Big entertainment properties are fun to work on right up until the studio tells you that you can’t actually see, know, or have anything.

For Kellogg’s partnership with Man of Steel, I led the integrated creative team across digital media, augmented reality, packaging, and in-store experiences. The idea was to make Mom the superhero by giving her something genuinely cool to bring home: an AR experience that let families interact with the world of Superman through Kellogg’s products.

There was just one small problem.

The studio was trying to keep Man of Steel under extremely tight wraps. Marvel had helped turn secrecy into part of the machinery of blockbuster filmmaking, and everyone wanted the same kind of control around leaks, spoilers, imagery, and story details, which meant we were given approximately one photo of Superman.

One.

That image had to work very, very hard.

We had packaging to create. Retail displays. Digital content. Promotional materials. An augmented reality experience. Gamification. An entire integrated campaign built around one of the most recognizable superheroes on Earth, and we basically had one approved picture of Henry Cavill standing there looking heroic.

So we did what creative teams do when complaining isn’t going to produce any additional assets: we figured it out.

We stretched the world as far as we could without pretending we knew things we didn’t. We used technology, interaction, design, environments, and storytelling to make the campaign feel much larger than the box of approved materials we’d been handed. And it worked. The program was wildly successful, which was a pretty useful lesson early in my career: abundance doesn’t necessarily create better creative. Sometimes constraints force you to actually have an idea. When you have no choice, you find a way to start making choices.

It also introduced me to the Webby Awards.

I remember someone first explaining the Webbys to me and my immediate response being something along the lines of, “Ew, web stuff? Gross.”

This was obviously an intelligent, forward-looking assessment of where media and marketing were headed.

The project went on to get Webby recognition, and suddenly all that “web stuff” seemed considerably less gross.

But somehow none of that is the story I remember most.

I got invited to the Man of Steel premiere and after-party, where I ended up sitting directly next to Christopher Nolan, David S. Goyer, Zack Snyder, and Henry Cavill. Four people responsible for making the actual Superman movie were sitting right there.

And I said absolutely nothing.

I was too intimidated to interrupt, so I spent most of the night quietly trying to listen to every conversation, convinced I was about to absorb some profound secret about filmmaking, storytelling, or creativity.

It was kinda boring, to be honest.