Daniel Brainin

I developed a promotion for Maxell Canada that extended Maxell’s iconic ‘Man in the Chair’ branding in a slightly surreal way: a man sitting on a chair on the roof of an urban building throws a CD like a frisbee, which hurtles through the sky to be caught by a woman on a beach – only now it’s a DVD, representing the two products that Maxell wanted to highlight.

Based on this taste of television, Maxell Canada decided to create their own brand sell, and invited agencies to pitch. They chose my spot, which starts off with the ‘Man in the Chair’ getting windblown in a laboratory test of their cassette tapes in the 80’s, followed by a more current ‘Man in the Chair’ getting literally blown off the screen in a laboratory test of their DVD’s. Both spots ran on MuchMusic.

When the stakes are high

Kimono Condoms, based in California, are well known on the West Coast, but less so in the East. I won the creative for their East Coast television campaign by coming up with a spot about a poker game with two players left. A woman has one chip left and a man has a huge pile of chips. The woman bets her chip. The man meets her and raises a chip. The players who had already folded look at her: now what, she’s out of chips…the woman reaches into her purse and slides a Kimono Condom across the table. The other players look back at the man; he’s all in and pushes all his chips into the pot, with the tag line ‘Kimono Condoms. When the stakes are high.’ The spot ran across the Eastern Seaboard, as well as extending to Miami, with Spanish graphics. It was featured in a New York Times article as an example of Poker’s rise in popularity.


New York Times article