Jason Thomas.
Real Estate agent. Motorcycle racer. Buffalo Bills football player. 9/11 hero. Composer. Country music artist. Australian Cinematographer. Physicist. If you Google ‘Jason Thomas’, you’ll come up with a wide array of me’s out there. But I’m guessing there is just one that interests you. And that’s this one:
Copywriter.
Yes, this Jason Thomas – Jason Jordan Thomas – was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, so I guess that’s where I’m “originally” from, but I grew up mostly in Minneapolis, Minnesota. And while my personal résumé isn’t quite as colourful as perhaps those listed above, it is nearly as varied: Fast food manager. Actor. Airport baggage handler. Film and television post-production freelancer. Junk truck driver. Airport security supervisor. Zamboni driver.
All true. All jobs I’ve held (sadly, this is not a complete list.) And all of them were before I finally got my shit together and found advertising. Either because of all of that or in spite of it, I’m not sure which, I realized that my career life had a rather glaring absence: creativity. So, I enrolled in the copywriting program at Miami Ad School in Minneapolis. While there, I spent a semester interning at Mark|BBDO in Prague, Czech Republic, where I got to work on such brands as Milky Way, DHL and a bunch of other ones that are really hard to pronounce, let alone spell. I then spent my final semester really developing my chops as an intern at the writer’s heaven known as Carmichael Lynch in Minneapolis. There I worked on, and got work produced for, brands like Porsche, Harley-Davidson and Northwest Airlines. All of this before I graduated in December of 2005.
Then I took off to the Great White North to Halifax, which was actually a move south for me. Look it up. In 2008, I became a Permanent Resident of Canada and married my wife Angela in the same month. By total coincidence, I swear. In 2010 I finally lived my dream and signed a Standard Player Contract in the NHL with the Minnesota Wild. I retired later the same day. Later that year I moved to hockey’s mecca, Toronto. And the Leafs have barely won a game since. Sorry about that.
In 2011, I entered a global contest sponsored by Thomson Reuters and won. The grand prize? A trip to Antarctica to join a team of 2 other guys in an attempt to break the Guiness World Record for overland speed from the coast of Antarctica to the South Pole. A documentary was made about it for the Discovery Channel called “World’s Toughest Drive”. It began airing in June 2012 in the US and UK, with more countries (including Canada some day) to follow. Oh, and the mode of entry for the contest? I had to write a tagline.
