I got to play a lot of roles as a writer and producer for Ring. Beyond daily YouTube content, holiday gift guides, and blog posts I worked with the product and advertising team on in-store displays for stores like Best Buy, Target, and Home Depot.
The most fun I had at Ring was co-creating, writing, and producing a weekly comedy best-of clip show called Top Ring Videos, that evolved into the Wanda Sykes-hosted comedy show Ring Nation.
Ring
BuzzFeed
I started as a copywriter in New York and promptly moved to Los Angeles to build and run BuzzFeed’s west coast creative department, becoming the first-ever New York comic to have kids and then suddenly move to LA to do advertising.
By the time I left in 2018, I had built a lonely solo operation into a diverse, thriving 18-person staff that spanned Los Angeles and San Fransisco and ran major campaigns for brands like Toyota and Hulu.
While I remain proudest of the things we did as a team at BuzzFeed, what follows are some individual pieces that I wrote, both branded and editorial, that don’t necessarily fit into larger campaigns.
When I first became a creative director and was given my own team, I initiated a policy for brainstorms called “The Bad Idea Jar” to encourage people to pitch weirder, riskier ideas. If you pitched something truly ridiculous that had no chance of being sold you would have to put a dollar in the jar, but then if anyone managed to actually sell that post to a client they would get all the money that had accumulated. I believe this post, for USA Network’s Suits, won me $44.
Somehow I was the only one on the 18-person team with kids, so I ended up running point on pretty much all of our parenting content. This post was my favorite because I got to involve my whole family, down to the 1-year-old, in testing and evaluating internet “parenting hacks.” We uncovered a few great ones we use to this day, and hopefully banished a few of the dumber ones once and for all.
My Weirdest Idea (which is also one of my favorites)
Early in my tenure at BuzzFeed, Ruffles came to us with a very specific ask: They had created a spokes-character called Ruff McThickridge, but they didn’t want
”regular BuzzFeed stuff”—they wanted something that felt like a 1980s Burt Reynolds action adventure. I used to love Marvel comics as an ‘80s kid (still do, in fact), and I thought back to how in the back of Marvel comics there was always some bizarre, branded one-page adventure where, like, Spider Man would win a battle by using Hostess Snack Cakes. We pitched a series of animated comics starring Ruff in a variety of adventures (as a cop, a hockey coach, an old-west gunslinger, etc.) and, to everyone’s surprise, they went for it. I got to write two of the six. Here’s one.
While I occasionally covered anti-administration protests from a news perspective, and produced branded content for Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans, the top editors were always cagy about putting out overtly political editorial content. Nevertheless, I was able to get a few things through by successfully arguing that this was “television and film” content more than it was political agitprop.
I wrote this quiz to promote Why Mommy Drinks, a new no-advice-ever comedy parenting podcast hosted by Betsy Stover and Amanda Allan. Just like the podcast, this quiz celebrates how hilariously hard parenting can be, encouraging the reader to laugh at their inevitable failures and embrace their inner garbage-person, because no matter how much you think you suck at this, you’re doing a great job.
Turns out if you play enough board games with your kids, you start noticing certain things.