INDEPENDENT PRACTICE

Most companies don’t have a marketing problem.
They have a clarity problem.

Most companies don’t have a marketing problem.
They have a clarity problem.

Most companies don’t have a marketing problem.
They have a clarity problem.

I’m Cody Baldwin. I’ve spent twenty years building brands and the creative that carries them — for national campaigns, for lending products, for arts institutions, for founders working out of a single room. The same discipline carries all of it: define the position, make the work, move the market. It holds at every size.

I’m Cody Baldwin. I’ve spent twenty years building brands and the creative that carries them — for national campaigns, for lending products, for arts institutions, for founders working out of a single room. The same discipline carries all of it: define the position, make the work, move the market. It holds at every size.

I’m Cody Baldwin. I’ve spent twenty years building brands and the creative that carries them — for national campaigns, for lending products, for arts institutions, for founders working out of a single room. The same discipline carries all of it: define the position, make the work, move the market. It holds at every size.

Start a conversation

See the work

Everyone can make something now. Fewer people can say why.

Everyone can make something now. Fewer people can say why.

The tools got more accessible, and that’s been mostly a good thing. A competent website takes an afternoon. A passable logo takes a prompt. What didn’t get cut is the part that comes first — knowing what you actually stand for, who you’re actually talking to, and what you need them to do.

That gap is where most marketing money goes to die. It gets spent on work that’s polished, on brief, and beautifully made, without any consistent strategy behind it.

My work starts upstream of the deliverable. Position the thing correctly and the creative decisions get obvious. Skip it, and you’ll spend a year refining executions of an idea that could have landed better on first pass.

Three ways to work together

FOUNDER-LED COMPANIES · ARTS & CULTURAL ORGANIZATIONS · LOCAL & OWNER-OPERATED

FOUNDER-LED COMPANIES

ARTS & CULTURAL ORGANIZATIONS

LOCAL & OWNER-OPERATED

01 · BUILD

A defined project with a beginning and an end.

We agree on a scope, I build it, you own it. Positioning through launch.

RIGHT WHEN

you’re starting something, relaunching something, or you know the current version isn’t representing you and you want it fixed properly, once.

TYPICALLY INCLUDES

Positioning and messaging · Brand architecture and identity system · Website design and build · Launch creative and asset library · Handoff documentation you can actually use

COMMITMENT

Fixed scope. Fixed fee. Timelines vary based on complexity, launch date set at kickoff.

01 · BUILD

A defined project with a beginning and an end.

We agree on a scope, I build it, you own it. Positioning through launch.

RIGHT WHEN

you’re starting something, relaunching something, or you know the current version isn’t representing you and you want it fixed properly, once.

TYPICALLY INCLUDES

Positioning and messaging · Brand architecture and identity system · Website design and build · Launch creative and asset library · Handoff documentation you can actually use

COMMITMENT

Fixed scope. Fixed fee. Timelines vary based on complexity, launch date set at kickoff.

02 · PARTNER

Ongoing creative capacity, monthly.

The standing arrangement for organizations that need consistent output but don’t need — or can’t yet carry — a full creative team.

RIGHT WHEN

the brand exists and the problem is momentum. You’re publishing, campaigning, or selling continuously and the work keeps stalling for lack of someone to make it.

TYPICALLY INCLUDES

Campaign and content creative · Video and motion · Social, performance, and broadcast assets · Site updates and landing pages · SEO and content programming · A monthly working session

COMMITMENT

Monthly retainer, tiered by output volume. Ninety-day minimum, then rolling.

02 · PARTNER

Ongoing creative capacity, monthly.

The standing arrangement for organizations that need consistent output but don’t need — or can’t yet carry — a full creative team.

RIGHT WHEN

the brand exists and the problem is momentum. You’re publishing, campaigning, or selling continuously and the work keeps stalling for lack of someone to make it.

TYPICALLY INCLUDES

Campaign and content creative · Video and motion · Social, performance, and broadcast assets · Site updates and landing pages · SEO and content programming · A monthly working session

COMMITMENT

Monthly retainer, tiered by output volume. Ninety-day minimum, then rolling.

03 · EMBED

Fractional creative direction. I sit in the room.

A creative lead inside your decision-making, with a defined number of days a month.

RIGHT WHEN

the decisions are the bottleneck. You have people who can execute and no one senior enough to say which direction is right, or to defend that call to a board, an investor, or a room of stakeholders.

TYPICALLY INCLUDES

Brand and marketing strategy · Audience and consumer insight · Media planning and investment framing · Creative review and standards · Team mentorship and hiring input

COMMITMENT

Fixed days per month. Deliberately capped — I take a small number of these at a time.

03 · EMBED

Fractional creative direction. I sit in the room.

A creative lead inside your decision-making, with a defined number of days a month.

RIGHT WHEN

the decisions are the bottleneck. You have people who can execute and no one senior enough to say which direction is right, or to defend that call to a board, an investor, or a room of stakeholders.

TYPICALLY INCLUDES

Brand and marketing strategy · Audience and consumer insight · Media planning and investment framing · Creative review and standards · Team mentorship and hiring input

COMMITMENT

Fixed days per month. Deliberately capped — I take a small number of these at a time.

Define. Make. Move.

DEFINE

Brand strategy and architecture. Positioning and messaging. Audience and consumer insight. Marketing and creative planning. Media strategy and investment framing.

MAKE

Identity systems and asset libraries. Campaign creative for social, performance, and broadcast. Video direction and editing. Websites, landing pages, and the copy that lives on them.

MOVE

Technical SEO and site architecture. Content programming and editorial. Search and authority strategy. Performance creative and testing. Measurement that answers a real question.

Most engagements touch all three. The proportions are what change.

The discipline of national scale, pointed at whatever you’re building.

For the last several years I’ve directed brand and campaign work inside financial services — a Super Bowl spot, national broadcast, a $45 million marketing investment, search programs that took a lending category’s most competitive keywords to number one. Hundreds of billions of impressions, to quantify it.

What’s that actually worth to you? At scale, you cannot guess. Every decision gets tested, argued, measured, and defended. You learn very quickly which instincts survive contact with reality and which ones are just taste.

I bring that same rigor to a twelve-person firm, an arts organization, or a founder with one product. Every project gets built the way I’d build it for layers and layers of institutional approvals — reasoned through, defensible choice by choice, ready for the hardest question anyone could ask. You get that standard whether or not there’s a committee waiting to test it.

The question I ask on day one is the same one I ask about every brief:

Does this look like the company you’re actually trying to become?

Closing that distance is the work. It’s the part I’m best at.

How it goes

01

READ THE ROOM

A conversation, then a look at everything you’ve got: site, assets, analytics, competitors, the things you’ve tried that didn’t work. No charge, no obligation.

02

FIND THE POSITION

I come back with what I think is true about your market and where you should stand in it. This is the part that makes everything after it move smoothly with no surprises.

03

MAKE THE THING

Design, write, shoot, cut, build. You see work early and often. Revisions are scoped and finite, which protects your budget and my ability to finish.

04

PUT IT IN THE WORLD

Launch, measure, adjust. You get the source files, the documentation, and a system your team can run with — and if you’d rather keep me in it, we’ll talk through what ongoing support looks like.

Tell me what you’re working on.

A few questions. I read every one of these myself and reply within two business days.

Or write me directly — cb@codybaldwin.studio

© 2026 Cody Baldwin — Creative Director

Brand · Broadcast · Performance