Creative Direction

For Dream Design Labs, a boutique digital marketing firm for US-based home service contractors, I started out as a simple copywriter, eventually becoming their lead copywriter. As the company moved further and further to using offshore creative designers, I evolved into the role of "creative director." The lion's share of this role was to provide quality control to the work of the Pakistan-based creative team.

The reason for this was simple — Pakistanis don't always know what imagery US audiences will respond to, especially high-end homeowners. My job was to catch when they used a stock image of a home surrounded by palm trees when the target audience was based in Ohio. Sometimes the creative designers used stock images of homes that looked like they were in Europe — or even Africa! One memorable image they used for a Milwaukee-based roofer was an overhead shot of rusted metal roofs along poorly-planned dirt roads surrounded by banana trees. That one had to go.

Below is a selection of the feedback I gave them. It was a pretty low-tech company. They used GoHighlevel and Canva for most of their creative design. If they had used an app like Figma I could have had a more sophisticated feedback workflow, but because of their tech stack, I kept it simple — screenshots with annotations 🤷‍♂️ The pakistani team loved it, finding it very easy to follow my feedback logic.

Much of the work of outsourced teams, as well as AI output, requires this level of quality control if it is to be take seriously by discerning audiences in Tier 1 countries.