Ontario International Airport
A new name earning ground in a market one giant had long dominated.
The Problem
Ontario International Airport shares a market with LAX, one of the busiest and best-known airports in the world. For years, that meant losing passengers by default.
The challenge was not simply awareness. ONT needed to give Southern California travelers a reason to choose it on purpose, while building a brand strong enough to support everything from consumer campaigns and airline recruitment to events, sponsorships, and internal communications.
My Role
Shared leadership of ONT’s brand strategy as part of the account’s senior team over seven years (2019–2026), shaping the positioning, audience strategy, campaign direction, and evolution of the broader brand system. I owned the art direction outright, including the visual language for the base brand and every sub-brand under it, the campaigns built from that system, and the tools and standards that kept it consistent across the organization.
The Move
ONT needed more than a single campaign to do everything the brand was asked to do. A base system held it all together, "Not So Fast" gave that system its public voice, and a portfolio of named sub-brands, State of the Airport, So Cal. So Jolly!, Decade of Local Control, ONT+, the 5K at the Runway, and a dedicated 10-Year Anniversary mark, let different parts of the organization speak to different audiences without fracturing the identity. And because a brand only works if the people using it every day understand it, I built the governance layer to match, a brand cheat sheet, a copy hierarchy guide, and a materials library, taught through an internal Brand Summit and Brand BootCamp.
A brand system is only as strong as the imagery holding it together, and stock photography wasn't going to carry an identity this specific. So I built the brand's photo library from the ground up: two full productions I ran end to end, concept through casting, wardrobe, on-set direction, and post, plus on-set art direction across the portfolio's broadcast commercials. That same need to make a physical, specific case for the brand carried into Routes World Hong Kong, a global airline trade show, where I ran point on visual design for a booth experience with a seven-language app, competing for airline attention against major international hubs, all work that went on to win Best in Show and Gold for Interactive Booth at the 2026 ADDYs. The brand extended past the airport itself too, into stadium signage and MLB uniform patches at ONT Field, and overlay branding inside Staples Center and the LA Memorial Coliseum through sponsorships with USC, UCLA, and the LA Sparks, putting ONT in front of an audience that had never set foot in the terminal.
On the performance side, the brand had to prove itself in real time as well. ONT's team built audience segmentation across competitor-loyal, ONT-loyal, business and leisure, and catchment-based groups, then used it to power a dynamic messaging system that pulled live flight-search data to generate destination-specific creative automatically, scaled across dozens of routes. I built that creative in matched English and Spanish, and stayed close to the A/B testing on dynamic digital ads and streaming ad selectors on Hulu and Disney+ as it ran.
What Happened
In 2023, ONT’s annual passenger volume grew 12%, with international travel up 113.5%.
The media work also became more efficient over time. ROAS improved 57.5% year over year, and Spanish-language creative converted 16% more efficiently than English. The dynamic, flight-data-driven campaign delivered an 11.3% booking-to-search conversion rate and ran 18.8% more efficiently than standard static display.
The work was recognized across the airport and advertising industries, including Best in Show, Gold, and Silver at the 2026 American Advertising Awards (Inland Empire); Excellence in Brand Identity and Excellence in Overall Marketing Program for Medium Airports at the 2022 ACI-NA MarComX Awards; and Best Campaign, Best Overall Use of Social & Digital Media, and Best Use of Video at the 2024 Moodie Davitt Awards.
