Dear GEICO Team,
Right now every company is being told AI will make their creative and marketing teams work faster and cheaper. But most of them aren't seeing those cost reductions yet. I've spent the last several years building creative studios for the global leader in in-housing, and it's given me the specific skillset to take cost savings from theoretical to actual. I know which tools the agencies are actually using well, which tools they're overselling, what the cost savings come to when the technology is being used correctly, and when to take certain workstreams in-house, building the systems to run this work efficiently if an agency falls short.
At OLIVER Agency I was embedded within HP, Morgan Stanley, and Unilever building such systems. At HP I owned the P&L alongside finance on a roughly $10.5M engagement. When the scope grew, I ran the negotiation with the client and then managed the hiring of 40 people to deliver it without breaking the new budget. I have negotiated the contracts and scopes with outside production agencies and vendors, built the rate cards that kept that work predictable, held vendor and agency partners accountable through regular reviews, and made the case to bring $1.4M a year of outsourced production in-house at a better margin. I measure whether the work is getting cheaper and faster, not just whether everyone's busy, so the savings are provable.
I measure whether the work is getting cheaper and faster, not just whether everyone's busy.
That background is why I think I'd be useful to you specifically. I can sit across from your agencies and set a real cost-savings target they should be able to hit without any loss of quality, because I know what's actually achievable with the tools they have. And when a partner can't get there, I know whether the technology can genuinely do what people claim or whether it's smoke and mirrors, and if it's real, I know how to bring that capability in-house and build it so it delivers the savings anyway. Building the tool is the easy part, though. The savings only show up once people actually use it, and getting whole teams onto a new way of working, then designing the operating model that holds them there, is the part I'm best at. At HP I did it one team at a time until it was just how the account ran.
The rest of this role I've done as well. I'm an expert at diagnosing bottlenecks, auditing how work and money move before implementing any changes. On regulated accounts, approvals are usually where creative work goes to die, so at Morgan Stanley I stood up the brand and legal sign-off that let work clear compliance fast instead of stalling in it, which is the kind of partner Finance, Legal, and Risk actually want in the room. When HP rolled out new brand guidelines, the risk was that a thousand-plus assets a week would either drift off-brand or bury the review team, so I put the infrastructure in place that held every asset to the new standard without burning the reviewers out. And when the check itself was the bottleneck, I built Creatiq, which catches spec and compliance errors before anything ships. It's the same thing I do everywhere, finding where a team is losing time or money and going in to build the fix without adding overhead.
I'd like to learn more about how you're building the marketing operating model and where the spend feels least accountable right now. This is the work I like most, and I'd be glad to walk you through exactly how I'd approach the first stretch. Thank you for your consideration.
