THE NOT SO BRIEF NARRATIVE: My journey hasn't exactly been a straight line. I started my career in Atlanta as a copywriter at Macy's. Soon tired of writing inspiring headlines like, "30% off Men's Shorts" and without anything better to do, I bailed on that and got my MBA.

 

That sent me down a road to agency account service at a couple of grand old agencies including McCann.  That was fun for a while until my Dunlop Slazenger client hired me to be their Director of Marketing for the Racquets Division. That brought me to Greenville, South Carolina and I haven't budged since. Very fun job. Won an American Marketing Association  Effie award for one of our campaigns. That was cool.

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Re-organized out of my position, I got the crazy notion that I was right in the beginning. I was meant for the creative side of the agency business.  I started my own shop, the Westlake Group, and had a good eight year run.  Most of our accounts were in golf and and other sports. We worked with Maxfli, Dunlop, Mizuno, and MacGregor.  A highlight was the global launch of the SRIXON golf brand that included my tagline, "Play a Better Ball." For over 20 years I enjoyed walking into pro shops to see that the line was still on their ball packaging.

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The next big switcheroo was venturing into a couple consulting gigs and fractional roles: Director of Marketing at the golf retail franchisor, Pro Golf Discount,  Brand and Creative Direction for Golf Card, and Chief Marketing Strategist at the Orlando-based agency/production company, GoConvergence (now Plant Street Studios). At GoCo I developed strategies and creative with a wonderfully talented group of people on travel and lifestyle brands, most notably, Cirrus Aircraft--an amazing company and brand. Some others were the Orlando Magic, Atlantis Resort. We also did a lot of direct response TV, which was a great learning experience.

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Next step was back to Greenville full-time. First at Infinity Marketing--a fun challenge to raise the creative culture of a media-centric shop. I have always been good at doing a lot with a little in terms of budgets and resources.  I raised that skill to an art form here. The last three years I was there we won over 150 national and international awards.

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Moving on to Crawford, I worked on United Community (bank), Haywood County Tourism, Brunswick Islands (NC) Tourism, University of West Georgia, and others. Proud to say we were recognized by the U.S. Travel Association ESTO awards as a national finalist for our "Haywood you like to..." campaign. Would've preferred to win, but still, that's not too shabby considering the level of competition.

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And now, it's back to the future for me, doing the thing I love most--the work. Have a need for a fractional creative role? Call me. Need some freelance writing?  A fresh idea? Let's talk. 864.616.3900. Ask for Curt.