In May of 2013 I was hired by Edelman to be the creative lead for their newly established Creative Newsroom. What’s that, you ask? I had the same question. It turns out that Edelman had this great idea to up their game with their social media clients, and I was all in.

To break it down to its simplest terms, the Creative Newsroom is the combination of two worlds: Journalism and Creative. Partnered with Cybil Wallace, an award-winning journalist who specialized in breaking news for CNN.com & the AP, we work together to first spot trends and then react immediately (read: real-time) with original creative. What’s important to understand is that we were not simply reporting the news, rather we were reacting to it creatively, in our clients’ own voices and look & feel.

Here are a few examples:

When the cicadas came back for their annual swarming, Volkswagen’s Beetle was the best vehicle for a pun (sorry i had to). We came up with several executions around the concept of #BugvBug to run during the week the bugs took over the east coast. Not only were the posts themselves a success, but the hashtag caught on and we started getting users in on the action.

When Lady Gaga debuted her album ARTPOP in a hover dress, PayPal got in on the conversation with an original illustration in her honor. This post actually broke engagement records on PayPal’s twitter page:

When scientists found a frozen woolly mammoth and were debating whether or not it could be cloned, we saw a perfect opportunity for Adobe Photoshop to make some witty commentary. Take a look at the engagement on this one:

When #SFBatKid took over the streets of San Francisco, we had PayPal celebrate his awesomeness with a shout-out. Not only was the post itself successful, but it was even turned into a meme that reached #5 on Reddit.

Want to learn a little more about the Creative Newsroom? We got a write-up in PR Week: