Agency projects
During 8 1/2 years as editorial director and an editor at Third Bridge Creative agency, I was fortunate to work on projects for many high-profile, high-standards clients. I’m highlighting Apple Music, Ticketmaster, and Squarespace, but I also worked on projects for Amazon Music, Spotify, and Netflix, among others.
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Project management for numerous verticals, including descriptive music content, artist bios, and more. Take a look.
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Blog features, service content, and team + artist bios to increase stickiness. Here are some examples.
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Educational hub-and-spoke packages for the Making It blog, designed to reinforce the platform’s authority in the DIY online commerce space. Take a peek.
Apple Music
Apple Music hired Third Bridge Creative to develop written editorial to accompany its music, e-book, and electronic newsletter offerings. Music was by far the bulk of the work. This account was the backbone of the agency; it was our first client, our largest in terms of revenue, and our longest-standing one.
I managed a team of around 40 professional music journalists, assigning and trafficking as many as 250 deliverables per week. During the years I led the project, we earned enough trust from the company that they sought our work for other verticals, such as e-books, an entirely new classical-music initiative they undertook (which required us to complete close to 4,000 deliverables in three months), and a data-driven featured content initiative.
Below are a few highlights of what I and my team delivered for them.
Identifying content priorities using data: We used data from a major aggregator to identify the top albums in the highest-performing genres each week, and then developed a tool that crawled the client’s site to identify which of those top albums lacked content. We cross-referenced that with the output of our own tool that highlighted which albums were on the steepest ascent—meaning, their audience was experiencing exponential growth—and created notes for those.
Providing context and depth: Our assignments spanned a massive swath of genres including catalog and trending music, and an essential function of my role was maintaining a team that had SMEs to create the most compelling content for each assignment. We delivered notes for playlist franchises that were designed to let listeners travel as far into an artist’s catalog as they wanted (from essentials into deep cuts), and introduce them to each artist’s inspirations, impact, and contemporaries. Over an eight-year span, we delivered more than 10,000 sets of notes, which included versions localized for the US, UK, Canada, and Australia.
Contextualizing artists: Over a three-year period, we created bios for more than 4,000 artists, both catalog and emerging. In addition to building and maintaining a writing team that was equipped, expertise-wise, for that work, I also had to design and pace the workflows to scale at that level.
Content-wise, the directive from the client was to always answer the question why. Why should anyone care about this artist? In other words, what did they do that was new and exciting? What place did they occupy in their contemporary music landscape? How did they evolve over time? Where can you hear their influence elsewhere in the canon?
Ticketmaster
The massive ticketing platform needed a partner to support their content-marketing initiatives via service-oriented blog content; artist, athlete, and sports-team bios; and service-oriented site content designed to enhance their image as a partner and trusted resource for entertainment seekers. I gathered a team of approximately 15 freelance writers experienced in music and sports content, established a pitch cadence for the blog, and designed workflows for a little over 160 deliverables per month.
Driving site stickiness: Ticketmaster had launched a new content marketing initiative to improve brand perception and to encourage site visitors to use their platform for more than transactions. On the blog, they sought SEO-driven service content that would provide dining and and leisure suggestions to help users plan stays in new cities. On the website, they needed to flesh out venue pages with information about amenities (such as parking and ADA accommodations). They also needed bios on pages for artists, teams, and athletes. During a three-year contract, we delivered thousands of pieces of content in support of their mission. (From top: Blog post; venue FAQs; artist bio; venue deep dive)
Squarespace
This website-building and -hosting powerhouse wanted to improve its SEO rankings and brand recognition. Taking cues from its largest competitor (Shopify), it developed a content-marketing strategy focused on becoming a trusted educational resource for its users.
Building brand recognition, trust, and authority: Squarespace sought to develop a suite of educational content to help small business owners learn and grow. For this project, I retooled our standard workflows and timelines in order to meet the needs of an expansive group of stakeholders on the client’s end. We included an extra outline-approval step prior to the first draft; an second round of feedback between the editor and writer on our end; and an additional round of proofreading at the very end, to make sure all suggestions and edits from the client had been addressed and were not in conflict with each other.
Over an 18-month contract, we delivered seven hub-and-spoke packages for the Making It blog, each consisting of a main article accompanied by five deep-dive articles plus a downloadable, workbook-style PDF digest of the content.
