In my role as Director, Creative Strategy I partnered closely with Integrated and Brand Marketing leadership to develop marketing plans, while working closely with cross-functional channel teams on campaign executions to drive awareness, shift perception, inspire usage, and grow the business. Led campaign development, from brief writing to concept execution in order to build brand consistency across the customer journey and drive incremental business impact through user acquisition. Drove the evolution of the brand platform / architecture and collaborated in the development of brand messaging to create a consistent and customer-centric experience.Developed GTM product launches through a semi-annual bundled release, working across marketing, product, and leadership teams. My team worked cross-functionally to develop every single piece of communication across the 50+ products for each release. Partnered with Marketing Insights and cross-functional teams to synthesize, present, and drive deeper understanding of Upwork’s many different B2B marketplace audiences, from freelancers to small business to enterprise customers.

As Director of Strategy, I led the strategy department for the New York office as the agency was undergoing significant change. This allowed me to help the CSO and leadership team craft the agency's evolved positioning, then put it into practice organizationally. I led strategy for Little Caesars - McKinney's most creatively successful AOR business. My team worked directly with the CMO and senior marketing team to define and execute marketing strategy against an updated customer segmentation, not to mention led their largest multiyear, global partnership ever with the National Football League (NFL). We systematically made Little Caesars the #1 pizza QSR on TikTok despite being heavily outspent by larger brands. Most importantly, sales grew significantly during this time.I served as strategy lead on PUMA Running, focused on crafting global, seasonal campaign narratives around new products and innovations. I created cultural workshops to help the marketing team better understand global nuances of running consumers as the category expanded rapidly. I also produced brand strategy for clients that needed deeper strategic help. For ABI's Natural Light beer, I led the development of their brand positioning and guidelines. For Resy, I delivered a content strategy audit across digital properties, including conducting qualitative research with users, to better understand engagement behaviors through the consumer journey. For Stop & Shop, the largest regional grocer in the Northeast, my team rebuilt the brand personality around the store's evolved shopping experiences.

As a Group Director, Brand Strategy, my role was to not only lead a team of strategists across $15MM in business, but to also help better define Virtue's positioning as a creative agency and how our teams could collaborate with other VICE business units to create groundbreaking, effective, highly creative marketing for a wide range of B2C and entertainment brands. I worked with global brands like Beats By Dre, Unilever, ABI, Google, and Target to develop culturally relevant marketing that increased sales and brand health with Millennial and Gen Z audiences. Being project-based, I created brand and business strategy for 30+ new business pitches (with a high win rate to boot) and am well-versed in presenting, pitching ideas, and building relationships with marketing leaders.My team established ways of working cross-functionally with VICE Insights, the publisher's consumer research department, to develop custom and proprietary thought leadership that attracted new clients, established the Virtue brand as an expert on youth culture, and created meaningful PR opportunities for the business. The insight development came from a wide array of quantitative user data combined with primary qualitative research. Subjects included Generation Z, the growth of Esports, and global youth macrotrends.

Joined Mosaic, reported directly to CSO with a dual focus. The first being to leverage brand and creative strategy to integrate three disparate verticals now brought together under one roof in Chicago: experiential, shopper, and digital marketing. The second task was to lead the largest shopper marketing client, Starbucks. On Starbucks, the focus was building, selling, and executing CPG retail programs across Starbucks grocery portfolio to the largest food retail chains in the United States including Walmart, Costco, Target, Kroger, and other regional retailers.

While my role was Brand Strategy Director, I was the most senior strategist leading all work across a start-up agency funded by the Havas network called The Annex (now going by Annex88). The goal of the Annex was to create culturally relevant, content-driven campaigns that helped large legacy brands like Coca-Cola and lifestyle brands like Adidas drive sales and brand equity with Gen Z and Millennial audiences. Part of the challenge and appeal of the role was getting to collaborate with non-traditional creative teams. Rather than hiring highly experienced advertising creatives, the creative team was made up of artists, designers, digital and film-based content creators. This provided me the opportunity to more deeply guide internal teams to develop campaigns that contributed to brand equity and sales, while also educating clients on ways to develop campaigns for social media, digital platforms, and new production models for keeping consumers engaged with their brands.

Across four years, I advanced from being a Strategist to a Strategy Director during my time at FCB. It was a formative team and role in how I approach developing strategy as the department was a mix of analytics, UX, brand strategy, and researchers. I was able to work on a wide range of marketing projects and problems to solve, benefiting from a wide range of strategic collaborators in the agency to learn new skills from. I worked on some of the most iconic brands in the world like Jack Daniel's, Coca-Cola, and KFC but rarely in an AOR relationship with each client, meaning my team had to prove our capabilities to win any work outside of our narrow focus. This is where I began to use strategy as a business development tool as I treated each project and client opportunity as a way to test, learn, measure, and push the boundaries of what the marketing brief expected us to deliver. With this approach, my team was able to grow our Jack Daniels scope of business 4x over, from doing retail promotions to becoming their primary digital agency. On Coca-Cola, we developed a multiyear partner marketing program with Walmart that was ranked by WARC as one of the 25 most effective campaigns in the globe in 2014. Beyond that, I was able to take on a wide range of research projects that allowed me to design and execute primary quantitative and qualitative research, from helping Brown-Forman brands better understand travel retail shopping habits across 12 global markets to doing ethnographies with KFC consumers to better understand home cooking habits.

My first role in advertising benefited from working on a challenged business with many different business units: Sears Holding Company. From my first job, I've learned how to solve for difficult business challenges and work across multiple organizational teams to take an idea from concept to execution. I built campaigns and communications strategy for all things Sears, from Craftsman tools to Diehard batteries to mattresses to cheap underwear.