Jake Stigers

Built on Citi's mid-’00s "Live Richly" campaign, "Story Time" was designed to inspire college-age cardmembers to take advantage of low-rate balance transfer checks and increase their card usage. The campaign combined subtly goofy photography with endlessly clever (ahem) captions that engaged readers and created an instant control that dominated the college communication stream and ran for three years. 

We exceeded Citi’s expectations with a 30% increase in response over its current control, an 80% increase in clickthroughs in the partner email campaign and a dramatic, lasting spike in overall card usage.

Mendota crafts high-end custom fireplaces that can be configured from a vast catalog of styles, profiles and finishes. This sell sheet promotes an innovative new finish that looks and feels like textured leather, so I blended tones of rustic charm and distinctive interior design in the copy.

The Arc of East Central Iowa has provided services, support and advocacy for people—and their caregivers—living with mental and physical disabilities since 1953. An essential pillar of the community’s social-services network, it funds its operations through private and corporate community partnerships along with engaging in-person events including a golf tournament and an annual bike ride designed to be inclusive for its hundreds of participants and their families.

Persuading lapsed subscribers of The Economist to re-subscribe is both a challenge and a piece of cake; it’s always difficult to overcome expired-subscription inertia, but it’s both fun and easy to flatter smart consumers into making themselves smarter.

This package eschewed a standard letter in favor of using a stapled booklet that broke down intellectual benefits into bite-size chunks. And we used a three-panel response card to make a final sales push to seal the deal.

The Economist is an international publication, so response metrics based on a mix of geography, demographics and subscription packages were difficult to measure. But this package mailed repeatedly, so it was measurably working on somebody’s spreadsheet.

I've always admired The Bradford Exchange for the way its writers bridge the gap between poetry and commerce. They employ old-school techniques like long-form letters packed with emotional detail but they keep the flow brisk and the calls to action front-and-center. So I was thrilled when I got the opportunity to write this package for one of its best-selling products: The Indian Head Nickel Ring. We positioned the package around the artistry of the nickel—which gave me ample room to weave together the fun historical tidbits I found in my research—and of the ring setting itself.

Citi’s now retired Live Richly campaign challenged its creative teams to find the sweet spot between smart, clever and a little bit odd. We killed it with this retention piece that mailed in a literal brown-paper-bag envelope—and it drove enough positive response that it stayed in the card portfolio’s control rotation for over a year.

Insurance is a challenging sell. People know they need it, but visions of actuarial tables and complicated application forms can scare consumers away from responding. I crafted these letters—one selling two different products even—to be scannable, friendly and easy to understand. Notice how everything you need to know to respond is in the top panels so you don't even have to unfold the letters.

The Chicago Gay Men’s Chorus always provides opportunities to push the boundaries of good taste. And while this invitation to its annual Oscar Awards fundraiser isn’t vulgar by any stretch, it’s saucy enough that I’m displaying it in a lower spot on my portfolio site.

In my year as marketing director for the Chicago Gay Men's Chorus, I was fortunate enough to convince the agency where I worked to donate design and production time to our campaigns. I developed a media strategy involving oversized postcards, emails, social media, email templates that chorus members could personalize or send as-is to their friends … and I even found enough in my budget to get ads up in Red Line trains for our world-premier The Ten Commandments: The Musical.

There’s nothing like the challenge of writing a print ad with a fourth of your layout covered in legal fine print. But challenge accepted: I distilled the broad cash-back benefits of this card into short, tight copy and crisp, readable blocks of supporting details.

This was the first national print ad I’d ever written. I was on a plane when I stumbled on it for the first time in Newsweek, and it was all I could do not to wake up the guy next to me to show it to him like a proud kindergartener at Show and Tell.