§ Toby Brewer · Miami · London · New York
§ About me
This is me not giving a TED talk. In the spirit of crowd work, ask me whatever you want.
▍ The mic's yours. Type a question, or steal one below.
§ The long version
Toby Brewer is a Creative Director, Copywriter and AI Filmmaker with thirteen years of advertising behind him and roughly fifty awards on the shelf. He has written and directed brand campaigns for AT&T, Volkswagen, Harvey Nichols, Lexus, the Financial Times, Smithwick's, Robinsons and The Prince's Trust, first in London and later in Los Angeles and New York. He now works freelance, splitting his time between London and Fort Lauderdale.
His advertising career started in the copywriting seat at adam&eveDDB London, where the job was simple and impossible at once: find the sentence nobody else had thought of, then find a way to make people care about it. That led to work like Harvey Nichols "Fashion Chickens" and "Try to Contain Your Excitement", Volkswagen "See Film Differently", and Smithwick's "The Thirsty Squirrel" — campaigns that earned Cannes Lions, Clios, D&AD pencils and, more usefully, millions of pounds of earned media for the brands paying for them.
As a Creative Director he has led teams at CHI & Partners, BBH London and BBDO in Los Angeles and New York, where he ran social and experiential creative on AT&T's "Just OK is not OK" platform and built the Clio Awards 360 interactive experience. Creative direction, in his version of it, is less about signing off on layouts and more about protecting the idea from the fifty small compromises that quietly kill it between the first script and the final grade.
The newest part of the practice is AI filmmaking. Generative video, voice and image tools have collapsed the distance between a script and a finished film, and Toby uses them the same way he used a pencil and a storyboard: as a means to test an idea fast, cheaply, and in front of real people before anyone commits a production budget. That covers AI-generated films and characters, synthetic presenters, previz and concept films for pitches, and full campaign toolkits produced without a traditional shoot. OneDoor, his AI building companion product, came out of the same instinct — design the thing, write the thing, then make the thing.
Alongside brand work he performs stand-up comedy, which is the most honest research method in advertising: a room of strangers tells you within four seconds whether a line works. That discipline shapes the writing. No warm-up, no throat-clearing, no sentence that survives only because someone in a meeting liked it.
He works freelance with agencies, production companies and brands directly, usually on campaign concepting and copywriting, creative direction on live projects, brand voice and tone, and AI film production. Remote by default, on set when it matters, and comfortable running the whole thing from blank page to delivery.
You can see the campaigns on the selected work page, or email toby@tobywrites.com to talk about a project.