Work on Purpose.
3 weeks. 3 continents. 1 employer branding campaign.
Around the world with Bloomberg.
Partnering with the Human Resources and Recruitment teams, I led a months-long project to rebrand and refresh Bloomberg’s global recruitment campaign and careers website.
Beyond the usual challenges of pitching ideas to skeptical stakeholders, project management, and threading a singular concept across an entire planet's worth of offices and cultures (no easy task, that's for sure), I learned the most about relationship building and the power of just being a nice, easygoing person to work with under an enormous amount of pressure.
The brief.
Reinforce Bloomberg's reputation as a firm that's on the leading edge of tech
and innovation.
Attract, hire, and retain top engineering talent in an extremely
competitive hiring environment.Build a modular and evergreen system that is robust, globally relevant design, and with enough elements to last for the next 5 years.
The messy part.
As the creative lead and only copywriter on the project, it was my job to come up with the idea — my dream assignment! Conceptual, big picture thinking is my sweet spot, and with a wide open brief like this, it was a true joy. As a starting point, I go on a really long walk and see where my brain takes me. I'll return home with my Notes app full of ideas, most of them hot garbage but a halfway decent one usually lurks somewhere.
So then I find that one really good pen, crack open my Moleskin, and start writing. In this instance, I came up with wrote four taglines and wrote "manifestos" to dig into the idea, see if it works, and then share with my team for feedback.
These ideas became the four directions we pitched,
along with mood boards and refined manifestos.
Come as you are.
Smarter works here.
Work on purpose.
Embrace complexity.
The hard part.
It took about a month of pitching and revisions, but the client chose to move forward with Work on Purpose as the theme.
This concept highlighted the quirky and unexpected relationships in our economy — and relied heavily on data and information that's discoverable on the Bloomberg Terminal. Besides connecting the company's product to a person's everyday life, it also emphasized the purpose-driven, impact-led mission of the company and its employees.
The fun part.
Have you ever gotten to fly one full loop around the world, in Business Class? 10/10 would recommend. I took a grueling and exhilarating journey from New York, to London, to Toyko, to Hong Kong, to shoot at our EMEA and APAC headquarters with world-class photographers Manfred Reiff and Peter Gabriel. Working with my art director Jordan Kovin, the four of us shot with dozens of employees and produced nearly 1,000 photos.
These assets — plus hundreds of copy lines and a library of animated data viz to capture the organic beauty of millions of data patterns — make up the creative library and, years later (as intended), they're still being used across print, digital, video, event signage, storytelling, and so much more.
Credits
Jordan Kovin
Manfred Reiff
Peter Gabriel
Alex Israel
Yuko Magoshi
Joseph Matise
Production company VFX: Aggressive