Home sweet home.

Yee-haw-lellujah! We were finally back in Texas and I found myself working for clients above and below the line at RAPP. But in reality, there is no line… only the customer journey. My journey to creative leadership began with Direct Energy. And one good thing about overstaying my welcome at agencies, is that you really get to know your clients and earn their trust, especially when the Account team is a revolving door.

Pitch mode, engaged.

We won a lot of new business and eventually, the agency split into Brand and Retail. I picked Retail because it was something new and learned all about CRM programs and customer journeys. Maybe a little too much because putting myself into the mind of the consumer comes very naturally to me. We pitched and won all kids of business and and even some AOR brand work. RAPP was always spinning off other agencies but these two folded back together into just RAPP.

All business.

HP was my first foray into the tech space. We adapted the enterprise campaign to create off-the-shelf 360 campaigns for chip partners. They used them in their own marketing and my early experience was really paying off. Our clients loved big ideas and many of ours bubbled up to the global brand campaign. This all culminated in an opportunity to pitch Radeon and eventually the whole AMD account. We won. Both.

Can a visionary be too creative?

I’ve been called both, and worse. But I’ve always been a director and my passion for video storytelling follows me everywhere. I’m also a fan of silhouettes because it makes it easier for the viewer to imagine themselves as the subject. We partnered with our favorite animation house to use groundbreaking (at-the-time) motion capture technology and made an entire suite of videos. They lived on web but mostly played silently on AMD computers in retail if you want the true customer experience.

Say what?

I see patterns everywhere. And one I’ve experienced personally is that the average lifespan of the ECD is 18 months. I had five in six years at RAPP and reproved myself to all but one. He quickly decided I wasn’t digital enough and I was unceremoniously laid-off not long after winning EOTY.

It’s cool, he wasn’t wrong but I’m pretty sure he just wanted to hire his friend. A bunch of people left after that so what I took away from the experience is… that’s what happens when you fire someone for no good reason. Boom!

Left to my own devices.

I was laid off a whole week this time before RAPP’s sister agency hired me as a digital creative director, go figure. Javelin let me do it my way and as de facto Managing Director of the satellite office, we grew the AT&T account from 3 to 5 million dollars in two years. I don’t really think about that stuff while it’s happening, but my Account partners said it was solely due to the Creative atmosphere and the client relationships we had built. And that was cool.

A little too comfortable.

After ten years at Omnicom, the vacation days were starting to pile up which I’ll take over a gold watch any day. Our little office’s new business engine was bringing in big clients like Hyatt and Wells Fargo. But one of the coolest things I’ve ever done is the customer personae story we told in a strategy-only pitch. And won.

A little too comfortable.

Almost twenty years in and I had never had to lay anyone off. It finally happened and was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do as a manager because this junior art director’s ideas were so beautiful. But she was miscast in a production role and I truly believed I was setting her free. It’s not like I had a choice but I spent a couple of weeks helping ut together a portfolio of all the work she had done. And when HR missed the 10am-on-a-Friday meeting, I had to play both roles so couldn’t really talk to her much about it. I hope she understood what happened because she got a job right away. It was a nice book.

The hero’s journey.

Our main account came up for a standard review and leadership saw fit to bring in a bunch of starfuckers to pitch it. Our entire team, the whole satellite office that ran the account, was benched. The Hero’s Journey is the monomyth our consultants used to wind leadership around the axle, but it made no sense in this story.

When it was all said and done, the five minutes I had to answer the actual RFP was the only time the clients, my friends, were paying attention. That is according to the head starfucker in the after-pitch post-mortem. He’s a good guy and I think we learned a lot from each other throughout the process.

Oh, we lost and I quit.