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Case study 01 · Concept · Campaign · Identity · Art direction

The brand is the plane — and I named it.

Jon Melby Airshows — identity, photography, video, print, booth, collateral and the website. One person, every surface, five years.

An air-show pilot in his first two seasons, with no marketing and no budget, against a field of corporate teams. I was the entire department — identity, photography, video, print, booth, collateral and the website.

It placed 2nd and 3rd in consecutive years in the International Council of Air Shows (ICAS) Marketing Competition, the air-show industry's marketing award. The field included the marketing departments of Red Bull, Oracle and the major oil companies — every one of them sponsors a pilot.
I was in the bathroom when the first award was announced.

My role
Concept, identity, art direction, photography, video, print and web — every surface, alone.
Client
Jon Melby / Jon Melby Airshows — my own agency's client, retained for nearly five years, across three aircraft. Still flying today.
Recognition
ICAS Marketing Competition — 2nd and 3rd place, consecutive years.
The decision it turns on

The brand is the plane — and I named it. The name came out of working on the lead photograph. I'd shot Jon's Pitts against a plain blue sky, but it needed more. I pulled a monsoon cloud from my library and began a composite. Putting them together made something neither frame was on its own: the black-and-yellow aircraft breaking out of a storm. The identity was born in that composite, and the name came out of it. I called it The Monsoon — and everything after fell out of the word. The palette was already on the aircraft. The weather was already in the frame. Every surface after that inherited the storm. "There's a storm on the horizon."

The Jon Melby Airshows identity: a Pitts biplane banking through an orange storm sky, its checkered tail and wheel spats picked up in horizontal bars across the layout, with the wordmark in outlined display type and the line 'There's a storm on the horizon' along the foot.
The identity, taken off the aircraft. The checker on the tail becomes the bar system; the plane's own black-and-yellow becomes the palette; the smoke and cloud become the weather the whole campaign lives in. Re-rendered from the original InDesign artwork.

One person across every surface produces a coherence a committee structurally can't. Red Bull's identity passed through brand guardians, agency partners and sign-off chains. This one passed through me at every touchpoint, so nothing drifted. The shoestring didn't win despite being one person — it won partly because of it.

And it kept working. The awards came in the first two seasons; the relationship ran nearly five years, across three aircraft — a Pitts S1, an S2 and an S1B. Winning something once is a good year. Being kept on for five is the harder credential.

And Melby was one of five. Ed Hamill, Eric Beard, Jim Maroney and Rhett Thompson flew with my work on them too, along with the Copperstate Fly-In. For a stretch I was the marketing shop for the air-show circuit — which is a category, not a client. The Monsoon is the one I show because it is the one that was scored.

Nobody commissioned the storm.

The first campaign isn't the one above. I was starting out, and Jon was art-directing the work himself — which is what most small clients do, and it is the single most common way good work doesn't happen. I was still doing all of it: photography, web, print, graphics, layout, video.
I built what he asked for.

Then a new aircraft arrived and the materials had to be redone.
I delivered exactly what he directed — and then pitched what I would have done instead. That was the Monsoon: name the aircraft, then let the weather that came with the name carry everything. I showed him on a laptop in an Einstein Bagels. He liked it and changed direction. Every award, every surface and every year that followed came out of a pitch nobody asked for.

That's the part worth hiring. Having the better idea is common. Delivering the brief you were given, on time, and then making the case for the one you believe in — without making the client wrong — is how creative direction actually gets earned. You don't win the argument. You make the other option irresistible and let them choose it.

The earlier Jon Melby Airshows advertisement: a blue and white Pitts biplane photographed over red rock canyon, inside a blue and gold bordered frame, with a serif wordmark, the line 'A new and different performance', a cut-out portrait of the pilot in a flight suit, an ICAS logo and a contact block.
before · client-directedThe brief, as given. Blue and white, first aircraft, and a headline that describes the act: “A new and different performance.” I shot the plane, built the layout, set the type and signed off the print. The only part that wasn't was the idea. That's the whole reason it's on this page.
The Monsoon-era ICAS magazine advertisement: a black and yellow Pitts biplane with a checkered tail against a gold storm sky, headed 'There's a storm on the horizon', with 'Prepare for the Monsoon' beneath the wordmark, and yellow bars framing the top and foot.
the pitchThe pitch, once he'd said yes. Second aircraft, and the headline stops describing and starts promising: “There's a storm on the horizon.” One is a description of an act. The other is a concept. The plane was shot from the ground at Jon's aerobatic box south of Chandler — 600mm handheld, fewer than a dozen low passes to work with. Same client, same designer, same year I stopped taking direction and started giving it.
A full-page magazine advertisement: a biplane trailing smoke against a yellow storm sky, headed 'There's a storm on the horizon', with 'Beware the Monsoon' beneath the wordmark and a contact block at the foot.
printThird aircraft, same weather. The identity came off the original plane, so a new plane could have ended it — twice. Instead the storm outlived both machines it was taken from, and the line sharpened with it: prepare for became beware. A concept that survives its own source is the test of whether it was one.
Trade show booth signage: the pilot in flight suit at left, the biplane banking across an orange storm sky, an aircraft specification list, and the web address across the foot.
environmentalTrade show booth. The same weather at ten feet wide. Booth graphics have to read from across a hall and hold up close.
The Jon Melby Airshows website: full-bleed photograph of the biplane against a gold storm sky, a horizontal navigation bar edged with the aircraft's checker, and a welcome line reading 'There's a storm on the horizon'.
webjonmelby.com. Full-bleed hero photography and one clear action, back when most of the web was still tables and buttons.
filmThe 76-second campaign spot, transcoded from the surviving DivX master — timestamped inside the award window. Air-to-air, onboard cockpit POV, word cards hard-cut to the checker, comedy relief, and just enough period Adobe Premiere cheese to make it work. Shown at its original 640×480: it is an artifact of its moment, not a showreel, and upscaling that SD to look modern would be the exact judgment failure this page argues against.
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