Braden Bickle

I solved problems with strategic thought, mentored others and produced some good work. During my tenure I had many different clients including: Joe's Crab Shack, Susan G. Komen, American Home Shield, SMU Cox School of Business, Taco Bueno, Texas Motor Speedway and the Dallas Museum of Art to name a few. I absolutely loved Slingshot, the management team and all of the employees.

As a creative director at Red Urban, in addition to establishing creative vision, I was much more hands on due to the size of the agency, which means I polished my chops daily as opposed to idly watching juniors and seniors do all the work.

We managed ourselves. We were seasoned professionals. As a result, we were much more grown up and thus needed no hand holding to come up with laser focused strategies and top notch creative.

The work we did was more holistic in nature, meaning, we didn't just come up with a microsite idea and wipe our hands. We approached any problem from every angle. We didn't consider social networking a medium. It was a strategy. There was no one size fits all and there was no check list. Each idea was carefully crafted to optimize its effectiveness.

In my last year at Tribal I was creatively responsible for creative direction, design work and leading teams to win the interactive accounts for Nokia, (RED) and Bud Light.

My day to day responsibilities included managing Exxon Mobil 1, Starbucks DoubleShot and Frappuccino, Nokia, (RED) and Bank of America. I personally lead many new business efforts and handled various melodramatic events between staff members of various departments.

During my tenure at Tribal I worked on, and was responsible for, a host of clients with varying degrees of project and retainer budgets into the millions.

Ackerman gave me the opportunity to dig deep into TV. I concepted and produced many spots and felt really good about every single one of them, except maybe that little one we've all decided to pretend never existed.

Leapfrog was the most succesful account I worked on at Ackerman that rose from budgets of a few hundred thousand to a few million in just a couple of years. For the first couple of years I was a Senior Art Director.

When I was handed a project, I owned it from beginning to end. Not that I didn't have to show my work to my boss, but there was no hand holding and visions were created and seen through to the end.

I taught myself animation and motion graphics and started incorporating those into our television spots and client reels because we weren't getting what we wanted. It just cost too much money to try different options using vendors.

We worked insanely long hours. My philosophy, after being promoted to an Associate Creative Director, was this: "we all walk out together." This kept us a tight team. We looked out for one another and helped each other get the best creative product possible.

I had a lot of free reign at Levenson and Hill, which is the time period when I won several significant awards. I learned a tremendous amount about the dirty work behind the scenes of an organization as far as finances, open books, how many people need to be fired to keep the doors open, etc.

I was the creative director for several clients for a while and eventually all of them. Mentoring and inspiring art directors, writers, production artists and even the owners and veterans were things I enjoyed. It came as no surprise to anyone when I would paint a wall or grab our best pieces of work, frame them myself over a weekend and fill the halls with them. The agency was inspired by those methods and the clients and potential clients were impressed.