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 Super Bowl awareness to top-ranked, acquisition-driving search.

Play

Embed showreel — Vimeo

123M

Super Bowl LVIII audience

+13 pts

Brand consideration lift

Rank #1

Three lending categories

50B+

Authority-program impressions

Selected Work

01 / National Brand Campaign

Discover — National Brand Campaign

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

Idea

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

Craft

Drove creative development across national spots and product stories — concept, casting, production, and final edit — including the flagship spot that aired in the Super Bowl.

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 — SEO & Content Direction

SEO · UX Writing · Content · Earned Media · Acquisition

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Rank #1

Weighted avg / lending categories

50B+

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, and an earned-media program with PR to build domain authority.

Approach

The work starts upstream — with positioning, not production.

The work starts upstream — with positioning, not 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 a number, not just a look.

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About

I came up through theatre and filmmaking, and I’ve spent my career pointing that craft at scale — from campus arts and concert halls to enterprise brand work at UnitedHealth Group 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, and PR. Based in Texas.

Contact

Let’s make something worth airing.

Let’s make something worth airing.

© 2026 Cody Baldwin — Creative Director

Brand · Broadcast · Performance