On Valentines Day, 2024, I joined up with another ex-Deutsch coworker, Neph Trejo, to help build a team for a brand new client at Razorfish, DIRECTV. We were responsible for all their mid and low funnel work, inheriting piles of templates, processes and projects from their previous agency.
We staffed up a team, bringing in Phil Henson as my CD Writer counterpart and calling up some of our favorite young creatives from past jobs to fill out a stellar creative staff.
We redesigned, broke, refined, and redesigned the brand and the templates again for newer, better, more exciting deliverables.
We found ways to work with (and sometimes, when needed, around) our agency partners both inside publicis team Beacon (a custom publicis agency package for DTV) and externally.
One of our biggest assignments and one that I am most proud of was our work with TBWA/Chiat Day’s upper funnel “Birds” campaign, featuring Henry Winkler and Steve Buscemi as smart-beaked, streetwise pigeons. Our first iteration we were only given still assets of the birds to turn into MF/LF social and display, but seeing an opportunity to do more, we convinced the clients to let us record with the talent and re-cut the upper funnel spots into a heavier lifting, much more entertaining mid funnel campaign. Off the back of the success of birds2.0, we then earned a seat at the table for birds 3.0, getting to make our own custom animations and spots in the pigeonverse, both impressing the client with our frugal ways to improve the work and making much better quality and stronger, better working ad units!
We found new opportunities both inside and outside our scope of work to add value to the agency (over $19mil in billing!) and to our clients, with new tentpole moments like National Streaming Day, the Sports Equinox and more!
Overall it was a great experience learning how to grow a team and manage a new client through agency onboarding, incremental and giant leaps of improvement, and a constant barrage of BAU assignment.
Shoutouts to Neph Trejo, Phil Henson, Olivia Kotlarek, Sarah Crum, Megan Smith (now Hudson, congrats girlie!) and Bryan Wong, and our amazing production team both here and nearshore lead by Nathan Dill and Sharon Trager!