Congrats on the promotion! What’s the first thing you did to mark the occasion?
When I found out, coincidentally, I had the day off — I was hosting friends who were visiting from out of town. They’d gone out earlier while I was on a couple of calls, and then they picked me up, and we went to a B-52s-themed café for lunch — which was awesome, because my very first concert ever was the B-52s with my mom and dad. Love the B-52s! After that, we headed over to Richmond’s incredible botanical gardens. So I guess I celebrated by not working the rest of the day!
You’ve been with SBDigital for over four years — what’s kept you energized and growing here, and what made this the right place to build your career?
You would not believe how much SBDigital has changed in the past four years — the size of our team, the kind of work we do, what we’re capable of. But the core mission of what SBD is trying to accomplish, and our values, which is really what brought me here in the first place — that has stayed the same. With all that said, every day my job looks different. Different opportunities, different challenges, different problems we get to solve together. And I get to do it with a lot of truly incredible colleagues and clients. It keeps things really interesting and exciting.
You came up through political and advocacy work before moving into creative direction. How did that background shape the way you approach creative and technology strategy?
I’ve always been politically engaged since I was a kid, and I was volunteering so much of my time with Young Democrats and local campaigns. Then, in college, I started working on campaigns more seriously. I had taken on a finance director role for a pretty competitive race. I was always doing call time with my candidate, either virtually from campus or with her in person. I loved it, and it was such an exciting time to be working on Democratic politics in Virginia.
That campaign work helped me understand just how valuable every dollar is. When you’re the one spending it, I think the dollar can probably lose its weight a little. Coming from a background of small, nimble, competitive races gave me a real understanding of how every component of a campaign has to work together — they have to operate in perfect harmony to create the conditions for you to win a tough race that, by all odds, you probably weren’t expected to win. Everything has to go right, and it’s got to be a perfect storm.
I think about those campaigns every single day I work here. Every time I’m writing ads, I put myself back in that position of being on the campaign side. Even when the races have no similarity to what I’m working on, that perspective is always there.
You’ve been Creative Director here for over four years — what does adding “Technology” to your title actually mean in practice? What new territory does that open up?
Honestly, ad-making and technology have always seemed like such a natural intersection to me — that’s where my passion for politics has always lived. I started in campaign fundraising because at the entry level on smaller races, there are really only two doors in: field and fundraising. There aren’t digital directors or comms directors on those smaller campaigns. But as long as I can remember, I was drawn to the ads, the persuasion, the creative, the websites.
Back in 2017, during the excitement of the blue wave in Virginia, I got in touch with a bunch of races in my hometown in Hampton Roads and started designing their logos and websites, doing graphic design for them as a volunteer. I met a lot of them at a town hall for my Republican congressman — he hardly let anyone inside, so they were all out in the parking lot, and I just started introducing myself and showing them work I’d done. I ended up doing all of their tech and design. I also got really familiar with the major campaign tech tools at the time — NGP, NationBuilder, VAN — because a lot of these small races just didn’t know how to use them. I became a kind of de facto CTO for a lot of those local campaigns, and I still help some of them today.
So I think this role reflects something that’s been there all along. Getting to combine creativity and technology in my daily professional work is genuinely so exciting for me.
Creative and technology can sometimes feel like opposite ends of a spectrum. How do you bring those two worlds together for your team and your clients?
I actually think more and more that they’re not at opposite ends of the spectrum at all — they’re right there together. I think the last great frontier for politics is technology. Politics has been very analog for a very long time: print material, then radio, then TV. And we’re still, every single day, trying to invent how to do politics digitally – building the plane as we fly it.
Understanding how to take the lessons we’ve learned about good, compelling creative and bring them into the rich multimedia options we now have at our disposal — that’s crucial. You could be the best ad-maker in Democratic politics, but it doesn’t mean much if you can’t translate that storytelling talent into the platforms and media that voters are actually using now. The best 30-second ad alone isn’t enough anymore. You have to be able to take that storytelling and apply it to all the different ways voters are consuming content today.
Where do you see the intersection of creative and technology heading in the next couple of years, and how is SBDigital positioning itself for that?
In my mind, human creative output is head and shoulders above what any generative AI can produce right now. I’m not going to put my head in the sand and say that will always be the case — none of us can guess and say that it is — but at this moment, I think human creativity is still so much better. That said, I see a really natural and complementary relationship forming between AI and the creative process.
Let’s say we’re running a program and we test half a dozen creatives. A lot of that testing was guesswork — we’d look at the numbers and construct a story from them. What I think AI can do is provide far more instantaneous, real-time analysis: here’s what worked with that creative, here’s what didn’t, here’s where you should take it next. And then have humans make it. That human connection in ad-making is still so important.
What’s a project or initiative you’re itching to tackle now that you have this expanded mandate?
My biggest goal is to give our teammates the maximum amount of time to do what they’re good at and what they’re passionate about. The less time we spend bogged down in busywork, the better.
A lot of my recent time has been spent working across every department at SBD on process efficiency. On the digital fundraising side, we’ve built automated reporting dashboards — it’s added hours back to our fundraising team associates’ days by eliminating the need to manually download spreadsheets, reformat them, and push them into reports. It’s better for our team, better for our client leads, and most of all, better for the client, who now has up-to-date, live data at their fingertips. It’s similar to what we’ve been doing on the ads reporting side for years, and we’re now bringing that same approach to fundraising. My colleague, Alice LeCroy, has been incredible in running with the implementation of this automated reporting for all of our clients.
We’re also doing similar work with our creative approval system. I want clients to have the clearest possible picture of what we’re producing for them — every platform, every placement. We’ve built a creative approval portal that sets clients up to actually visualize what they’re approving before it runs on their behalf.
And then with Vox Pop, our influencer marketing service, we’re building a creator review portal where our Head of Creator Partnerships, Jae Masino, can source creators, load samples of their content, and let clients review them before we ever reach out on their behalf. It’s in early beta, but I’m really excited about it. All of these projects are about the same thing: streamlining collaboration — internally and with our clients — through smart use of technology.
You’re a big live music person — is there a concert experience that’s stuck with you, and does it connect at all to how you think about creative work?
I didn’t have to think about this one for a second. I just got back from three nights of Phish at Sphere in Las Vegas. I’d seen every video on the internet of every visual that’s ever played in that room, and my parents had been out there two years in a row for Dead & Company and kept telling me I had to go. But being actually in the room — it’s something else entirely.
The creative ingenuity happening inside that venue is groundbreaking and genuinely humbling. When you think about the arc of Phish’s history — over 40 years, starting out playing basements at the University of Vermont, and now they’re the band that is single-handedly redefining what the live music experience can be. Their lighting director was actually a consultant on the design of the venue’s audiovisual system, so when Phish plays there, the person running that room knows every inch of it. Across all nine shows, they never repeated a song — playing 180 unique songs or something crazy like that — and each weekend found its own way to feel special and unique.
What I’d say about the connection of that to my creative work at SBD is this: find something that makes you completely forget about everything else and escape. It’s grounding. It’s energizing. Do it as often as you can. Three nights of Phish was physically exhausting — but I come back to work after every concert, no matter how tired I am, completely energized mentally and emotionally. And I think in the world we’re living in right now, everyone deserves something that does that for them.
What’s one piece of advice you’d give to someone trying to break into the creative and tech space?
Chase it relentlessly, and don’t let the old guard stand in your way. People don’t generally give away influence — you have to go get it. Young people are digitally native, and we are needed in this conversation. I’m not talking about myself — there are people younger and smarter than me whose voices and perspectives we genuinely need in this space. Folks younger than me and newer to politics than me are out there running some of the biggest progressive digital operations in the country – and they’re kicking ass doing it. And I promise you no longtime consultant in this industry found those young people and handed them that role on a silver platter. They knew what they wanted to do, and they went and did it.
I’d also say: show your value, don’t just talk about it. Put your head down and do the work. Be humble about it. There is no campaign too small. A city council race needs one smart, driven young person in the creative and tech space far more than a presidential campaign does. Find where you are genuinely needed, step in, and help change the trajectory of that campaign or that organization. And the worst anyone can say if you put yourself out there is ‘no’ — so go find someone else who will appreciate what you bring. That’s it.