11 Years and Counting: The Creative Chief Who Outlasted His Own Rule

After building some of advertising's most iconic campaigns — Sonic's "two guys," Southwest's "Now Free to Move" — Brian walked away from agency life to become the client. Eleven years later, he's still there, having built Garmin's 110-person in-house creative team from the ground up inside a famously engineering-led company. This conversation goes past the campaign highlight reel into the real tension of in-housing: how to stay creatively hungry without an agency's survival pressure, how to earn trust from an organization that didn't believe in emotional storytelling, and why "thank you, Ecuador" became his go-to line for managing feedback from 20 people on a call. Brian also gets candid about AI's place in creative work, why authenticity is non-negotiable at Garmin, and the simple magazine flip-through that led to one of his favorite campaigns. A rare inside look at what it actually takes to build — and defend — a creative culture inside a product company.