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 Mitchell Thompson

A few weeks ago, I went to see The Midnight perform at Neumos. I discovered their music fairly recently, but they’ve swiftly become one of my favorite bands for how their melodies and vocals carry such a strong feeling of emotion, longing, and ennui. As saxophone solos wafted over a crowd illuminated in beams of neon light, I could hardly imagine a better visualization of the burgeoning synthwave movement.

Synthwave, also called retrowave or outrun, is an artistic movement that’s been gaining a lot of steam over the past several years. Inspired mainly by imagery and music from the 80s, synthwave combines visuals like neon lighting, airbrushed chrome, computer grids, and midnight cityscapes with synthesizer-heavy music reminiscent of new-wave pop music and sci-fi movie soundtracks. The genre explores a wide variety of themes, from retrofuturistic optimism to dystopian fears of mechanized oppression. Many artists explore the limits of 80s media, intentionally adding VHS noise to digital video or releasing their music on vinyl.

And yet, for something apparently steeped in nostalgia, synthwave isn’t an accurate representation of what the 80s were really like. Movies looked at as progenitors of the movement—such as Blade Runner, TRON, or films by John Carpenter—were minor successes at best or box-office failures at worst. Synthesizer film scores by Tangerine Dream and Ennio Morricone garnered Razzie nominations rather than Oscar nods. Even the famous DeLorean DMC-12 seen in Back to the Future drove poorly and sold worse. Though synthwave visuals may resemble tech support posters or a Corvette ad, by and large the media of the 80s bore only a minor resemblance to this new aesthetic. Going beyond regular rose-tinted glasses, synthwave is nostalgia for a time that never existed.

This fascinating development—faux-nostalgia taken in a new and modern direction—speaks to me as a designer. A truly successful design should connect with its audience, and synthwave has achieved this. Straightforward 80s nostalgia has become a huge marketing trend in recent years, from Voltron selling Hondas to the Stranger Things kids suiting up as Ghostbusters, but synthwave goes beyond simply parroting what was popular 30 years ago. Instead, the movement uses a smaller-scale evocation of certain nostalgic elements rather than a full-on resurrection.

In an age where you can instantly stream a classic album or pull up clips from a favorite movie, synthwave stands out by sampling the mood and aesthetics of the past and then taking it in a new direction. Pressing beyond hollowly echoing nostalgia, synthwave finds a unique way to create emotionally resonant works.

By Kelly Schermer

Remember that one ad with the farmer in the dusty field and the cooing baby that took your breath away? Remember what it was for? Or what it wanted you to do?

Yeah, I don’t either (but I guess beer, or maybe trucks?).

I would ask if you remember the ad that told you exactly what you needed to know but was so boring you didn’t read it…only I didn’t read it either….so…

When it comes to marketing—whether it’s an ad, an animation, an ebook—there are endless ways to miss the mark. Some agencies do striking but empty, while others do focused but bland. At 2A, we believe there’s a third option that uses creativity and strategy to captivate and connect.

A lens for bringing stories into focus

It’s natural to want to think of creative and strategic as synonyms for design and content, but that’s not how it works for us. At 2A, creativity and strategy come long before design and content. They fuse together to make a single inseparable lens through which we view our client’s situation.

You’ve probably experienced a right brain/left brain gridlock that ended in a compromise no one really wanted. Imagine instead a fluid progression of ideas in which creativity and strategy hone one another for the purpose of defining what needs to be accomplished and determining how best to bring it to life. By using them together, they can take you someplace new.

It’s creative strategy or strategic creativity or really some fused-hybrid thing all its own. It’s the foundation from which we build the content and design that come together to create a story.

An approach used by everyone                              

No one person owns our process at 2A. It’s everyone’s approach—our designers think strategically; our consultants get creative. While it may upend traditional agency roles, it’s who we are. It’s how we captivate and connect.

Ideas, words, pictures and the way they intersect matter to us. Let’s see what we can make them do for you.

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

I’ve been looking for a reason to visit the recently renovated School of Visual Concepts, and certainly didn’t think it would come as an opportunity to speak with young designers about leadership. But that’s exactly what I got to do last Friday at an AIGA Emerge event—part of a national campaign to strengthen offerings for emerging designers.

My message? Feedback is a muscle that needs building and you’d better head to the gym if you want to grow in your career. And while giving feedback is certainly as important as receiving it, the early phases of our careers are weighted towards the receiving end, so that’s where I focused.

1.  Make space to hear it

If you’re too caught up in your own emotional response, you’ll miss the chance to grow. Calm that inner ego for a moment and make the emotional space to take in what you’re hearing.

2.  Find the nugget in what you hear

Not all feedback is good, or well explained, but there’s almost always a nugget in there that will make your work stronger. Ask questions. Think it through.

3.  Scout a way forward

Don’t get stuck and figure out what’s next. A new concept? A revision? A different deliverable? We’re making work that has purpose. It’ll never happen if we’re stuck.

4.  Recommit to the new vision

Find something you care about in the new path give it your all—even if that inner ego you squashed in step one still has her hands on her hips.

By Abby Breckenridge

A few weeks ago, a good friend reached out to me and another friend about a mentoring situation she was struggling with at work. Her mentee was a young, ambitious, well-respected female developer in a mostly male company. She had recently cried in front of more senior colleagues in response to some reasonable feedback, and was feeling ashamed and regretful. She wanted advice on what she should do, not wanting to build a reputation as “the girl that cries.”

After much discussion about the pros and cons of crying at work, we basically came to this:

Shake it off.

Crying may not be the best way to get things done at work, but it happens. I’ve certainly done it, more than once. After a quick browse through the internet, it became clear that we are not alone in our advice. Apparently Sheryl Sandberg declared its ok to cry at work in 2013.

“Look, I’m not suggesting that the way to get to the corner office is to cry as much as possible. Nobody is going to publish the next Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and say that crying is one of them. But I am saying that it happens…Rather than spend all this time beating ourselves up for it, let’s accept ourselves. OK, I cried, life went on. And I think that’s part of the message of Lean In, like we are human beings, we are emotional beings and we can be our whole selves at work.”

In all of our job descriptions at 2A, we include this clause:

We like what we do, and we want to work with people who are excited to be at work, and nice to be around.  At the end of the day, work relationships are a big portion of our lives, and we want them to be rewarding and enjoyable.

To me, that means we want real whole people on our team. And if you’re a person who cries when you get emotional, bring it on.

By Abby Breckenridge

My husband isn’t technically a millennial, but he’s close. That, and the fact that we’re juggling a new baby and two careers made me especially interested in Claire Cain Miller’s “Millennial Men Aren’t the Dads They Thought They’d Be” in the New York Times a few weeks back.

Miller writes that while millennial men aspire to more egalitarian relationships—more so than any other generation—as they advance in their careers, they adopt more traditional roles.  She attributes the shift to unsupportive workplace policies and a gender divide in the way workers respond to the pressures of employment.

“The research shows that when something has to give in the work-life juggle, men and women respond differently. Women are more likely to use benefits like paid leave or flexible schedules, and in the absence of those policies, they cut back on work. Men work more,” Miller writes.

My husband works for a small architecture firm, and they’ve generously let him cut his hours to accommodate spending Wednesdays with our son. Similar to what many working moms have experienced for decades, he already feels the tug of what a reduced schedule means for his opportunities and perception at work.

According to John Oliver, the US and Papua New Guinea are the only countries that require no paid maternity leave. And while there’s been some good news recently about strengthening of family workplace policies with Microsoft and Netflix expanding parental leave, we obviously have a long way to go. In the meantime, I am grateful to have an almost-millennial partner who’s committed to working through the challenges of balancing family and work, and taking advantage of modern workplace policies that allow him to prioritize parenting.

Maybe by the time my son enters the workforce, we can come up with something more useful to offer parents than a free meal at Hooter’s on Mother’s Day.