I’m a hands-on Creative Director, Art Director, Illustrator and Maker with over twenty years of professional experience and a track record for creating thumb-stopping social creative and developing high-performing teams. So yes… I’ve been around the block a few times; and starting my career post-grad in a small town and exhausting all the creative roles there meant that I learned a lot—but the job titles I had never matched what I did. I led all Creative for Dippin’ Dots, Inc. for over five years—and helped develop “Minion Madness Cookie Dough” as a co-branded tie-in with Illumination Entertainment when the first “Despicable Me” came out—but my title there was only ever “Designer.” I’ve driven initiatives for scalable digital creative solutions in addition to leading custom social content and video productions that resulted in double-digit sales increases. My career began in print design and gave me a strong grounding in production specs and “doing work right the first time” to avoid costly reprints. I’ve championed the power of social and new media; leading the launch of Facebook for Dippin’ Dots, Inc. (2007) and TikTok for Arby’s (2018) and The Home Depot (2022). I empower and challenge my teams to think strategically—not just creatively—as we work to elevate the brands we touch and make content that resonates with our audiences. I enjoy passing along what I’ve learned and teach new shooting, editing and software techniques to my teams on a regular basis to help everyone develop new skills. I’ve worked freelance, long-term contract, in-house and agency-side as a single contributor on a larger Marketing team as well as a Creative team leader and mentor—hence the number of titles that don’t accurately reflect the job I was hired to do. I identify as a member of the LGBTQ+ community and proudly bring my whole self to every role. I’ve won awards for my work, including a Cannes Silver Lion and a Shorty Award for Art Direction; but the one that means the most to me is the HOW Design award for the wedding invitations I created for my husband and me in 2014.
ROAR Groupe / Moxie work for Arby's Restaurants | 2016-2021
Arby's Twitter post the day the platform went from 140 to 280 characters (November 8, 2017). We wanted to see how many "characters" we'd created could fit in a single image and still be recognizable.
There's a lot I can say after being on this account from September 2016 to February 2021. This account and the team I joined were the reason I chose to leave in-house marketing and go agency-side. What we had was the very definition of "lightning in a bottle." It got me noticed as an artist for my paper crafting and gave me multiple occasions to speak at conventions and events like SXSW, MomoCon and Awesome Games Done Quick. Arby's as a client was amazing to work with, and they constantly asked us for the next , "Holy sh*t, Arby's!" moment.
Above all, I was privileged to work with some of the most talented and creative people in the business. As a team, we met Arby's goal of being one of the most talked-about brands on social; and that started with our "Fellow Fan" approach to content creation. Through the Fellow Fan ongoing campaign, we were written up more than 50 times by various trade publications, blogs and fan sites; and we won or were nominated for a dozen awards. To see more about that, go check out the Awards tab above where I captured as many of the links as I could.
My role on the team shifted over time. I joined as Senior Designer, and did almost entirely content creation in the form of paper crafts built from packaging and sauce art (my Illustration background and history with cake decorating came in very handy there). However, just because I was a "Senior Designer" on paper, my boss never let that title stop me from joining in on the concepting, art direction, photography and presenting of our ideas. Everyone on the team was an equal and all opinions and ideas mattered; and as I rose through the ranks at ROAR Groupe/Moxie, I kept up with that mentality. Creative Residents (how we referred to our interns) had just as much room to speak up in ideation and planning sessions as the CD, and that made for some incredible growth for everyone on the team.
Who are all these crazy-talented people I worked with? This list is everyone who was part of the day-to-day Creative team since I first joined it in 2016; and although some of them have moved on to other projects / other agencies / got smart and left agency life altogether, they all left their marks on the account.
• Jennifer Barclay - ACD/CD until Dec. 2020
• Brandon Kraemer - Sr. Copywriter until Dec. 2018 (left Publicis for Nintendo)
• Erik Hostetler - ECD from 2016-2018 (when our team got moved under Jared)
• Hughston May - Creative Resident in 2018; Jr. Designer starting Jan. 2019
• Jared Kozel - ECD from 2018-2020
• Orin Heidelberg - Sr. Copywriter starting March 2019
• Kalle Thomas - Creative Resident in 2019
• Katie Greco - Creative Resident in 2019
• Clarke Modlin - Art Director starting in Jan. 2020
• Cat Sheehan - Sr. Art Director starting in Nov. 2020
The average person on social media gives any content less than three seconds before they decide to scroll to the next image or video.
THREE SECONDS.
Nobody wants ads in their social feeds.
Arby's was a FUN account to work on because they knew they were the brunt of so many jokes (Thank you, Lisa Simpson and Jon Stewart). So what we achieved in social at the time was legendary.
Get people to stop scrolling and start engaging with Arby's on social.
(That's not a big ask at all, right?)
Stop making ads.
Get Arby's to behave less like a brand and more like an unabashed fan.
We looked at the interests of the members of our team... and got Arby's on board. If we were geeking out about it, then Arby's would be, too.
We made content people actually cared about and made the food secondary.
Targeting niche audiences and interests like gaming, anime, disc golf and woodworking, we built a rabid audience who shared the niche interests the members of our team had... and it WORKED.
The industry average for brand engagement on social lands somewhere between one and three percent (1-3%), with six percent (6%) being considered "Very High."
Arby's Instagram engagement rate was over 12% for 2019.
Double the rate of "highly engaged" brands.
With follower growth across all channels averaging 19% YoY, we knew we had hit the "stop scrolling, start engaging" goal.
Engagement Labs also gave Arby's credit for our niche-centric social strategy by awarding them the #3 slot in "Most Talkworthy Marketing Online" in 2018.
We also won several awards, which meant the Ad Industry liked what we were doing, too.
TikTok Influencer Campaign - October 27, 2020–November 6, 2020
SILVER CANNES LIONS WINNER for Social Influencer
SHORTY AWARD WINNER for TikTok Partnership
See the campaign:
May 16, 2018 (Saucy_AF) and May 16, 2019 (Fancy_AF)
GOLD ATLANTA AD CLUB ADDY WINNER for Art Direction (for Saucy_AF)
SILVER ATLANTA AD CLUB ADDY WINNER for Innovative Use of Technology (for Saucy_AF)
BRONZE ATLANTA AD CLUB ADDY WINNER for Branded Content (for Saucy_AF)
Two reasons I'm proud of this one:
• It's my handwriting (in Arby's Sauce) translated into two fonts
• I convinced the clients that "AF" stood for "Arby's Font"
Twitter Activation - September 12-16, 2018
2018 SHORTY AWARD WINNER for Art Direction
GOLD ATLANTA AD CLUB ADDY WINNER for Art Direction - Campaign, Social Media Campaign and Online Campaign
SILVER ATLANTA AD CLUB ADDY WINNER for Social Media Single Execution
Event Activation in partnership with Bandai Namco and Volpin Props - July 5-8 and August 3-4, 2018
The. Biggest. Activation. We. Ever. Did.
Instagram Story Activation - June 24-25, 2019
2019 SHORTY AWARDS FINALIST for Gamification
GOLD REGIONAL AD CLUB ADDY WINNER for Innovative Use of Interactive/Technology
SILVER ATLANTA AD CLUB ADDY WINNER for Innovative Use of Interactive/Technology
See the activation:
To see more, you'll need to check out Arby's social channels... and scroll WAY back on the timelines, LOL.
You'll get bored quickly... it's a lot of photos of my adorable husband, our kids and our rescue dog, Porter.