Ask any bartender. Everyone is talking about cocktails and craft brews. And for a major domestic beer brand, that cultural dialogue isn't exactly great for business.
So to champion the simple love of the classic America lager, Anheuser-Busch took the content marketing approach with the blog http://LetsGrabABeer.com.
To help stock the site with custom content, I wrote, produced and directed three videos that showed the world just how classy a beer can be.
DP: Dustin Schirer
I spent a year at the happiest place on earth—Hallmark Cards Inc. Embedded in their in-house agency I served as copywriter for digital, broadcast and brand initiatives. For Valentine's Day 2017 we mixed a lifestyle photo shoot with playful product photography to reach our Millennial audience online.
We let our fans behind the scenes at our Valentine's Day photo shoot and created some fun Snapchat content.
As the Senior Director of the Brehm Center I create and manage all marketing for Brehm Film events with some of Hollywood’s biggest directors, writers, and producers.
Working with the marketing teams at studios like Amazon, Sony, Apple, and A24, I produce and promote advance screenings for hundreds of movie goers each year. After each screening we host Q&As and bring the audience into conversation with filmmakers.
Guests have included:
Pixar’s Chief Creative Officer, Pete Docter
Actor Tony Hale
Director Paul Schrader
Director Lee Isaac Chung
Director Scott Derrickson
Hershey wanted to relaunch the TAKE5 Bar and introduce it to a new generation: millennials. As the ultimate remix of 5 layers, TAKE5 set out to remix its packaging, social content, and guerrilla street activations. So we packed up and headed to South By Southwest in Austin to remix the festival experience millennials love. And we knew exactly what needed a remix—SWAG. At SXSW it's everywhere. We set up the first ever TAKE5 Swag Exchange. People brought us unwanted swag and we handed them something they actually wanted. Our Twitter following grew by 90% and our social content experienced at 18% engagement rate that week. We ended the week with 32.7M media impressions and we proved that a brand can do SXSW right if they remix it instead of add to the noise.
Team: Tanya Karpitskiy
Our social content helped drive foot traffic and online engagement before and during the activation.
Gatorade EDGE (BETA) is a complete athletic training experience. It measures performance and offers personalized information straight from the elite experts who work with the pros. I worked with a small editorial team creating and managing the editorial calendar; brainstormed hundreds of SEO-friendly headlines; assigned stories to celebrity trainers, nutritionists and coaches; edited content from media partners; researched our target audiences; managed more than 400 articles within the CMS; stayed on top of sports nutrition trends by reading scientific journals and industry research; conducted interviews and I worked with legal and client contacts to make sure all site content met brand standards.
Team: Kim Wallace
Anybody can sell chicken wings. Wingstop is on another level.
Why? Because of its gritty, in-your-face cult following. And those chicken wing fans let their loyalty be known on Twitter. Using insights from the social platform, we listened to our audience and crafted our gorilla and broadcast campaigns based on real trends.
That set the bar high for developing social media content.
We leaned into the realities of our fans' daily lives and spoke with them honestly—all corporate niceties were off the table. We developed this brand voice through monthly social content, influencer partnerships, street activations and a national food truck tour.
Team: Justin Smith, Thomas Price & Morgan Howell
Wingstop's thing is wings, but their mission is to serve up flavor. Flavor that spices up life and reminds people what's good. So they outfitted a food truck and hit the road to tour the nation and spread some goodwill.
Each stop the truck served up wings, and the crew got to work supporting the community. From reserfacing basketball courts to building playgrounds, the Wingstop Tour didn't stop until everyone had experienced the good a little flavor can bring.
And of course the social community got in on the action. With a team on the truck and a home base manning the social command center, we produced content that made everyone feel like they were in on the action.
The content our team developed for Wingstop leaned heavily into cultural trends, celebrity news and internet memes. Below are a few of the most successful posts I wrote while on the account for more than a year.
As the lead on social media infographics, my partner and I were in charge of taking complex statistics and financial data and converting them into beautiful and clear social posts.
With every project our aim was to stay within the brand voice and the industry's strict requirements. We followed a no-nonsense guide to make sure none of our communication was promisory to the consumer in any way.
Wingstop's fans go crazy when a new flavor is released. So we teased out the launch of Spicy Korean Q in order to cultivate the crave.
We launched the 360 campaign with broadcast, flaunting the limited-time nature of this hot, new flavor—Spicy Korean Q. And we made sure they knew that getting after the crave was going to be competitive.
ACD: Jason Hopkins
Dairy Queen is an iconic American brand. And their social media following is full of loyal fans who love to look at BLIZZARDS.
Through monthly social content that supported campaigns, we took what fans loved the most and wove it into culturally relevant social trends. The result was beautiful brand storytelling that felt at home in the highly artistic Instagram environment.
Team: Thomas Price & Justin Smith
Honey Suckle White (HSW)—a Cargill brand—brings honest, simple turkeys from independent farms, to the marketplace. Developing the HSW brand language started by finding a voice that was true to the farmers who make the brand possible. Research for the project consisted of distilling brand truths from farmer interviews and profiles. The result was a brand voice with integrity and authenticity.
The 100-page guide is now used by the corporate communications teams and agencies in advertising and branding development.
Team: Adam Elwell
Supporting the online brand campaigns, we developed social content in 3-month batches. From strategy and concepting, to shot lists and photo shoots, we used the brand promise—For Women Who Do—as our North Star with every piece of content we developed.
Team: Chelsea Ceasor
Our brand strategy for Vanity Fair was centered around empowering women. To celebrate National Friendship Day, we brought to life the long-distance friendships of our fans and followers.
As the nation’s largest broker dealer, LPL Financial needed to continue its growth by recruiting more financial advisors to join their ranks. LPL asked my team to spearhead lead generation through B2B paid social efforts and organic awareness posts. I extended the newly launched Advisor Voices campaign into the social space by brainstorming with the creative team and then writing all the copy for the images that featured ‘voices.’ I also wrote all the content for our promoted posts. The posts asked advisors to either share their #AdvisorVoices using the hashtag or to click the link for a whitepaper download.
With a modest goal of 300 leads this year, we blew away the expectations by bringing in 1,079 leads through paid social in the first eight months. In September alone paid social drove 700,000 impressions and 9,250 click-thrus with just 8 posts.
My copy helped capture the attention of a highly targeted and niche B2B audience who has traditionally been very difficult to reach through social media tactics.
LG wanted to give everyone access to the world's kitchen with information on cooking necessities. I helped craft more than 10,000 words in three weeks to describe more than 40 kitchen appliances, exotic herbs, spices and ingredients. I researched every item to find country of origin, common uses and insider tips. I then compiled all pertinent information and delivered bite-sized paragraphs for easy consumer digestion.
KC LOVES is a collaborative documentary project telling the stories of what KC loves, by the artists who love their city.
I got to hang out at The Campground in its early days and write the story about how it all got started.
Team: Josh Dubois
Most couples don’t name their backyard. But if your shed has a waiting list and an underground following, it probably deserves a name. When Chris Ciesiel and Cristin Llewellyn started serving craft cocktails and made-from-scratch small plates to friends, they had no idea it would turn into a sought after speakeasy.
Updated work coming soon.
McDonald’s needed to increase daytime coffee sales in a few select regions. To engage consumers on social media, we asked followers to tweet why they needed an afternoon pick-me-up using the #McCafeBecause hashtag. We set up a social command center in the studio and collected the responses—using a few actors, we filmed some of the best reasons. After writing replies we attached the Vines and tweeted them back to the users in real time. The hashtag has 739,935 impressions to date and was picked up by other McDonald's co-ops nationwide.
See the full campaign here: http://www.b-r.com/work/mccafe-because
My voice acting ranges from warm and welcoming, to dramatic and strong. Listen to my commercial demo: RuthSchmidtVO.com
I was hired to do the voice over acting for this video supporting World Water Day.
Project description coming soon.
I started renting a room to Airbnb guests in 2015. Since I started, I've had some fun experiences with some amazing people.
My personal social series, Dear Airbnb Guest has allowed me to share some of the crazier situations—and it unexpectedly garnered a following among my friends and coworkers.
Read about the madness here: DearAirbnbGuest.com