Creative Director · Brand + Performance

Brand-defining creative that moves culture and the business.

Brand-defining creative that moves culture and the business.

I direct work that has to do two things at once — earn attention in culture and answer to the number. From national broadcast and social awareness to top-ranked, acquisition-driving search content.

123M

Super Bowl LVIII audience

+13 pts

Brand consideration lift

Rank #1

Three lending categories

100B+

Authority-program impressions

Selected Work

01 / Brand Refresh

Discover — Brand Refresh

National TV · Celebrity — J. Coolidge · Multi-product · Super Bowl

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123M

Audience / Super Bowl LVIII

+10 pts

Awareness / sustained

+13 pts

Consideration / sustained

Challenge

Make Discover products show up in culture with the scale of a top-tier consumer brand to an audience that wasn’t looking for just a card company.

Idea

A celebrity-led awareness platform built on the brand’s new positioning and applied across product lines, using Jennifer Coolidge’s comedic voice to make Discover feel current and unmissable.

Craft

Creative decision making to align bank creative across national spots and product stories that tied back to refreshed brand positioning.

02 / Social & Video System

Discover Personal Loans — Social & Video System

Online Video · Streaming/CTV · Social · Performance

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50+

Assets / 3 concepts

30%

View-through / vs benchmark

5%

Lower CPA

Challenge

Turn a new product-level positioning into an always-on awareness engine across paid social, streaming, and online video — at volume, without diluting the brand.

Idea

Three distinct campaign concepts engineered to flex across every format, so one system could scale to dozens of assets and still feel intentional.

Craft

Directed the build of 50+ assets across three concepts — art-directing for online video, CTV, and social, with a system for versioning and testing at scale.

03 / SEO & Content Direction

Discover Lending — Brand Authority

SEO · UX Writing · Content · Earned Media · Acquisition

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Rank #1

SEO Weighted avg / lending categories

100B+

Impressions / earned & owned authority

Challenge

Make Discover’s Home Loans and Personal Loans sites the authoritative destination for the category’s highest-value searches — and convert that visibility into applications.

Idea

Treat search as a creative brief, not a technical checklist — direct content, UX writing, and experience around what borrowers actually ask, then build external authority.

Craft

Led creative direction across site content, blog, and UX writing — coordinating technical SEO, market research, content creators and an earned-media program with PR to build domain authority.

Approach

The work starts upstream — with positioning before production.

The work starts upstream — with positioning before production.

Before the casting, the media plan, or the first cut, each of these campaigns began as a positioning problem. I helped shape the brand positioning and architecture that redefined how Discover showed up. That work is proprietary, so it lives off the page — but it’s the reason the campaigns held together: every spot, asset, and page laddered back to a single point of view. That’s the through-line here — creative direction that’s accountable to a strategy and to the bottom line.

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I came up through theater and filmmaking, and I’ve spent my career pointing that craft at scale — from campus arts and concert halls to enterprise brand work at Fortune500s like UnitedHealth Group, Optum, Chevron, Capital One and Discover. I direct creative that has to earn attention in culture and answer to the business at the same time, partnering deep with strategy, media, product, tech, and PR. Based in Texas.

© 2026 Cody Baldwin — Creative Director

Brand · Broadcast · Performance