VIVINT — SR. CREATIVE DIRECTOR (+ CREATIVE DIRECTOR, DIGITAL MARKETING; DIRECTOR DIGITAL EXPERIENCE DESIGN
I built an in-house team so good, the company that acquired us handed me their brand.
Over five years and three roles at Vivint, I turned a fragmented set of creative groups into a full-service, 31-person in-house agency — and made it the standard a Fortune 500 acquirer chose to adopt.
The Challenge
Vivint is a direct-to-home company at its heart — and companies built on door-to-door sales fight a constant battle with brand perception. Sales performance ruled; brand was treated as a cost, not an asset. And half the business ran through the website and the leads it generated for inside sales.
By the time I took over the full creative organization, the groups had been combined but never unified. Talented people who'd lost their confidence and creative freedom under previous leadership, split into teams each funded — and effectively "owned" — by a different part of the business. The talent was there. The structure, the culture, and the belief were not.
My Role
I was recruited to Vivint for one thing: performance-level digital creative. I ended up owning the creative mission in three escalating chapters — Digital Marketing Creative Lead, leading the team responsible for website performance, lead generation, and conversion; UX Lead, Technology, leading a UX group charged with unifying the company's fragmented sales tools into a single experience; and Sr. Creative Director, brought back to lead the fully consolidated creative organization: brand, sales, digital, video, and UX, in one group. Craftsman to organization-builder. That arc is the whole story.
The Approach
Performance and brand are not enemies — I bet the website on it. When we rebranded and fully redesigned Vivint.com, everyone expected the usual cost: a redesign tanks SEO and leads, at least for a while. The business couldn’t absorb that — leads were sales. So I pushed the performance and SEO teams toward a different path: a tested, optimized rollout over six-plus months, not a big-bang relaunch. We rebuilt the entire site with no loss to SEO, leads, or page performance. Anyone who’s done a performance-site redesign knows how rare that is.
Unify the sales experience — a big swing that outlived itself. Leading UX in technology, I bet that every sales surface — mapping, lead tracking, presentation, packaging, checkout, financing — could run on one shared experience, whether the user was a rep at a door or a customer on e-commerce. The full vision was more engineering than the company could take on, so it didn’t ship whole. But the thinking shaped the roadmap for those tools for years. A bet worth making even when it doesn’t fully land.
Reorganize around how creative actually works — three pillars. Leading the consolidated team, I built a structure I hadn’t used before but that fit the work exactly: Media, Design, and Creative. Each pillar with its own leader, its own craft, its own remit.
Break the “I fund it, I own it” model — the boldest call. The team’s talent was locked up by funding: different stakeholders paid for specific people and therefore claimed their time. I pushed to pool that funding into a single bucket, so we could put the right people on the right problem instead of rationing by who paid. It drew real pushback. But it turned a set of stakeholder-owned resources into one organization that served the whole business — and that org model is exactly what caught the acquiring company’s eye.
Rebuild the culture, people-first. I gave a beaten-down team back its freedom, its confidence, and its work-life balance — and enabled my three creative directors to lead their own way, instead of molding them into copies of me.
Pillar/org diagram; before-after brand or site.
The Work
Delivered by the team I built.
Volume & Scale
Hundreds of videos and thousands of deliverables a year — more than 3,400 annually across the three years I led the consolidated team (plus ~500 for NRG after the acquisition).
Disney / Marvel
Product placement in the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special, and a co-branded advertising campaign built around it.
Delta Airlines
A 3D-animated Vivint spot on seatback screens; the first outside brand Delta had taken onto those screens in more than three years.
Apparel & Swag
Custom apparel and swag lines for the sales organization — built to a standard that reset how our manufacturing partners supported corporate merchandise — amplified by the media team's hype films and shoots.
Website & E-Commerce Evolution
Kept pushing conversion and new e-commerce flows without ever sacrificing the lead generation the business ran on.
Disney/Delta campaign stills + video embeds, apparel/swag, site work — the showcase-heavy section.
The Outcome
A fragmented set of groups became a full-service, 31-person in-house agency — one of the premier creative teams in the region and the industry.
The website redesign shipped with zero performance loss — SEO, leads, and page performance all held through a complete rebrand and rebuild.
Marquee brand moments a direct-to-home company had no business pulling off — and did: Disney/Marvel and Delta.
The capstone: the quality of the team, and the way I'd structured it, are what caught NRG's attention in the acquisition — and led a Fortune 500 to move me up to lead its entire corporate brand. The team I built became the reason for my next role.
What It Took
The most constant battle was justifying brand investment inside a company that measured everything by immediate sales. Brand takes years and conviction; a sales-first business wants results this quarter. We won some of those arguments and lost others to that math — and I learned to keep making the case.
The deeper lesson was about how I lead. This is where I stopped needing to be in the weeds and became an orchestrator — setting the vision, the culture, and the tone, then enabling my leaders to get the most from their teams. An orchestra has many sections, each essential; the orchestrator's job is to keep them in harmony, step in where there's dissonance, and let the whole thing play. That point of view on creative leadership was born in this chapter.