USA Today
Lifecycle, retention and acquisition across six products
Six products, one habit: come back and play.
Design and art direction across USA Today’s Crossword and Quick Cross game products, the WeatherAlert app campaign, the 40th anniversary brand campaign, the Devour Indy festival campaign, the network-wide subscriber onboarding program, and multi-state sports offers — six different lifecycle jobs, one publisher.
Crossword: the retention series
An eight-part email sequence carrying a free trial through to a paid subscription. Every send keeps the same device — a crossword clue filled into the headline — but the ask, the benefit, and the colour shift stage by stage.
WeatherAlert — the social campaign
WeatherAlert keeps readers ahead of real-time weather across the country. Two concepts carried the app on social: one built purely on illustration, holding the brand’s own visual language; the other on selected photography paired with copy that does the asking. Same headline, same offer — eight skins for eight kinds of weather.
USA TODAY 40 — the anniversary campaign
A 360° campaign marking USA Today’s 40th year: a chunky, chrome-and-glow wordmark revives the newspaper’s original identity, paired with a warm, nostalgic tone across acquisition, retention, social, and merch.
A city-wide dining celebration
A bi-annual culinary celebration in Indianapolis, Devour Indy features dozens of restaurants with exclusive menus and pricing. Partnering with our Creative Director and Marketing Director, I led art direction from concept to execution — creating a vibrant look rolled out across the app, social media, print, and on-site event assets.
Subscriber onboarding & activation
A twelve-email onboarding journey built once and templated across USA Today Network mastheads — any local paper drops in its own name and photography and launches the same proven sequence.
- Welcome email
- Add a user
- Newsletter sign-up
- Breaking news alerts
- Download the app
- Best of the app
- eNewspaper
- Online games
The emails behind the journey
Five sends carry the journey end to end. The row shows the top of each — open any one to read it at size.
Fans become fanatics
Multi-state campaigns across basketball, NFL, college football and baseball. The same dollar offer runs under each local masthead — Milwaukee’s Journal Sentinel, Arizona’s Republic — with its own colour and its own crowd.
The animated cuts
Three silent loops made for the feed: courtside access, the Indy Women’s Basketball series, and insider access in the SPORTS+ app.