Building the agency behind the campaigns.

The job was the agency itself

On the business card it said Executive Creative Director. In practice, I was building the shop as a partner: establishing the creative department, setting hiring standards and quality expectations, designing the workflow, managing budgets and staffing, and sitting across the table from CEOs to win the work in the first place.

The scale made the system non-optional. Twenty-five-plus active clients, a team of twenty, and about four thousand creative projects a year, riding on $12M in managed media and $9M+ in annual billings. You don’t art-direct your way through that volume. You design the machine that produces it, then protect the quality bar it runs at. During my run, billings grew roughly 500%, and client campaigns averaged around 140% ROI.

The loop

Every account, whatever the industry, ran the same underlying loop: discovery, brief, concept, presentation, proposal, production, campaign, optimization, and back around. That loop was the agency’s real product. It’s what let one week be healthcare, the next entertainment, the next consumer goods, without the quality wobbling.

The other thing agency life beat into me: clients rarely buy design. They buy confidence. The rationale, the presentation, the way you translate a subjective opinion into an objective principle in the room. I’ve been running some version of that loop, and that lesson, on every pitch since.

Five seasons with the Kings

The anchor relationship was the LA Kings: agency of record for five years. AOR isn’t a campaign, it’s a marriage. Season campaigns, playoff pushes, in-arena and game-day creative, partner and sponsorship work, year after year, all of it needing to feel like one franchise.

The campaign I’d put on the wall is “We Are All Kings”: player key art built for the whole city, running from freeway billboards to wild-posted streets to game-day social. And then the 50th anniversary season, honoring five decades of the franchise while still selling tonight’s game. Heritage and urgency in the same system, and it had to hold up everywhere from a banner over Figueroa to a social post.

A séance on the internet

The strangest brief came from Blumhouse: build and launch the world’s first digital séance. A live, online horror event, designed and shipped for an audience that showed up to be haunted together. I still love that sentence.

That sat inside a bigger run of social campaigns for Blumhouse’s BH Tilt theatrical releases, engineered for opening weekends. Horror marketing is honest that way: the audience either shows up Friday night or it doesn’t. Across the agency’s clients, that kind of work added up to over a billion social impressions.

Everything, all at once

The roster below is the real education. Hockey one day, tabloids the next, then a fashion e-commerce brand, a cycling tour, a film studio. Agency-of-record wins with AEG, Orion, and Fox came from pitching, and proposals brought in roughly $1M in new contracts. Constant context switching taught me to learn a business fast, find what actually matters to it, and design for that.

That’s the skill I still lean on every time I walk into a new industry.

What it set up

Soda & Lime is where design and business stopped being separate subjects for me. Hiring, workflow, budgets, quality, revenue: the agency itself was the design project. Everything after runs on that: the 24/7 team at TMZ, the format systems at Banijay, and honestly, the pitch loop I use today is this one with better tools.