IAC's portfolio in 2019 included Vimeo, Daily Burn, and Ask Media Group — three brands with distinct audiences, distinct voices, and distinct competitive contexts. What they shared was a parent company that had decided to consolidate creative leadership across the portfolio rather than maintain separate creative teams at each property.
That meant one creative lead across all three simultaneously. Me.
The conventional wisdom about this kind of arrangement is that it doesn't work. The brands are too different. The context-switching is too expensive. The quality inevitably suffers because no single person can hold three distinct creative identities in their head at the same time.
The conventional wisdom is wrong, but only if you build the right infrastructure.
The System That Made It Possible
The first thing I did was document each brand separately and completely. Not a shared brand guide — three distinct documents that lived independently of each other. Each had its own tone guide, its own visual reference system, its own vocabulary of what was on-brand and what wasn't. The discipline of writing these down forced a clarity that even the internal teams hadn't fully articulated.
Then I built the template ecosystem. For each brand, the repeatable formats — social creative, video series openers, email headers, ad units — were templated with enough flexibility to feel alive and enough constraint to feel consistent. This meant production could begin from a standing start rather than from zero every time, which compressed turnaround without compressing quality.
The brief system came next. A format that forced every project to answer the same core questions regardless of which brand it was for: what's the audience, what's the message, what's the one thing we want someone to feel or do, what does success look like. When a brief is built well, the creative work that comes out of it is almost inevitable. When it isn't, you make the same wrong decisions a hundred different ways.
Finally the freelance network. You can't run three brands as a solo lead without a reliable production network that can scale on demand. I built relationships with video producers, editors, designers, and writers who understood the brands well enough to execute independently — and documented their work thoroughly enough that the output was consistent even when the personnel changed.
The Work
Across the three brands I launched 10+ branded content series and performance marketing campaigns over two years. The work covered video, digital, and social — from long-form brand content for Vimeo to conversion-optimized campaigns for Daily Burn's subscription model.
The results were measurable: 35% improvement in conversion metrics across app downloads, session length, and premium sign-ups. The campaigns optimized via Google Analytics and A/B testing against defined audience segments, which meant every iteration was incrementally smarter than the last.
The Lesson
Running three brands from a single creative lead isn't a compromise. It's a model — if the infrastructure supports it. The creative quality didn't suffer because of the breadth of the portfolio. It improved because the systems created consistency and the consistency created trust. Stakeholders who trust the process free up the creative energy that makes the work better.
The IAC engagement taught me something I've carried into every role since: a great creative system doesn't just make the work faster. It makes the work more ambitious, because everyone involved spends less time on process and more time on the thing that actually matters.
