Ryan Morgan Email & Phone Number

Columbus, Oh, Us

Highlights:Shape and influence how people—both externally and internally—think and feel about our company and their relationship with it, as customers and employees. Who we are, what we do, how we do it, who we do it for, and why. Our mission.Drive strategy for key campaigns and company initiatives, in close collaboration with our Creative Director—as a team, we don’t miss. Think about what we should or shouldn’t do, how we should do it, with or for whom, what’s next, etc.Lead and own brand partnerships, our most effective tool for reaching new audiences, growing brand awareness, and driving trial. How do you follow up unfollowable collabs with Tyler, The Creator and Dolly Parton? A flavor for Ted Lasso, is how. Our partnership with Apple TV+ for season 3 of Ted Lasso outperformed our Dolly collab (the biggest thing we’d ever done) by almost every metric, an unthinkable and surprising feat if you didn’t #believe.BTW, on the same day that our Ted Lasso collab launched, American Girl launched the AG x Jeni’s collection, bringing the Jeni's experience into the American Girl world, with a mini ice cream truck and a full suite of components and accessories—from the iconic orange Jeni’s shipping box and branded pints to all the equipment needed to make and serve our signature buttercrisp waffle cones. Jeni’s is featured on the menu at American Girl bistro locations, and we brought the American Girl experience into our shops with free mini scoops in mini bowls with mini spoons and special seating, just for doll friends.Once you’re done wrapping your head around that, imagine a Frosted Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop-Tart—served buttered, warm, soft, and gooey, right out of the toaster. Now take that exact time-stopping moment and suspend it in ice cream. That’s what we did for our Pop-Tarts collab—an iconic snack brand that defines its category, has a passionate, cult-like following, matters to pop culture, and has a nostalgic emotional pull (and is fun).

Columbus, Oh, Us

Highlights:Drove internal brand building to create and strengthen an emotional connection that informed how the team approached their work, even if they didn’t interact directly with customers, so there was a shared sense of direction and purpose and on-brand behavior was instinctive. Co-owned (with Jeni) the brand experience across all customer touch points so there was always someone thinking and speaking on behalf of our customers at the leadership table. How will this impact the customer experience? How will it make them feel? Led blockbuster brand partnerships with Tyler, The Creator and Dolly Parton, each one, successively, the biggest thing we’d ever done as a company, from both a brand and sales standpoint, contributing to culture in a way that people *wanted*, each collab an authentic expression of mutual fascination and fandom, each partner an exemplification of our belief that flavor is everything.Drove national and local PR with a focus on features in top-tier national media outlets, supplemented by foot-traffic-driving placements in local markets, and support for new shop openings. Developed strategy and executed plan for ongoing (unpaid) celebrity and influencer outreach programs with a focus on nurturing organic relationships with celebrities and people widely known and recognized for having outsized influence in their respective fields or categories, supplemented by local influencer outreach in scoop shop markets. Drove social.Launched—presciently (in 2016)—on-demand pint delivery.Led our communications response team and the execution of an integrated digital communications strategy during a nationwide voluntary product recall in 2015. Our handling of the crisis was written up in Fast Company and lauded by PR pros and crisis-management experts as “technically perfect” (Bernstein Crisis Mgmt), “a case study in how to conduct a recall” (Thompson Hine), and “a textbook example of how to respond in the right way” (Hennes Paynter Comms).

Columbus, Oh, Us

Highlights:Led the team responsible for maintaining and optimizing the overall Jeni’s brand presence online, including e-commerce, integrated digital strategy and execution, providing support for all revenue channels—scoops shops, e-commerce, wholesale, and events—via content and brand marketing across owned digital channels.Architected the relaunch of jenis.com—from static desktop site to flexible content delivery system with a reimagined nav and improved UX—making it the hub of our online publishing presence with a focus on visual storytelling. The site was built with responsive design, optimized for viewing no matter the size of the screen. We packaged, optimized, and then distributed bits and bytes of content on social for the purpose of driving people back to the site for the full content, coupled with a focus on converting visitors to subscribers on our email list.Launched an integrated holiday campaign with a bunch of firsts—our first digital gift guide, our first direct mail catalog, our first subscription product, our first gift concierge service—leveraging coordinated content across owned, earned, and paid media, plus messaging in our scoops shops, increasing overall e-commerce holiday revenue that year by 50+%.

Columbus, Oh, Us

Highlights:Developed a robust, mature, and distributed social media presence to increase awareness and understanding of the Jeni’s brand, giving us a significant advantage over increased competition, earning coverage from Inc., Internet Retailer, and Ad Age, etc.Refined our content strategy to focus on key differentiators—less finished product, more process and ingredients; *showing* how we made our ice cream—so that people had a deeper understanding of what set us apart from the rest of the category.Launched on Tumblr, leveraging the platform for visual storytelling that emphasized our points of difference, optimizing for social amplification and tag-based discovery, earning the attention of channel editors who regularly featured our content, increasing reach exponentially—within 6 months it was our largest social channel—and later we added Tumblr commerce.Launched an interactive, social-first campaign powered by UGC—the campaign fed itself—to support the release of a line of ice cream condiments, encouraging people to share tagged photos and stories of the sundaes they created, aggregating them in real-time on a hashtag-powered microsite with search and filtering that became a scrollable menu, increasing sundae sales by 193%.

Columbus, Oh, Us

Highlights:Launched the Jeni’s wholesale program with no marketing budget, little brand awareness, and a wholesale cost that was 2x the *retail cost* of the most expensive ice cream on the shelf. Developed a brand storytelling framework that resonated with frozen buyers by leveraging key differentiators, early press as social proof, and access to a national network of hardcore fans who would do or pay just about anything just to get our ice cream. (We were early to DTC.)Partnered with brand fans to accelerate the program, crowdsourcing a list of their favorite markets, inviting people to play a part (skin in the game / barrier to entry) by requesting Jeni’s in-store, and then activating them via social and email after closing the deal so that we were moving units on day one. Landed 100+ accounts in the first year—enough success that we created a new role for me in focused on solving a new high-priority business problem: how to grow brand awareness and drive sales nationally… without a media budget.

Leveraged growing skillset, network, and enthusiasm to help grow awareness of Available Light Theatre—the hottest thing coming out of Columbus at the time, next to Queen City Cayenne. I wasn’t a theater person and this was theater for people who didn’t like theater. I always felt fully alive at an AVLT show, it was *electric*. Did the gateway drug and caught the bug, became an evangelist. AVLT had an innovative Pay What You Want model, which was revealing about the level of confidence they had in the work and, in turn, prompted you to think about the value of the experience.

Columbus, Oh, Us

Leveraged skillset, network, and enthusiasm to help grow awareness for Local Matters, a non-profit and Slow Food affiliate in Columbus working to create healthy communities through food education, access, and advocacy. Think equitable access to affordable healthy food… and the knowledge and skills to know what to do with it. This was a natural extension of the work I was doing at brilliant.—and the work i *wanted* to be doing. An early manifestation of the willingness for the direction of the work to be guided and informed by authentic interest, and a knack for finding and forming strategic partnerships as a result.

Launched a non-traditional brand from inside a traditional company, with strong positioning, differentiated service, and a values-led philosophy that resonated with our target market and got people to pay more to be a part of it, leveraging insurance as a social tool to build community.brilliant. was based on two simple ideas: "only work with people we believe in” and “do something worth talking about,” with clear and simple philosophical framework:Do meaningful workGet engagedConnect with othersWork collaborativelyHelp others do the sameThe not-only-for-profit belief system manifested in ways that quickly set brilliant. apart. Turning away business was unheard of, as was pledging not to do any traditional advertising or “old marketing” that wasted attention. We were asking different questions: What can we do to create or add value? What might actually make a difference? What might make the lives of the people we want to work with easier? How can we change the world on our clients’ behalf?Used ad budget to launch Buy Local Columbus, a collaborative city-wide campaign supporting and promoting local, independent businesses (our target customers). You can still find stickers from the campaign on the doors of local businesses across the city today.Provided a differentiated level of service using technology: from being mobile (and mobile-first) and providing e-policies to offering online appointment setting and customer support via live chat. Leveraged an intuitive understanding of social media at a time when very few in the industry were using it and even fewer were using it well. Showed an uncanny knack for finding creative ways to connect and build long term, mutually-beneficial relationships. Displayed a gut-level understanding of advanced branding concepts—bolstered by an internet-fueled, autodidact-level of curiosity and passion. Caught the attention of popular marketing bloggers Advergirl and Idea Sandbox. Launched @jenisicecreams on Twitter