Portfolio

Throughout my career, I worked on possibly hundreds of projects in several different capacities. I am not a designer, or a copywriter, or a planner. I am, however, deeply strategic and deeply creative in any project I am a part of.

I have spent a long time studying what works and why. I can tell when the team is on to something and I know how to guide the team through the phases of overwhelm, doubt, and distraction that are inherently part of a collaborative creative process. I have designed processes that protect the creative process and maintain the strategic purpose. most of the time my contribution to creative work lies in my talent to facilitate work in a way that helps distill the work down to the most essential Message.

Here are some of my favorite projects:

This project is one of my favorites and it definitely did not go as planned. Sometime in 2019 the agency was invited to pitch for this business. The team collectively had decades of experience in health care and we were confident and enthusiastic to put our hat in the ring. The client gave us a brief that asked us to focus on innovation. We kept getting stumped around showing innovation while staying fresh. The healthcare category is littered with images of doctors and machinery and high-tech felling spaces and buildings.Someone on the team kept saying that yoga was innovative. I asked why they thought so and they explained that progressive doctors were prescribing yoga. I thought about it and the thing that makes yoga innovative is that it is a practice that drives the body to find homeostasis. We noticed other non-traditional innovations in medicine like using biometric data from smartwatches and biomimicry. New medicine looks to the body for answers. We decided the most innovative thing happening in medicine is focusing on the patient more than the technology. We pitched a campaign called “You’re the Reason” and it spoke to the insight that hospitals are full of people who are so inspired by the human body that they dedicated their lives to it.We lost the pitch. However, three years later, Ochsner was still ruminating on this idea and came back and asked for it to be produced. I was not working for the agency when it finally got produced, but I remain proud of this work. The campaign is currently live and I see it almost every day and find it absolutely inspirational. Other networks have tried to copy this direction since the campaign launched, which signals to me that we changed the conversation about healthcare in the New Orleans market.
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When I became the CEO of Job Portraits, one of my first observations was that we were an employer brand agency that had no discernable brand ourselves.

Our website was vague and a bit obtuse. We had a mark that was at best ambiguous and our capabilities were a little thin.

The first thing I did was set out to make a new mark. Our new logo was designed with a frame as a design element that could be used to frame to reference the idea of a portrait. We could use this visually to zero in on an element of an image that we want to highlight or use for context.

We then updated the JP website which leveraged the new mark and some vibrant brand colors. The new look was a drastic improvement but the real feature of the new site was the content. We were able to redefine many of our product offerings. We were also able to establish a new blog to feature thought leadership.

Another major upgrade of the site was our new articulation of Managed Employer Brand. This laid the foundation for many new conversations about the importance of employer brand that flowed into our social presence and our sales efforts.

Now that we had a brand, a new site, updated products, a clear position, and an active content pipeline, we could build our presence on LinkedIn. We shared blog posts but also created easy explainer videos, micro portraits of people’s work lives, and quotes from people in our organization.
New Orleans is an anomaly in so many instances and coffee is one of them. In the early 2000’s all major cities had a Starbucks popping up every 10 blocks. New Orleans actually had more coffee shops than any other city (I can’t remember if this was measured by area or density) and only 2 Starbucks. That has changed, but we are still very locally-minded when it comes to coffee.

In-fact big coffee dominates supermarkets in most American cities, but in New Orleans, local coffee has an outsized share of coffee sales.

In 2018 French Market Coffee was ready to launch a cold brew product that was targeted toward the next generation of New Orleanian and we had not seen many consumer brands attempt to define that consumer profile yet.

We knew that the millennial coffee-drinking audience in New Orleans (and the Gulf South) had strong ties to New Orleans, were brand loyal, valued quality, and embodied creativity and energy. We created a new Soul Fuled brand identity, packaging, and a launch campaign for cold brew that captured these qualities and brought new life to a legacy brand.