Ancestry — Art Director › Senior Art Director › Associate Creative Director › Visual Design Lead
Where it started — and where I helped build a household name.
I joined Ancestry early in my career and, over my years there, helped transform a niche records product into a globally recognized consumer brand — building the performance-creative and brand-systems disciplines that have defined every role since.
The Challenge
When I arrived, the company was myfamily.com, and Ancestry was just one product among several — carrying a legacy as a subscription for a niche audience: genealogists and library microfilm researchers. The ambition was to break out: to turn "old records" into the family stories a mainstream audience would pay for, and to build Ancestry into a national consumer brand.
And the whole business ran on one hard constraint — there was no sales team. Every subscription was won online: an ad, an email, a landing page, a free trial that had to convert. The brand had to be beautiful and it had to perform.
My Role
This is where my foundation was built. I joined about two years out of school as an art director — and it was a deliberate step back from management (I'd already led a 15–20 person team at my previous company) to do one thing: become the best creative I could be. I learned agency-level creative brought in-house from a creative director who'd come up in agencies — the model that has defined my entire career since.
I grew to senior art director, and later returned as Associate Creative Director and then Visual Design Lead — leading a team and owning the brand's evolution.
The Approach
Idea-led, integrated campaigns — with the craft to win awards. We built a creative team around ideas and stories, not just production. We found the heartwarming, real family-history discoveries in the data and built beautiful integrated creative around them — print, digital, email, TV, and non-traditional — earning Addy Awards from the local level up through regional and national.
The showcase — the indexing campaign. To rally people to help digitize historical records, we took iconic and everyday historical photographs and removed the people from them — a famous wartime scene with no soldiers, a portrait with no face — behind one haunting line: without these records, the people in them disappear. It ran as a physical office installation, in print, and in digital — fully integrated, and award-winning.
The performance discipline that became my signature. Because every subscription was won online, I spent years deep in conversion-rate optimization and a large-scale email program — prospecting, retention, and win-back. This is where I built the performance-creative foundation that, years later, is the exact reason Vivint came looking for me.
Brand systems and evolution. As Visual Design Lead, I led a brand evolution — dropping the “.com,” modernizing the identity — and built the brand standards and the “brand platform” decks: the messaging-and-visual guides that directed each campaign, collection, and product launch for marketing managers and creatives alike.
The Work
Selected work across more than a decade of campaigns.
The Indexing Campaign
Iconic and everyday historical photographs with the people removed from them — a physical office installation, print, and digital, fully integrated and award-winning.
Integrated Campaign Work
Idea-led print, digital, email, TV, and non-traditional campaigns built around real family-history discoveries — earning Addy Awards from local through national.
Performance & Email Program
Years of conversion-rate optimization and a large-scale email program across prospecting, retention, and win-back — the performance-creative foundation behind every subscription won.
Brand Evolution & Brand Platform
Dropping the ".com," modernizing the identity, and building the brand standards and "brand platform" decks that directed every campaign, collection, and product launch.
The indexing campaign, award-winning integrated work, brand-evolution before/after, brand platform decks.
The Outcome
We helped build a household name. Ancestry went from a niche records product to a globally recognized consumer brand — in pop culture, on television, known almost universally. I was part of the team that made that transition happen.
The revenue engine ran on our creative. Continuous conversion optimization and the email program drove the subscriptions that funded the company's growth — its brand investment, new record collections, global expansion, and eventually AncestryDNA.
Recognition to match — award-winning campaign work from the local level to national.
What It Took
As the company scaled and opened a San Francisco office, I learned to lead across a divided, two-city creative organization — and to fight, successfully, for the things that mattered: overhauling email, strengthening the brand standards. But the lesson that shaped everything after was simple: an in-house team can be as good as, or better than, any agency. I've spent every role since proving it.