They say the best brand strategist is a creative at heart . They say it until the strategist wants to be a creative. That usually gets them to stop .
Fortunately, I worked for some people who let me break a few unwritten rules along the way. The result is half a career as a brand planner, the other as a writer and creative director.
Half consumer insights, competitive analysis, trend-watching, researching, media planning, brief writing, and coming up with creative ideas that only my wife would hear. Half developing campaigns, writing concepts, re-writing concepts, pitching, re-pitching, impromptu therapy sessions (both as patient and doctor) and often muttering to myself—wrongfully so—that if I was still a strategist, we’d have a better creative brief.
The somewhat twisted path has given me a chance to fall in love with this thing we do a few times over and provided me a bit of different lens than most creative leaders. It’s connected me with people in nearly every role both agency and client-side. And it’s led to work that has been featured in The NYT, The Washington Post, Wired, Inc. AdWeek, AdAge and at SXSW, and recognized in everything from The One Show, Effies, and The Webbys, to CommArts, Archive, and Graphis.
Otherwise, I’m an avid reader and watcher (of both treasure and trash), a musician, and author of an award-winning Children’s book. With undergraduate degrees in Communication and Sociology and a master’s in Communication from Marquette University, I also spent a half-decade as an adjunct professor teaching young impressionable minds to fall in love with advertising. Something I have to live with every day.
