JOSH IS A CO-FOUNDER OF LAUGH YOUR ADS OFF AND AN ASSOCIATE CREATIVE DIRECTOR OF ART AT WALMART CREATIVE IN LA.
A content creator when newspapers were still landing on driveways. A creative who thinks like a creative technologist. And an art director who can write. Josh was multi-hyphenating when multi-hyphenating was just-considered-lazy-copywriting by most
An industry vet of 13 years, Josh has collaborated with some of the top agencies in the country across some of the biggest brands in the world.
But Josh tends to be most remembered for his side projects. When not working as an Associate Creative Director at Walmart, Josh can most likely be found taking photos, mentoring, helping run Laugh Your Ads Off, organizing industry happy hours for Freelance LA, designing for weird ideas that pop into his brain, writing about the ad industry and the nature of work on LinkedIn, or spending time with his daughter, wife, and cat (Killbot 3000).
JOSH D. WEISS HUMAN
SIDE PROJECT TIMELINE
LAUGH YOUR ADS OFF 2024
A traveling event series focused on comedy in advertising I created with David Roth, Stephen Reidmiller and Yuriy Mikhalevskiy.
We started off with three events in Los Angeles at TBWA\Chiat\Day before taking the show on the road to New York. After our first event at Argonaut, Chris Beresford Hill enjoyed it so much he offered to let us use an Omnicom event space for our second event. It just kept growing from there as major ad players and agencies wanted to take part.
You can find out more about it here or here.
Featuring
Gerry Graf (Slap Global/Barton F. Graf), Greg Hahn (Mischief), Andy Pearson (Liquid Death), Chris Beresford Hill (BBDO), Sean McBride (Arnold), Zoe Kessler (Johannes Leonardo), Tara Lawall (Rethink), Mo Said (Mojo Supermarket), JJ Adler (Ruckus Films), and Noel Cottrell (Murder Hornet) have all taken part.
AI DIRECTORS CLUB 2024
I spent about three weeks designing, building and delivering welcome kits to a fictional advertising club.
Packages were made for five of the top Los Angeles based creative leaders featuring Kirsten Rutherford (TBWA\Chiat\Day LA), Josh Fell (Anomaly), Laura Sampedro (Mullen LA), Zach Hilder (72&Sunny), and Ryan Lehr (Deutsch).
Each featured a portrait of their AI, a hand carved, burnt and stained box, a welcome note with a QR code inviting them to meet their AI, and a customized landing page on my site.
Only 4/5 of the recipients completed their journey, but posting the process of building the boxes earned me 38k impressions, 275 likes and 86 comments.
THE ENCYCLAWPEDIA DICTATIA 2023
In the earlier days of AI, I wanted to test how much it could speak up the production of a project. Working with Anaiis Rabiela, we created an encyclopedia about dictators as if they were cats.
I used Midjourney to build the portraits and Anaiis used ChatGPT to write a baseline entry for each that she could build off of. Instead of months, it only took three weeks to build and launch.
BENNETT IV GEORGIA 2022
In 2022, Herschel Walker ran an ill-advised campaign for the Senate, Ben Mann and I asked ourselves which other Georgia player could unite the state and we came up with one singular player.
Originally, Stetson Bennett IV had been a walk-on at UGA. He transferred to a junior college before coming back on scholarship as a backup. But due to injuries found himself in the driver's seat and took the team to the promised land.
In 2022, he came back to try again and we launched a faux political website as a backdoor Heisman campaign. We gave him a platform (which supported the destruction and conversion of rival Georgia Tech's stadium into a parking lot), tracked his stats throughout the season, and created lawn signs/shirts/other merch that tied in inside jokes UGA fans would embrace.
We also were active on social creating sharable graphics of Stetson. I was even asked by the student newspaper at UGA, The Red & Black, to write a column for the editorial section advocating for the school to support Bennett IV Georgia.
At the end of the season, Stetson and the Dawgs prevailed leading Georgia to a perfect season (15-0) where he passed for over 4,000 yards and 27 touchdowns to only 7 interceptions.
He also was invited to New York for the Heisman ceremony where he placed 4th.
You can't prove our campaign helped him get there, but you also can't prove it didn't.
ADVERTISING.JPG 2021
While looking through entries for The Side Show I noticed a large number of photographic submissions for our Visual Arts category.
I wondered if there was something more targeted I could do with it though and reached out to my friend Jody Bufkin who was early in his photography journey.
We discussed ideas and settled on a curated Instagram feed that could show off all the great photography we were finding from people in the ad industry.
We started off by following people we could confirm worked in the industry the scoured their feeds for the best of their best.
Once we had reposting permission, we inserted them into our polaroid template to make all our posts easily identifiable on the feed and create a seamless scroll on our grid.
We started building community with people tagging us in photos they wanted us to consider while also reposting their featured photos to their stories.
Jody and I both got busy and we both ultimately forgot the password.
THE SIDE SHOW 2020
While working on a previous side project, I had been encouraged to submit it to award shows. That's when I realized bcause of the fees award shows were for the agencies and not the creatives.
I decided to start my own with the mission of maintaining a low barrier to entry ($10 fees) with the same judges you'd find at Cannes or One Show.
We also used our platform to host virtual creative week programming that included a talk by George Tannenbaum about Ageism in advertising and a debate between Taras Wayner and Jeff Greenspan about whether ad agencies are worth saving.
Over the two seasons we ran the show, we had 700+ submissions with over 100 judges dedicating their time.
THE BIG, LITTLE BOOK OF WEIRD, STRANGE, BIZARRELY 100% REAL ANIMALS, BUT NOT REALLY 2020
When my nephew was turning two I decided I wanted to do something more creative than just buying him another toy.
I decided on an alphabet book and enlisted the help of Sunita Deshpande to help. Together we concepted a book of weird animals and worked together to name them all. Sunita wrote a poem for each of our creations and I illustrated and laid out everything.
Additionally, I built the illustrations in a way that allowed me animate them for a digital copy.
The book ended up being a low key success. People I knew were ordering multiple copies for gifts because they loved it so much and that led to some people I didn't know wanting copies as well.
To date we've printed about 150 copies with virtually all of them accounted for.
My personal favorites are the Kiltwala and Wheasel, you can see them and the rest of the book here.
TRUMP RIO GRANDE 2019
One morning in 2019 while showering I had the thought that the border detention centers Trump had built in Texas were the worst hotels ever built, and ironically the one thing someone known for wanting to put their name on everything the one thing he didn't want to put his name on.
I met up with Cindy Hammel for coffee that day and she was sold. We launched the site in under two weeks and got a writeup in AdWeek for our efforts.
GIVE 'EM HELVETICA 2018
One day after critiquing the final projects of my friend Eric Doctor's class at Miami Ad School NY, I made a joke about the possibilty of someone who was typeface blind (like how face blind people can't distinguish faces). I asked Eric if I wrote a short film about a typeface blind graphic designer he'd star in it. He said yes not expecting me to actually write it.
Big thanks to Eric, Director Thomas Wohlford, Director of Photogrpahy Alison Davis, MAS NY for providing a location for a good chunk of the film, and all my friends who agree'd to take small parts to help me out.
FUCKTYPE 2017
One day when I was looking for type inspiration I started thinking about how unlike font websites where you can type in a word to see how it'll look, there was no universal baseline you could compare the styles through.
That combined with looking through a lot of student books and seeing tons of minimal typesetting, Fuck Type was born. I moderated the account for 150 posts, about half were ones I made myself and the others were ones people actually submitted after they found the account.
A CLEAN PAIR OF SOCKS 2015
A Clean Pair of Socks actually inadvertently started in January of 2011 while I was working at CNN.com.
I got permission to go photograph some train kids I met for two days, but they ultimately decided not to use them for anything.
Fast forward to 2015 while I was walking around Santa Monica and saw some travelers and began wondering what happened to the original crew I had met back in Atlanta.
This project combined my photojournalism skills with my neglected sociology degree to create an ethnography of the subculture.
I spent part of every weekend for the rest of the year finding more travelers in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Atlanta, taking their photos and interviewing them so they could tell their story about why they started and the things they'd encountered.
The site ended up getting a bit of a following with almost weekly updates, but after 50 entries I decided it was time to move on to the next thing.
VOCADULARY 2015
Where it all began. In early 2015 I was doing post work for Saatchi and noticed my ACD grab a drink for the road from the company's refridgerator. I made a joke about him grocery shopping on the way out. He laughed, and I began to think about other funny terms people probably have for industry things.
I cobbled together a website to create an Urban Dictionary for ad creatives that allowed people to submit and vote on defintiions. It got a quick blurb on Agency Spy which was the most attention anything I'd worked on had gotten to date.
