The Army Corps had every reason to keep a camera crew out. I went in braced for a polite no from people with .mil addresses, and found what I usually find: the person holding the veto was quietly a fan of the work. Most of this job is finding that person and handing them a reason to say yes.

That instinct came from three places: Cactus, a Denver ad agency; TIBCO Software; and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the Department of Energy lab behind the videos you just read about.

Throughout my career, the tools organizations use to communicate have gotten cheaper, then automated. The judgment has only gotten more scarce: knowing what a story will carry, what to hold back, when to abandon the plan. I have been making that call since 2013, when the AI in my job was a sentiment engine I trained by hand, one brand-approved keyword at a time.

Cactus · Denver · 2013–2015When the stakes are real.

At Cactus, I was the voice of Dr. Rich Mahogany, the character behind Man Therapy, a suicide-prevention campaign for men built with Colorado's Office of Suicide Prevention. Rich is a mustachioed therapist in too-small gym shorts, because the men the campaign needed to reach would never click on somber. When Robin Williams died, the question inside the building was hard: how does a comedic character step into a national conversation about male suicide, in the days it is rawest, without looking like an ambulance chaser? The answer was in the epidemiology. Suicides rise in the immediate aftermath of a celebrity death, men's most of all; researchers later counted nearly ten percent more American suicides than expected in the months after Williams died. That window is exactly when men are most vulnerable, we had exactly the messaging they needed, and the only question was reaching them in time. So: content built, vetted by the state's suicide-prevention clinicians, and out the door while the window was open. The channel was Reddit's r/EveryManShouldKnow, and the post hit the front page. More than a decade later, the campaign is still at it, in the same spirit.

I also built the social strategy for Colorado's Good to Know, the first campaign any state government ever ran to teach adults how to buy legal weed. Jimmy Kimmel made it his monologue news-hook the week it launched.

TIBCO Software · 2018–2020When nobody has heard of you.

TIBCO Software was a billion-dollar company most people could not describe; plenty of its own people couldn't either. Its loudest marketing was a Formula One sponsorship: a fortune spent on being seen and almost nothing on being understood. I built the global social program and made the sponsorship mean something to the enterprise buyers who signed the checks. Reddit was where I made it land, a platform I'd known cold since 2011, when I broke the news of Steve Jobs's death there. It topped the site before the networks had it; by one researcher's tally, the most-upvoted post in Reddit's history to that point. So when the sponsorship's brand-safety apparatus wanted nothing to do with Reddit, I produced its first AMA anyway. Mercedes F1's technical director went first to prove it was survivable; then Valtteri Bottas took the chair under a title I pushed for, his own catchphrase: "To whom it may concern," minus its famously unprintable second half. Fans caught the wink; the brand kept its hands clean. The AMA drew twenty-three thousand upvotes, the best-performing content of the multi-year deal. When Conan O'Brien crashed a company video call mid-pandemic and roasted the CEO on his TBS show, we treated the prank as a gift. The clip ran from Forbes to Boing Boing, the best press the brand saw all year, and a locked-down workforce got the laugh it needed.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory · 2020–2024Reach, without the budget for it.

At the lab I ran digital communications for an institution that cannot buy its audience: at a federal laboratory, reach is earned or it does not exist. A recruiting campaign for hydropower researchers ran on one idea worth repeating; it was sharp enough that the Secretary of Energy shared it herself. A single Star Wars meme we posted on May the 4th reached a biosecurity researcher at Johns Hopkins, who quote-tweeted it and, two months later, took a job at the lab.

The best thing I built was a bench.

I was hired to run social media at a national laboratory and left leading its whole digital communications team. Along the way I built the digital arm of the lab's Joint Information Command — the operation that stands up when something has gone badly wrong. A system other people now run without me in the room. The work that lasts is the work someone else can carry after you leave.

The content specialist I hired started green; by the time I left, the job was theirs to take, and they took it, on the same playbook. The designer I hired, on a bet that science explained with a little mischief travels further than science explained safely, remade how the lab looked online and won it recognition it had never had for design. My role, more than once, was to stand between her boldest idea and an understandably nervous federal bureaucracy: yes, we can run a Breaking Bad-inspired animation for National Periodic Table Day; no, it will not get anyone fired; the people who should catch it will, and everyone else will just enjoy it. Most of what is on this page has other people's fingerprints on it; my job was keeping the room pointed the same way.

Where AI belongs, and where it doesn't.

In 2018 I gave a talk in Amsterdam asking whether social media was machine-learnable, back when the question still sounded academic. My cautionary tale was Tay, the Microsoft chatbot the internet taught to be a monster in a day. Half a decade later I was working directly with Microsoft, running the social rollout when it partnered with PNNL to sort thirty-two million candidate materials down to eighteen and build a better battery. That one went better than Tay: the story ran in GeekWire and Federal News Network, Satya Nadella posted it himself, and Elon Musk replied, in full: “Interesting.” I have spent enough time near these systems to be unimpressed by most of what is sold around them, and sure of one thing: what carried that story was not the copy we wrote. It was the coverage, and a post from someone else's CEO. The part a company doesn't write about itself is doing more of the work now, not less, and most are spending as if the opposite were true, pouring budget into AI that flattens the voice that made them worth reading.

And when it isn't planned.

Everything above was the planned work. The unplanned kind runs on the same judgment, and it is where I am most useful: the wildfire I mapped by hand, the magnet that went viral before the lab had a statement, the government that named the lab in a disinformation campaign. I keep that work on its own page; the short version is that one of the best calls came from a company I had already left.

When the stakes were mine.

The most important thing I have ever put in front of a camera was not for a client. In 2022, when a national shortage left my prematurely born daughter without the specialty formula she needed, I ran it from my kitchen table the way I would run any campaign: press first, then power. I put the story in front of the reporters who owned the beat, and once the Washington Post ran it, that one article was all I needed to start kicking down doors, converting coverage into action from the handful of people who could actually get preemie-specific formula back onto shelves. When Good Morning America came, I didn't just answer questions. I worked with their producer and shot the field piece myself, one hand on the camera, six stores into the hunt for my daughter's formula. The story reached CNN, CBS News, and CBC Radio; Inside Edition's segment alone has been watched more than nine hundred thousand times. It reached a Senate committee hearing, where Senator Patty Murray named my family to the FDA Commissioner's face. She later told me our campaign put the shortage on the President's desk, where it met an emergency airlift. Before I left Washington, she asked to meet my daughter. I would trade all of it for MacKenzie never having needed the formula.