JUSTIN LUND
Creative Director & Brand Storyteller
Celebrate New Mexico | KOAT 7 (2021)
A rich history as old as humanity, written on 120,000 square miles of diverse, beautiful land.
ROLE: Producer, Writer, Videographer, Editor
Overview
COMPANY: KOAT 7, New Mexico
ROLE: Assistant Creative Director
PROJECT TYPE: Station Brand Campaign, Community Storytelling, Broadcast Promotion
PRIMARY GOAL: Strengthen KOAT's connection to New Mexico through a year-long brand initiative celebrating the state's people, places, culture, and stories
KEY WORK: Campaign strategy, scripting, production, cinematography, original storytelling
RECOGNITION: National Promax Silver Award, Regional Emmy Award
The Challenge
KOAT 7 introduced a station-wide initiative built around a simple but powerful idea: Celebrate New Mexico.
The goal was to spend the year highlighting the people, places, traditions, landscapes, and stories that make the state distinct. This was not just a tagline or a one-off promotion. It became a larger brand initiative that touched special programming, news content, original stories, and station identity.
The challenge was to make that idea feel big enough for the state, but personal enough for viewers at home. New Mexico is visually stunning, culturally rich, and deeply varied. The creative needed to honor that range without turning it into a postcard.
ORIGINAL PROGRAMMING PROMOS
The Strategy
Our plan was to position KOAT as more than a news station. The campaign needed to make KOAT feel like a storyteller, guide, and champion for New Mexico.
The initiative gave the station a platform to educate, engage, support, and celebrate the state across many kinds of stories. We crafted news, programming, and promos that shared the culture, customs, traditions, places, and, most importantly, the people whose lives give New Mexico its character.
The main promotional campaign had to connect all of that together. It needed to give viewers a clear emotional reason to see KOAT as a station that understood the place it served.
My Contribution
As Assistant Creative Director, I helped shape how the initiative would be promoted and brought to life on-air.
I wrote promotional scripts, supported the creative direction, and led the production execution for the campaign’s main television spot. That became the centerpiece of the Celebrate New Mexico promotion.
To create it, I spent weeks traveling across the state with a Canon C300, capturing landscapes, communities, traditions, and natural beauty across New Mexico. I filmed everything from White Sands and desert scenery to mountain wildlife, historic rock formations, Santa Fe, wide-open roads, and the visual details that make the state feel unlike anywhere else.
I then wrote a cinematic script designed to feel majestic, warm, and grounded in local pride. The final campaign was voiced by KOAT anchor Royal Dá and edited into a brand piece that connected the station’s identity to the beauty and spirit of New Mexico.
The main campaign spot went on to win a National Promax Award and a Rocky Mountain Regional Emmy Award.
What I gained
Celebrate New Mexico deepened my understanding of how powerful local brand storytelling can be.
This project was not about selling a product or promoting one program. It was about helping a station express its beliefs about the community it served. I learned how to take a broad brand idea and turn it into a campaign with a clear visual language, emotional tone, and lasting identity.
It also pushed me creatively as a producer, shooter, writer, and editor. The work required patience, taste, planning, and a willingness to chase images across an entire state until the campaign felt worthy of the subject.
More than anything, Celebrate New Mexico showed me that a great local campaign can make viewers feel seen. It can remind people why where they live matters.
