Sr. Copywriter & Editor
Feb. 2018 - Feb. 2020

During my time at ENGINE Group, I worked alongside everyone from Copywriters and Graphic Designers to International CEO’s and Executive Board Members. Below are some notable achievements.

More examples of my work can be shown upon request.

2019 ENGINE Rebrand

During my time at ENGINE, I had 4 different bosses and 3 different CMOs, leading me to help rebrand the company twice. As a result, I’ve written all of the copy for a total of 6 full websites. I’ve partnered with Artistic Directors, SEO Strategists, and Global CMOs to ensure the copy and design strategically work together to push forward the company values, voice, and overall brand identity. Additionally, I’ve helped to strategize the website design to ensure a positive User Experience.

For the 2019 rebrand, I worked closely with Chief Creative Officer Will Gelner and Global CMO Zihla Salinas to develop a brand identity, complete with tagline (“Forward Faster”), brand positioning, style guide, and unique voice.

RESULTS:

ENGINE_US

• 32k+ additional website visits within 90 days of launch

• 25% increase in website traffic

• 5% increase in website duration

ENGINE_APAC

• 30% increase in website traffic

• 20% increase in website session duration

• 6.1k+ additional visits within 90 days of launch

CANNES 2019

In one week, Engine Group was heading to Cannes. While there, the Global CEO would be speaking about the Gender Brand Gap—passing around a 26-page booklet written by the UK CEO to support the panel. Just days before the panel, I saw the booklet for the first time, asked to give it one last check before heading to design. The writing itself had only a handful of grammatical errors, but the narrative was broken. While the UK CEO understood the topic, it was clear to me that an audience member reading this for the first time may not be able to follow. With limited time and an unavailable UK CEO, I worked to fill in the gaps, structurally rearranging bits of the narrative, while working directly with the heads of design to have the booklet ready to go.

RESULTS: The booklet received festival praise and a write up in AdWeek.

Click below for the whole booklet.

BIRTHRIGHT

Cassandra (an Engine Group brand) had pitched to Birthright. Unable to decide between Cassandra and globally acclaimed agency IDEO, on Monday Birthright asked Cassandra to design a brand new Birthright trip and pitch it that Wednesday. With both Cassandra Creative Directors out for the week, I (the Senior Copywriter of Engine Group) stepped up and stepped in. Briefed Monday afternoon, I spent 16 hours talking with past Birthright participants, real Israelies, collaborating with graphics and strategically applying Gen-Z insights to my storytelling and narrative building skillset.

RESULTS: A narrative Birthright journey that beat IDEO and won Engine Group a $500k client.

Emails showing in-process work, internal praise, and a description for why my work won me a company award.

Click the images below to see the trip.

Click below and open with Adobe Acrobat to use the interactive PDF.

SPARK: IGNITE YOUR CAREER

Engine’s Head of Talent Development was creating a career development platform. She called an hour-long brainstorm with my marketing team in order to name it. Inevitably, the meeting followed tangents, until the last 10-minutes when Head of Talent Development reigned the meeting in, attempting to come out with at least a few ideas. During the tangents, I had been jotting down ideas, prospective titles, tags, etc. I pitched a few different names I’d jotted down, the last one being “Spark,” with the tag, “Ignite your career.”

A direct quote from the Dir. of Marketing:

"I guess we didn’t need an hour long meeting. We just needed 10 minutes with Dillon.”

ADVERTISING HALL OF ACHIEVEMENTS NOMINATION

The Advertising Hall of Achievements nomination season was open. The Executive Director of the Engine Group Board, Paul Caine, and the Global CEO, Kasha Cacy, wanted to nominate Michael Zacharski, CEO of EMX (Engine Technology). To do so, I worked closely with the Michael to collect the necessary documents and information via in-person interviews, emails, and reaching out to a list of people for recommendations. Once collected, I wrote, edited, and collaborated with the Head of Graphics to put together a booklet for submission. Michael’s approval is currently pending.

Click below to see the full nomination booklet.

REV

The Engine Group COO, Keith Grossman (currently President of Time Inc.), wanted to create digestible LinkedIn content to show off Engine’s Insights capabilities. Keith handpicked me and his graphic designer to work together to create REV content. Blogs that I had previously given full-body edits to, I re-opened and worked to strip away content, grabbing the meat of the article and structuring it into a narrative. Once edited, I worked with the Graphic Designer to design short online pamphlets for public posting.

Click below to see an example.

5G WHITEPAPER

Engine’s Global CMO at the time, Zoe Church, wanted to create powerful thought leadership on a hot marketing topic. She chose 5G. We launched multiple insights studies and spoke with experts. Multiple people helped write the white paper, which was 27 pages long by the time I received it. In addition to grammatical errors, the 27 page white paper was redundant, stuffed with unnecessary filler, and unfocused both narratively and structurally. I worked to realize the target audience and story we were trying to tell. Planning to edit the white paper from 27 pages to 10, I began a full-body edit, pulling information from the original paper, while re-writing and consolidating the redundant sections to be more pointed and concise. The final paper was set to be just 10 pages. Because of leadership changes it was never finished nor published.

Click below for the initial 27 pages and 7 of the unfinished 10 pages.

Pride Campaign & Panel

A few days into Pride Month 2019, Engine wanted to pull something together to celebrate the LGBTQ employees and community. I led a brainstorm with the Global Chief Human Resource Officer, Dianne DeSevo. The idea we landed on was to create digestible social content that could stir excitement for a Pride Panel of LGBTQ industry leaders, hosted by our Global CEO, Kasha Cacy. Over the next two weeks, I worked with graphics to create an invitation, spearheaded social initiatives, developed a brief of LGBTQ current events and questions, and was liaison between Engine and guests.

INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S WEEK CAMPAIN

With such strong female leadership, Engine Group wanted to celebrate International Women’s Week. Along side the Director of Social, I lead a brainstorm in which we decided to turn International Women’s Week into International Women’s Month. We worked together devising a series of questions to send out to Engine’s female employees. I collected the answers, editing the content into digestible quotes, while maintaining the voice and message of said leader. I created an email in the voice of our Global CEO for her to send out in celebration.

Full-Body Copy Editing

During my time at Engine I have been relied on by every facet of the company—from Insights and Technology to emails from the Global CEO—for copy editing. The copy editing has reached beyond grammatical errors and sentence structure, delving into narrative restructures and entire re-writes. Below is an example of a blog I gave a full-body narrative edit to, bringing it from 400 words to about 845.

Sr. Writer & Strategist, Video Prod.
Sept. 2014 - June 2017

For these examples of my work, I was the one to conceptualize creative concepts/ campaigns, write the content, work with clients/ brands on developing creative voice and messaging, lead brainstorms, assign graphics and editing work to our graphics team, work with photographers/ videographers, plan the posting time and determine the boosting budget. I did this all within an agency setting.  

For scheduling and posting, we used a social media scheduling service called HeyOrca. In the past, we have used HootSuite, TweetDeck, and native scheduling tools.

Photography I took for a restaurant client can be found here. 
More video work can be found on my videos page.
More written work (other than the blogs below) can be found on my published works page.
 

Blogs:

Facebook:

Twitter:

Instagram:

Video:

The H@ndle

An SNL Weekend Update-esque video blog geared towards social media.  I was the Creative Lead, Writer, Director, Male Lead and Co-Producer. This is Episode 1 and the Episode 1 bloopers.

Hampton Inn / Homewood Suites 10-sec. PR Video Campaign

I was the Co-Producer, Co-Writer, and Co-Creative Lead on this video campaign made for the new Hampton Inn/ Homewood Suites in Chicago's West Loop.

Paid Posts:

Instagram - Modern Mensch

Analytics:

Analytics can help a company find out who their audience is, where they're located, what days of the week they're most active, and more. These metrics can be powerful marketing tools in terms of writing copy, paid promotions, which direction to take your company, and more. 

Here are some examples of Instagram analytics and conclusions that can be drawn: