Biography
Patrick Hanlon has been an award-winning creative director at a host of great agencies. Most recently, his 2003 Super Bowl spot for H&R Block with Willie Nelson was a Top 10 spot in consumer polls.
At places like TBWA, Ogilvy, Hal Riney & Partners, and Lowe & Partners in New York City, Hanlon worked on famous brands including Absolut, UPS, John Deere, Disney, Nickelodeon, General Motors, Ford Motor Company, Pepsi International, BellSouth, LEGO, Montblanc, Sears and IBM.
Hanlon wrote the preface to How To Succeed In Advertising When All You Have Is Talent, and his work for Absolut vodka is included in Absolut Book and Campaigns!.
He’s been a guest writer for ADWEEK and his ads have been featured in Communication Arts, The One Show, Archive, Advertising Age and more.
He has been a guest speaker at Syracuse University, Miami Ad School, Parsons School of Design and elsewhere. He has also been a guest lecturer for “Strategic Branding: Building, Leveraging, & Protecting Brands” at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management Strategic Branding Program.
After serving on the management boards and executive levels of major advertising agencies, Hanlon realized that there might be better and more efficient ways to create ideas for clients.
In August, 2003, he started Thinktopia® with the notion that the idea business needed a better idea about how to do business.
Almost immediately, they began working with brands including Samsung, Best Buy, Barnes & Noble, even the Academy Awards. Their talents as an idea task force have been sought for everything from strategic brand communications to Super Bowl spots to creating television content.
They quickly established a network of like-minded independent companies in the areas of media, public relations, design, event development and trends, and now have relationships from London to Los Angeles.
Thinktopia also has a proprietary new branding construct called Primal Branding™ that marketers from Target to LEGO to Starbucks regard as “not the same old branding bullshit”.