I build sustainable
creative systems.
I build and lead multidisciplinary creative operations — brand, content, social, marketing, video, design, and live production — for organizations that need a system, not just more deliverables. I founded Vamos Media to give growing brands that infrastructure, while also leading a 75-person multidisciplinary creative and production department responsible for brand, marketing, content, and weekly live experiences. Same principle either way: build it so the quality holds when you're not in the room.
Vamos Media
Vamos Media is a creative agency I founded to give growing brands the kind of creative infrastructure usually reserved for companies with a full in-house department — strategy, content systems, and production run as one connected pipeline instead of a string of one-off deliverables.
I built it around a simple bet: brands don't lose momentum because their creative isn't good enough for a month — they lose it because nothing is built to sustain the next eleven. Vamos exists to be the department a growing brand doesn't have yet.
Most growing brands are stuck between two bad options: overpaying a patchwork of freelancers who each own one deliverable and no strategy, or under-investing in creative entirely and letting marketing go reactive. The result is the same either way — inconsistent presence, content that doesn't compound, and a brand that resets its own equity every few months instead of building on it.
Creative that isn't systemized doesn't scale. Every campaign I direct is built to leave the brand with more infrastructure than it started with — templates, workflows, a content bank, real brand guardrails — so quality compounds instead of resetting every time a new project starts.
Creative Vision
Set the strategic and visual direction for every client account, from positioning through final asset.
Production Leadership
Direct photography and video on flagship shoots — commercial, product, and event — setting the creative standard the wider team executes to.
Crew Leadership
Hire, brief, and lead photographers, videographers, and editors across concurrent client accounts.
Systems Building
Design the calendars, shot-list templates, and approval workflows that let the agency run without me on every shoot.
For every client I define a content architecture before a single asset gets made — pillars, cadence, and channel-specific rules — then build the production system that executes it consistently, month after month.
Brand voice, visual guardrails, and photography style guides written so a client's own team can maintain the brand correctly without me directing every post.
Monthly calendars mapped to real business goals — launches, promotions, community moments — plus a modular content bank sorted by pillar so nothing gets shot twice.
Set the creative bar across every account, review for brand consistency, and mentor junior creatives toward brand-first thinking over content for its own sake.
Advise clients on channel mix and campaign sequencing tailored to their actual audience — never a templated social calendar copied across accounts.
Sit close enough to the business to translate ownership priorities into creative strategy, and stay embedded enough to respond to real-time needs — a promotion, a PR moment, a community event.
Discovery
Audit the brand, the business goals, and what's actually broken in the current marketing.
Strategy & Architecture
Define content pillars, cadence, and channel rules before any production begins.
Systemization
Build the calendars, shot lists, and templates that make the strategy repeatable.
Production
Direct photography, video, and content creation against the plan, not around it.
Review & Iterate
Measure against goals, refine the system, and hand the client more infrastructure than they had.
Chick-fil-A, Inc.
Local marketing system for a high-volume, community-anchored brand — built to run every month, not just for a campaign. Work spans 12 of 18 Chick-fil-A locations in the St. Louis market, not counting additional store relationships in the Chicagoland and South Florida markets.
Chick-fil-A restaurants need marketing that feels local and intentional while staying brand-compliant at the same time. Corporate guidelines are strict — but growth depends on local relevance national templates can't produce: school nights, sports sponsorships, and community moments that make a franchise location feel like part of the community.
Replaced one-off posting with a monthly content system tied to each store's promotional calendar. Every month is planned against a pillar — product, community, culture, or seasonal — with a shot list and full deliverable set attached before the month starts.
Photography
Lifestyle photography for every LTO launch that feels native to the local store, plus lifestyle photography for team and culture content — shot for use across social, in-store signage, and paid ads.
Commercial Video
Short-form product spots, culture and recruiting films, and community-event recaps — produced on every event with priority turnaround, without losing quality.
Product Launches
Full creative coverage for every new-menu rollout — teaser content, launch-day content, and in-store signage timed to corporate release windows.
Social Media
A platform-specific content calendar and strategy balancing product, community, and culture posts under one consistent visual system.
Community Marketing
Content and campaigns built around store-level involvement — school nights, sports sponsorships, first-responder appreciation — positioning each store as part of its community.
Monthly Content Planning
A recurring planning cadence — a monthly content meeting, a shared calendar, a shot-list handoff — a system, not a series of sporadic asks.
Events
On-site creative direction and live coverage for store openings, community nights, and seasonal activations.
Brand Consistency
A lightweight brand toolkit — templates, color and type guardrails, a caption voice guide — so posts stayed on-brand even when the in-store team published without me.
Set the visual direction across every touchpoint — photography, video, signage, and social — so the store's local marketing reads as one brand voice, whether the asset came from a flagship shoot or a same-day community post.
The real deliverable isn't any single post — it's the monthly planning cadence, the content bank, and the brand toolkit, built to keep running at a consistent standard even on the months I'm not personally on set.
Jon Blanco
Hat Company
Rosie LED
St. Louis LED Display Experts
Mr. Gonzo's Tacos
St. Louis Food Truck
Crave Cookies STL
St. Louis Market Launch
New Life St. Louis
"How do you turn one vision into a unified brand experience that reaches thousands every week, both online and in the room?"
I lead the creative, production, and marketing strategy behind New Life St. Louis, connecting everything from weekly live production and digital content to advertising, social media, branding, and event campaigns under one consistent vision.
Creative Director
Lead the visual identity, brand strategy, and creative direction across every audience touchpoint, from digital to live experience.
Production Director
Direct weekly live production across cameras, lighting, livestream, stage visuals, and production technology.
Marketing Strategist
Lead weekly marketing and targeted campaigns designed to increase awareness, reach new audiences, and drive attendance.
Team Leader
Recruit, train, and lead a multidisciplinary team across creative and live production.
Weekly Live Productions
One vision, executed live every week across lighting, video, broadcast, presentation, and production technology. Powered by a rotating volunteer team and coordinated through a production system I lead and manage.
Creative Planning
A weekly pre-production meeting translating that week's program into a visual plan — stage design, graphics, camera shot list, and lighting cues.
Run of Show
A minute-by-minute document coordinating video, lighting, audio, stage, and livestream cues in real time.
Camera Operators
Recruit, train, and schedule volunteer operators against a written shot-list standard, so the look stays consistent regardless of who's behind the camera.
Lighting
Design and program lighting looks per service and songs, and train volunteer lighting operators to run them.
Livestream
Own the technical and creative pipeline to an off-site audience, graphics, camera switching, and stream quality.
Production
Call the live show, coordinating audio, video, lighting, and stage in real time with no second take.
The Creative Department
When I took on this department, quality depended entirely on who happened to be available that week — no shared standard, no path for a volunteer to grow into a lead. I made the decision to build it like a professional department instead of a rotating crew: real org structure, a training pipeline, and documented SOPs, so the standard holds regardless of who's in the room.
Creative direction isn't about being the best individual creative in the room, it's about building a system where good creative is the default outcome.
Volunteer Onboarding
A defined path from shadow to trained to certified on a role, so new volunteers grow instead of being thrown onto a live show.
SOPs
Written standard operating procedures for every creative role: photo, video, editing, social content, so quality doesn't depend on one specific person showing up.
Meetings
A recurring planning and review cadence — weekly creative leaders meeting, monthly all-department meetings, building alignment.
Whiteboards & Planning
Physical planning rituals: whiteboard campaign mapping, sticky-note brainstorms, used ahead of every conference and major content series.
Brainstorming
Structured, time-boxed sessions that turn a theme into a concrete visual plan before creating begins.
Training
Regular skills sessions: photography, video editing, design, social strategy that build volunteer capability over time.
Social Media Growth
Since taking over New Life St. Louis's social media pages, we've gained 45K+ new followers across platforms — at a sustainable, compounding rate, not off one viral video. Below is 2025 alone, platform by platform.
New Life Academy Rebrand
The school's visual identity no longer matched its growth or the quality of education it delivered, a brand quietly working against enrollment instead of for it.
I audited every touchpoint: signage, uniforms, the website, admissions materials. I mapped the perception gaps against comparable schools, then repositioned the brand around its academic rigor and close, values-driven community: confident enough to compete for families weighing multiple schools, without losing what made it feel like itself.
Visual Identity
A shield icon built around an NL⌒A monogram — the arch a nod to St. Louis — paired with Neue Haas Grotesk and a bold collegiate display face, a navy-and-cream color system, and a full lockup, sub-mark, and icon system for every application.
Photography & Website
A new photography style guide replacing stock imagery, and an admissions-focused site rebuilt to guide a family from first visit to enrollment.
Rollout & Signage
A phased social rollout protecting existing brand equity, plus a full campus signage system applying the new mark consistently.
Admissions & Governance
Rebuilt admissions collateral and delivered brand guidelines with a governance system, so the identity stays consistent without me.
The rebrand launched ahead of the 2025–26 school year — and I still lead all of New Life Academy's marketing today. This isn't a one-time project handed off at launch; it's an ongoing partnership.
Social Media
Ongoing content and channel strategy carrying the new brand system into daily use — the identity proven out post-by-post, not just on a brand board.
Advertising
Paid campaigns run on the new identity, driving inquiries and applications through the admissions funnel the rebrand was built to support.
"A rebrand only matters if it keeps paying off after launch — enrollment nearly doubling since tells me the system is doing its job."
The Reel
Vamos Media — pinned reel
Creative Principles
Systems outlast campaigns.
A great campaign ends. A great system keeps producing great campaigns after you've moved on to the next one.
Direction is a form of clarity, not control.
My job is to make the vision clear enough that all different hands can execute it consistently, not to do all ten jobs myself.
Brand is what happens when you're not in the room.
I can direct the shoot. I can't be standing next to every store manager at 11pm deciding whether a post fits the brand — the system I built has to make that call for them.
Consistency is a leadership discipline, not a design discipline.
Inconsistent brands aren't usually missing a style guide. They're missing a system for how decisions get made.
Team members deserve professional standards and professional training.
Training someone isn't just teaching them to run a camera or hit a cue — it's building them toward being able to teach the next person themselves.
Every project should leave more behind than it used.
Templates, SOPs, shot lists, brand assets, the infrastructure is as much the deliverable as the output.
Community marketing beats campaign marketing.
People don't remember your promotion. They remember whether you showed up for their kid's team, their school, their neighborhood.
The goal is to develop leaders, not just team members.
Anyone can be trained to run a camera or hit a cue. Developing leaders means handing off real decisions, not just tasks, so the department keeps growing people after I've moved on.