Creative Briefs

Haley Nason cursed at her monitor. Normally, such an outburst would have gone unnoticed – the whole department was afflicted with some level of Corporate Tourette’s – but when Haley immediately began foraging through her top drawer, colleagues at adjacent desks quietly adjusted their chairs to get a better vantage ...more +

6 years ago

The invite snuck into everyone’s inbox under the guise of Sync with Marketing. In most cases, this was code for a 30 minute meet-and-greet that required no preparation except finding a blank page in one’s notebook. These initial engagements were like a first date, a chance to read the style ...more +

6 years ago

Haley stared at her monitor, disappointed that the Word doc was still blank. No wonder, as the closest she’d gotten to typing was to put her hands on home row and silently curse her inability to conjure a simple six-word headline. Unless she counted the one line she’d typed and ...more +

6 years ago

Haley enjoyed transcending the make-it-pretty misperception of Marketing and providing the sales team with polished, professional collateral that delivered more than what they’d asked for. Even if it wasn’t a verbatim execution of their request, she liked to believe that they recognized and appreciated the upgrade. Such dreamy reveries lasted ...more +

6 years ago

Calling the office Pictionary games “team-building exercises” was akin to referring to carpet-bombing as “delivering new landscaping opportunities.” The games might have increased camaraderie if they occasionally resembled a scene from a Milton-Bradley TV spot, full of laughter and lightness, but this was never the scene in Marketing. The matches ...more +

6 years ago

Haley stared at the woman who wasn’t quite smiling, at least not yet. Instead, she looked like a wave of happiness had just left her heart and was about to splash across her face and flood the train with joy. You could see it in her eyes, a glint of ...more +

5 years ago

There are worse things in the world than imperfect writing, though apparently, Haley wasn’t supposed to think so. After all, she was a copywriter – one of the appointed guardians of grammar, a warrior on the front lines of syntactic propriety. Of all people, she should be appalled by confounding ...more +

5 years ago

Paul’s email was nothing more than a list of links and his signature. Haley surveyed the URLs, a who’s-who of local ad agencies with each digital address ending with some variation of /MeetTheTeam. “Hey Paul, are you sending me a virus?” “Just check them out. I sent them to everyone.” ...more +

5 years ago