By Abby Breckenridge

One day, while on a walk in Interlaken Park, our creative director Daniel and his 7-year-old son noticed a terrifying beetle that looked ready for battle. Upon closer inspection, they were inspired to identify the crazy creature. Little did they know, their bug’s eye view would inspire our latest animation and challenge us to take a closer look at our creative process.

The Seattle Public Library asked us to create an animation that would excite kids about their Summer of Learning program and this year’s theme to “explore your world.” It had to capture a voice that would appeal to a diverse bunch of kids without being too childish, reference native Puget Sound plants and animals, and use watercolors from local artist Yessica Marquez.

These requirements led to an animation far different than the ones we typically build for our corporate tech clients (who tend to think of bugs as bad things). Here’s how we put our own creativity under the microscope:

We asked lots and lots of questions

We tapped into kids’ innate curiosity from the get-go, posing the sorts of provocative questions an elementary school student would appreciate. When we sourced our nature images, we asked ourselves, “What kind of plant is that? Is it native to the Pacific Northwest? Would a bee pollinate that flower?”

We got down in the weeds

As adults, we often fail to notice the natural wonders that surround us. This animation was our chance to get up close and personal with bugs, birds, and trees. The more we learned, the easier it became to convey the joy of exploration to the young scientists who we know will dig this program.

We used our hive mind

This project had a tight timeline, so we had to be resourceful and especially collaborative in order to deliver. We used a collage approach and pulled images from multiple sources. This allowed us to divide the work among more designers, then weave everything together cohesively.

Are you ready to bring newfound curiosity to your marketing? It’s time to make some new discoveries!

By Abby Breckenridge

I’ve had a few conversations with women leaders recently where the story I hear goes something like this: I was doing my job, never thought of myself as a leader, someone else told me how great I was and now here we are. Surprise! I am in charge.

While I’m sure that’s how it happened for some women, I would prefer to paint a different narrative for aspiring leaders. One closer to what my peer Carey Jenkins, CEO of Substantial, shared in a Q&A for Seattle Magazine’s Daring Women series. “I ended last year thinking for the first time, ‘What if I were CEO?’ Within a couple of months, I was in talks for the role.” It’s refreshing to hear a woman leader tell us she believed in herself and made her goals come to life. And it’s essential that we tell the next generation of leaders you don’t need to wait for someone to tap you on the shoulder.

I, like many women, was raised not to brag. There’s certainly some goodness in that lesson—no one wants to hang around people who can’t shut up about how great they are. But (to twist an expression from Anne Lamott) the sunny side of bragging is owning your own strength. It’s saying: I am qualified to weigh in here, I’m up for the debate, and in some cases, here’s why I’d make a great CEO.

As February sees many easing off aggressive New Year’s resolutions to KonMari their basement or detox their beauty routine, we at 2A are homing in on a theme for the year. We’re working toward refining how we talk to our strengths and the value of our work. For us, that’s explaining design decisions, backing up copy choices with strategy, and speaking up when we have tested opinions. We’re calling it demonstrating our worth.

The flip side of that coin is making sure we’re treated fairly and honoring our worth. That’s insisting on fair pricing, communicating the benefits of reasonable timelines, and saying no to projects that just don’t fit.

My partners and I have been helping clients market for over a decade. But we’ve been doing it as 2A for just five years. For us, startup mode helped us build a body of strong work, win and keep exceptional clients, and recruit some of the most talented marketers around. Now—with a team of over 40 consultants, designers, storytellers, PMs, developers, and administrators—we’ve outgrown startup mode.

While creating amazing and effective work for our clients will always be the core of our effort, we also need to nurture a culture that supports creativity and experimentation. This is how we’ll hang on to that team and those clients, and how our work will get even better. It’s time to shirk the imposter syndrome—to stop waiting for someone to tap us on the shoulder—and act like the thriving team we’ve become.

It’s essential for our business to honor and demonstrate our worth. And it’s the next step for us as individuals, for aspiring leaders, and for women who want to take charge.

By Abby Breckenridge

Ally Henny—writer and speaker on the intersection of race, culture, and faith—recently made a bid to her Facebook followers to confront racist comments at Thanksgiving instead of keeping the peace. Her point was that while it certainly is easier to let things slide—whether you change the subject or step outside for a glass of wine—just remember that our kids are watching. And the stories they hear at family gatherings, the stories they see their trusted adults overlook and ignore, will be the stories they remember and perpetuate.

I plan on taking her words seriously this holiday season as I grasp for things we can do to shift our culture. Whether it’s an insensitive comment about a hijab, a dismissal of Central Americans seeking asylum in the US, or a claim that taking a knee to protest police brutality is unpatriotic, I plan to engage.

By Abby Breckenridge

I’ve been a marketing consultant in one form or another since the summer of 2007, so I’ve had ample time to field cocktail-party reactions to my profession. On the whole, people aren’t that interested in talking about it—they’d much rather talk to my architect husband about that new library they love than piece through a messaging strategy with me—but when they do speak up their comments are consistent. Non-marketers generally believe that marketing a) is evil, and b) has no effect on them personally. This is when I throw my head back in evil marketing laughter.

As a marketer, of course, my opinions are quite different. I think marketing is only evil some of the time, and successful much of the time. I would have gone through two pregnancies without the best maternity basics if they hadn’t tracked me down on social media, and I have no idea how we would have chosen our HR software if no one had explained its unique benefits.

Definitely successful—and slightly evil—is marketing from the $128B skincare industry. Most of the time it’s designed to make women feel badly about their skin. I used to just shrug off their ads as unrealistic representations of women, but ever since I turned 40 I haven’t been able to shake them as easily.

Just days after my birthday I found myself clicking through headlines like “Drink up and glow,” texting my girlfriend to ask if I should be using an oil-based cleanser, and wanting to learn more about the benefits of alpha and beta hydroxy acids. I’ve applied more face masks in the last 9 months than I have in the rest of my life combined!

How had this drugstore-lotion-using woman been seduced by the anti-feminist engine? What I’ve come to realize is marketing is only one piece of the puzzle. Those confidence-crushing ads inevitably combine with all the other stories out there, from friends, coworkers, and the news. But just as we’re all influenced by stories from many directions, we’re also influencers—contributing to the stories of those around us.

Someone recently said to me that positivity is like perfume on the brain—it’s enchanting and doesn’t hang around for long. Negativity is what gums us up. Let’s be the perfume, shall we?  

By Abby Breckenridge

(The following is a letter we submitted to the Seattle City Council urging councilmembers to help put an end to workplace discrimination.)

Hearing about Seattle Silence Breakers was like a slap in the face. In the wave of #metoo, I thought for a moment our progressive, liberal community might be immune to the rampant harassment that still plagues women. Turns out I was wrong. Not only did upsetting examples of sexual harassment surface, but the Silence Breakers showed that our own city government was not the safe haven I had expected.

Upholding the rights of everyone in our city is something I believe in and was assured that the City of Seattle believed in it too. After all, the City of Seattle is the body that recognizes my business as women and minority owned. When I took on the role of partner in our growing marketing firm, I was thrilled to join the ranks of hundreds of other driven women business owners who are actively strengthening our economy. The WMBE certification meant our company was changing the face of leadership and fostering an environment for women in business, with the city’s full support behind us. That certification feels tarnished now, and the commitment from the City of Seattle to endorse women as leaders in business, hypocritical.

Why we need to take harassment seriously

Women make up half the population of Seattle, yet our region has one of the largest wage gaps in the U.S. Women in King County make 78.6 cents for every dollar their male counterparts earn. Sadly, the glass ceiling is a reality in our city, and women are struggling to compete against men in the workforce. When you add sexual harassment into the mix, the gains women have made, are quickly lost. Nearly half the women who experience sexual harassment in the workplace leave their jobs or change careers. This can lead to stagnating careers and setbacks in earning potential. If you want to continue the prosperity our region has seen over the past decade, we need to take harassment seriously and put an end to workplace discrimination.

Why we need to foster women in the workplace

While women are still woefully underrepresented in leadership positions, companies like ours that put women in positions of power often change for the better. One study showed just by having women in C-suite positions (CEO, COO, CFO, for example) they added a 6% net profit margin. When a company’s leadership is uniform, valuable perspectives—and markets—are overlooked. Beyond profits, teams with a balance of men and women show greater psychological safety, team confidence, group experimentation, and team efficiency. It’s time we valued the women on our team—for the sake of our economy, community and sanity.

Why I believe in WMBE distinctions and want to keep it that way

Seattle has made huge progress in growing the number of women-owned businesses, but there’s still more work ahead. Based on the most recent federal data, Seattle had 83,000 companies, of which 30,000 were women-owned. Our city was ranked as a top place for women entrepreneurs in part because of the number of certified women-owned businesses that have already paved the way. The city’s backing of WMBE certification is working—it ensures an equitable playing field for women and it’s making a difference in our community. But we need the city’s full support to continue to realize these benefits. When the city is embroiled in sexual harassment events like those in Seattle City Light, it steals from programs like WBME and puts women back on the losing side.

So to the City of Seattle, please take workplace discrimination against women seriously. It affects us all.

By Abby Breckenridge

It had been three years and two days since I had read a book for pleasure. I know that with specificity because it had also been that long since my water had broken with my first child. I had read countless parenting books, New York Times articles, food blogs and Pete the Cat books, but I was in an undisputable pleasure-book drought. 

Packing up my kids to leave a three-year-old’s birthday party, my girlfriend and mother of the guest of honor handed me a well-pawed copy of Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions. “Have you read this? You should.” I grabbed it, shoved it into my basket of diapers and little jackets and brought it home. Then I read it. And I loved it.

It wasn’t so much that the book itself was amazing (which it was), or that it’s premise of recounting the first year of being a mother was speaking directly to me and my needs (which it did), but that I was reminded of a different way of writing—fresh sentence structures, unexpected vocabulary, alternative ways of getting to a point.

As a marketer, I work in words—drafting, scheming, refining to craft stories long and short that help our clients connect with their audiences. My adventure into Anne Lamott’s world reminded me how important it is for my work—and my wellbeing—to read books for pleasure. My creative instinct gets a refresh when I read pieces written for purposes other than drumming up business.

While my life as a business owner, wife, mom of two littles, home cook and occasional exerciser doesn’t leave me a ton of time for pleasure books, I’ve made it my homework to always be working through something interesting on my nightstand. Right now, I am plugging through David Levithan’s The Lover’s Dictionary, a novel written as an alphabetical series of definitions. It’s blowing my mind and making me better at my job. What’s your homework?

By Abby Breckenridge

It’s a dark time for immigration in this country—a country of immigrants. Between threats to Deferred Action to Childhood Arrivals (DACA), this week’s reinvigoration of Trump’s travel ban, and this latest announcement that the Department of Homeland Security plans to collect social media information on all immigrants, it feels like a jarring departure from the values that represent America.

And the darkness is hitting close to home for us this week. Two of our team members have family in Venezuela, which has recently been added to the travel ban. But as the ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero declared, “President Trump’s original sin of targeting Muslims cannot be cured by throwing other countries onto his enemies list.”

While the country battles on a policy level, our sanctuary city is fortunate to have organizations like Casa Latina that work on a community level. The group empowers low-wage Latino immigrants to move from economic insecurity to economic prosperity and to lift their voices to act around public policy issues that affect them. We’ve been proud sponsors for years, and given today’s political climate, we’re increasing our support and are looking forward to celebrating their accomplishments at the upcoming gala.

Through organizations like Casa Latina, we can make incremental change against a monolithic policy. We can help the US regain its footing and to borrow a line from Dan Rather, “retain its standing in the world.”

By Abby Breckenridge

I’m eight months pregnant, and if there’s any life event that’ll make you pause and think about growth, it’s building a human. Combine that with last week’s announcement that we’re 686^th on the Inc 5000 fastest growing US companies list and you’ve got us reeling down a path of nostalgia, reflecting on all the ways we’ve grown as a business.

When I was pregnant with my now two and a half year old, 2A was renting desks in an old house, sharing space with a talented troupe of creatives. This week, we’re finishing up our second expansion in the Broadway Building. As I headed out on my last maternity leave, Renato and I strategized how to keep our team of 10 busy, happy and productive. This time around, we’re working with a talented line-up of over 30. Our client list has more than tripled, we’ve launched an animation practice, and have a new development team.

In addition to the obvious stats, we’ve grown up in a lot of ways too. We’ve expanded our benefits package to better reflect our values, including a new parental leave policy. We believe that doing great work requires being well, and that it’s the company’s job to be part of that wellness. We spent the summer hashing through and writing down what we’ve learned over the years and launched a consultant training program. And we’ve improved our hiring process, getting clearer about what it takes to be a successful member of our team and sharpening how to find it.

I’m pretty flush in growth right now—myself, my family, the 2A team—and I am feeling grateful for it. As Mark Zuckerberg recently posted on Facebook, it’s important to take time off for new children, and I am pretty sure the office will still be standing when I get back. At this rate, I’m sure it will have grown.

By Abby Breckenridge

Scott came to us pre-vetted. He had been in the Foster graduate program with two of our consultants which translated to two glowing recommendations. I consider hiring to be a huge challenge with an even huger upside—Scott was an easy choice. During his interview, he asked smart questions about the future of our business, and handed out milk.

Since he joined 2A, we’ve gotten the chance to build our own glowing opinions of him. Here’s a glimpse.

He loves words

Shortly after he joined, Scott asked if he could read an original poem at the holiday party. This was a first for me, and not the kind of request you say no to. Over wine and appetizers, Scott recited this poem to a room full of new colleagues and their loved ones, much to the delight of the room. His knack for poetry has sparked the recurring idea that 2A launch a business poetry offering (email us if you’re interested).

Before Foster, he spent five years at Gordon Thomas Honeywell in their governmental affairs consulting group where he flexed his language skills by bringing together stakeholders from across countries and industries.

Scott’s passion for words does more than entertain us at parties. His command of language (English being one of four) also brings a much-appreciated edge to his client work.

He collects information

Some people scroll through Instagram during lunch, Scott reads the Economist. And he listens to The World Next Week and Stuff You Should Know. From niche scientific factoids to international relations, Scott enjoys understanding how systems work.

Other items on the long list of things Scott has chosen to learn in his free time include: to play the bagpipe, to make soap, why Dalmatians are associated with fire houses, how aspartame impacts the body, to coach Special Olympics skiers, to be a karaoke rock star.

As marketing consultants, we’re called on to quickly get up to speed in a variety of industries. Scott has both a knack and hunger for just that challenge. Hopefully we’ll get a project in chemistry soon so he can put his knowledge of the periodic table to use.

He’s democratically goofy

A few months back when Nick and I were waiting for the elevator, we heard a thump, thump, thump. The door opened and there was Scott, a little embarrassed, dancing by himself.

He doles out “later ‘gator” with equal opportunity, and made an unexpected choice for his Skype profile photo.

One of our 10 rules of client management is that clients are people too. No one wants to work with a robot and we all owe each other a little leeway, as we’re just moving through life as humans. You’re not going to be a successful consultant if you’re struggling to be something you’re not. Scott’s ability to be his goofy self in all company makes him a pleasure to work with. We think you’ll agree.

By Abby Breckenridge

Building the infrastructure to support a growing business is less of a straight path and more of a series of jumps and plateaus. Every time we’ve made one of those jumps, we think to ourselves, why didn’t we do that sooner?

There’s no exception to hiring Kristina—Operations Manager of 2A. How did we get by without her? I’m not sure, but here are a few reasons we’ve come to rely on Kristina to do the heavy lifting.

She’s an expert process builder

Before joining 2A, Kristina spent 10 years in health information management, designing and managing procedures to improve operational efficiency. Lucky for us.  Since she joined, she’s put her process skills to work and streamlined our back office. Our clients may not know it, but they are benefiting from her skillful contributions every day.

She digs in

Thorough is an understatement. Her commitment to excellence means she doesn’t shy away from the hard tasks—a challenge makes Kristina double down. This is obviously an asset at work, but it also pays off in her free time. Commitment and persistence led Kristina to compete in her first weight lifting competition last year, and now she’s training for her next.

She has a hunger for learning

Whether it’s taking a UX design class at General Assembly, brushing up on how 2017 tax changes will impact our business, or dropping a new mix on her turntables, she’s less of an I-don’t-know, and more of a let-me-find-out. Her enthusiasm for the new makes her a perfect fit for the dynamic role of managing a budding agency, and also makes her interesting to talk to.

She’s been demonstrating her appetite for learning for a while now—Kristina is the youngest of five siblings and the first in her family to graduate from college (go dawgs!).

I am looking forward to learning more about Kristina. In the meantime, I sure am glad she does the heavy lifting around here—making the office run smoothly.