with more successful outcomes.
Back in 2014, I collaborated with Jamie Siminoff on a presentation outlining a vision for the future of home security. I met Jamie while serving as a creative director for Apple. Jamie, a serial inventor, and I had collaborated on a few small projects. I helped him by sharing my knowledge of creativity, storytelling, and bringing new products to market—lessons I learned at Apple while launching new and innovative products and collaborating with top-tier talents in marketing and communications. This project, known as f5_v001, was particularly significant—it was the next iteration of the “doorbot,” the first video doorbell, which you might remember from the 2013 episode of Shark Tank. This venture would become Ring, acquired by Amazon in 2018 and since become the largest home security company globally, safeguarding over 15 million homes and generating over $4 billion in revenue.
In 2016, I joined Ring to lead the marketing efforts. At the time we created the f5_v001 document in 2014, Ring was merely an idea. My strength lay in visualizing a future that had yet to materialize and then bringing that vision to life. As a designer, director, and creative director, my role for many years had been to demonstrate the potential of ideas and to actualize them. Whether through storyboarding, creating pre-visualizations for movie sequences, or developing animatics for commercials, creativity, for me, has always been about imagining beyond the present and constructing that vision for diverse audiences. Therefore, the opportunity to collaborate with Jamie and help shape a vision for the future was highly appealing. Remarkably, nearly everything unfolded as we had envisioned, a testament to Jamie's foresight and my ability to convey that vision to audiences in tangible and engaging ways.
f5_v001 served as a blueprint, aligning our intentions and bringing together internal teams to support innovation, product roadmap development, and overall progress. The ideas and narrative from this document formed the basis of our external communication strategy, enabling us to effectively convey to the world what Ring represented. Importantly, this unified vision rallied our investors and supporters, ultimately facilitating our acquisition by Amazon. In 2014, beyond the original 'Doorbot,' no tangible products existed. Thus, only words and images could give dimension to our story. I created modest yet sufficient visualizations of the "Rings of Security" surrounding individuals, their homes, and neighborhoods, thereby imparting tangibility. I used an image of a soap dispenser to represent the first Ring Video Doorbell. Illustrations depicted an ecosystem of cameras in and around homes, alongside the concept of a social network for neighborhood security, which would later materialize as the Neighbors App. The idea of "Always Home" projected a vision of constant connection, ultimately embodying our brand essence. This served as the foundational "storyboard" for the Ring Brand. By the time I departed Ring seven years later, we had developed products, communications, from a brand that initially only existed as mere pages scribbled in an old garage in Santa Monica.
2014 Go-to-market presentation for the Ring Brand
Connecting the dots through creative and storytelling.
When venturing into uncharted territory, particularly in the realm of new products and technologies, I have consistently championed the “Show, don't tell" approach. This philosophy serves two pivotal purposes. Firstly, in the act of creation, it's about embracing the journey of discovery, recognizing that while meticulous planning is essential, much unfolds organically during the process itself. Secondly, it fosters inclusivity by creating tangibility that audiences can understand. This allows you to craft your strategy dynamically as you witness the product coming to life, adjusting its shape as needed. Importantly, it aligns diverse minds toward a common vision, ensuring everyone sees through the same lens. This cohesion is vital; without it, diverging end goals or perspectives can lead to missteps along the way. At Ring, I encouraged my teams to always jump straight to making so we could all see what “it” was and align people, strategy, and execution at once. For example, I’d prefer to work directly on a product marketing page, saving time and enabling everyone to see what our customers would see, literally working on the actual canvas. We created all the time at Apple, making things we could show Steve Jobs every Wednesday at Marcom meetings in Cupertino. It wasn’t enough to write a script; we made the actual commercial. The first commercial campaign I “sold in” was for the iPad. On my laptop, I edited a 30-second video animatic with a voice-over and music to promote the idea “We’ll Always” do what we love, just in a whole new way. No one had to imagine anything because they could all see the end result. This became the launch campaign for the iPad 2. When Ring was acquired by Amazon in 2018, we were introduced to the concept of “working backwards” and the PR F.A.Q. This technique brought together a group of people to imagine the future by writing a favorable press release describing the ‘product” and supplying frequently asked questions. The technique was used to look back at our own ideas from the perspective of others as they would see them. This would help us dimensionalize the efficacy of ideas and innovations in product and communications, and importantly, it would put everyone on the same page as they collaborate to bring the vision to life.
Every day, creative technology brings us closer to the ability to create imagined worlds, bringing people together to envision a future state and guide us toward it. AI and Generative AI represent just another step in how technology can generate previsualizations that demonstrate intention, solve problems, and can be tested and refined to enhance outcomes—a tool for fostering alignment and mutual understanding. In the five years I spent as Chief Marketing Officer at Ring, there was not a single day when my creative background didn't come into play. The tools and philosophy of "show, don't tell" enabled me to lead the marketing organization in aligning on a common vision, proving indispensable and delivering effective results for the growth of the brand.
