Six years. One account. Every format and discipline — simultaneously.
AT&T doesn't give you a brief and walk away. They give you a brand system built for a telecommunications giant — precise, corporate, tightly governed — and then ask you to make it feel human enough to attract the engineers, retail workers, and corporate professionals they need to hire at scale, across every channel, every quarter, for years.
The real challenge wasn't the volume, though the volume was real. It was keeping the work from going stale. Six years on one account means six years of resisting the gravity toward safe, repeatable, on-brand-but-forgettable.
AT&T operates one of the most tightly governed brand systems in the Fortune 10. Every deliverable runs through multiple approval layers — legal, brand, HR, stakeholder — before it sees the light of day. Designing within those constraints at volume, without letting the compliance process sand the life out of the work, is the actual skill the account demands.
In agency life, most designers last a year on AT&T. The volume burns people out, the brand process wears people down, or the account moves to a different team. I ran the account for six.
AT&T was the account everything else ran alongside. For six years, I was the person the Creative Directors handed it to — and left there. Not rotating through. Not covering gaps. The primary creative, start to finish, across every deliverable the account produced.
Over the course of the engagement, AT&T's recruitment marketing program delivered a 128% year-over-year increase in external hiring and a 34% decrease in marketing cost per hire — outperforming all Radancy client benchmarks in both categories. In agency work, accounts move. Clients change. Designers rotate. When none of that happened for seven consecutive years, the work was doing its job.