Party However. Just Plan.
The Virginia Cannabis Control Authority approached us with a challenge: reduce cannabis-impaired driving without sounding like every safety campaign people scroll past.
The problem wasn't awareness. Most people already know driving high is a bad idea.
Young audiences have developed an allergy to being talked down to. Traditional safety messaging often arrives as a lecture, and lectures are easy to ignore.
So instead of changing the message, we changed the voice.
Client: New business pitch
Year: 2026
Agency: Fable
Role: Creative lead, art direction, design, and campaign development. Created in partnership with Blake Carlson (Copywriter). Following the pitch, I independently expanded the work for this portfolio, developing new copy, activations, social concepts, and experiential extensions.
Insight
Nobody wants to sound earnest anymore. Care has become disguised as a bit.
Sincerity got too expensive to say straight, so people learned to smuggle it through jokes. Concern sounds like a roast. Affection looks like bullying. The joke becomes the love.
The people most likely to stop you from making a terrible decision aren't authority figures. They're the friends in your group chat.
The campaign adopts the emotionally intelligent cadence of modern friendships: fake unseriousness, affectionate bullying, casual concern, and just enough emotional damage to keep everyone alive.
Every message sounds like your funniest friend caring about you out loud in the only register that doesn't make either of you cringe.
Out of Home
Most impaired-driving campaigns rely on fear, statistics, or consequences.
This campaign relies on friendship.
Using bright colors, Coolvetica, and the language of the group chat, the work transforms safety messaging into something that feels culturally native. The boards don't sound like a government agency. They sound like the friend who confiscates your keys and roasts you while doing it.
The humor gets attention. The concern is what sticks.
Social
The campaign expanded into a recurring social voice that gave people something most safety campaigns never do: language.
Posts provided ready-made responses for drivers, passengers, and friends navigating real situations involving impaired driving.
Not instructions. Scripts. The goal wasn't to lecture people. It was to give them words they could actually imagine sending.
The Munchie Stop: Pop-up Activation
A festival activation built around a simple idea: the ride home is part of the night.
Attendees could grab food, claim ride discounts, and pick up branded takeaways that reinforced the campaign message long after the event ended.
The Munchie Stop extended the campaign into the real world, meeting people at the exact moment ride planning matters most. By pairing snacks, discounts, and practical takeaways, the experience made planning ahead feel less like a responsibility and more like part of the fun.
Tinder Ad Placements
What if designated drivers were attractive? Rather than positioning ride planning as responsibility, the campaign reframed it as a green flag.
The Tinder-inspired activation introduced Danny Driver, a dream match whose most desirable quality wasn't height, money, or abs. It was having a transportation plan.
By treating safe rides as social currency, the work transformed planning ahead from a chore into something worth showing off.
The Campaign System
The campaign was designed to live wherever the audience already spends time: on the street, in the group chat, at festivals, on social, and even on dating apps.
While each execution takes a different form, every touchpoint shares the same voice. The funniest friend in the room. The one who cares enough to roast you.
