Mastering the Balance of Brand and Demand to Build Affinity and Drive Campaigns that Truly Resonate
Sariah Dorbin, EVP and Executive Creative Director at Quigley-Simpson, explores the power of embracing a holistic approach that combines insights, performance-driven strategies, and creative to maximize impact at every stage of the consumer journey
Sariah Dorbin is EVP, Executive Creative Director at Quigley-Simpson, where she leads a team of talented creators and production specialists in creating cross-channel marketing. She works across several key lines of business for JPMorgan Chase, including cobranded credit cards for United Airlines and Marriott Bonvoy, as well as Chase Business Banking.
Beyond her work with JPMorgan Chase, Sariah has spearheaded creative campaigns for Ball Aluminum Cup, WeightWatchers, Sutter Health, and The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. She has also led projects for the City of Los Angeles on behalf of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD).
Sariah began her career as a copywriter, creating work for Nissan, Lexus, Energizer, Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino, Red Bull, and Partnership for a Drug-Free America, among others. Her work has been recognized by The One Show, New York Festivals, and Communication Arts, but she considers her appointment as Honorary Los Angeles Fire Chief her true career highlight.
The Continuum sat down with Sariah to discuss her career, key advice for others who want to break into advertising, why brand and demand must always go together, and how she came up with the name for this very publication.
We usually start at the beginning of our guest’s career, but The Continuum is a Quigley-Simpson project, and we just learned that you came up with its name. How did you pick it?
I was thinking about brand and demand on a spectrum, in parallel with the customer journey. You have pure brand marketing on one end and hard-working direct response on the other.
The question every CMO asks is, “Where along this line should I be investing my marketing dollars?” And the answer is that there isn’t one fixed answer or fixed spot on that line. You need lots of creative along that line, some that dials up response and others that dial up the brand.
It's a continuous process of adjusting your position and finding the right balance. I wanted a name to reflect that sense of shifting and moving, with the consumer, along a continuum.
You’ve been at Quigley-Simpson for 14 years and have gone from being an Associate Creative Director on a creative team of five people to building a 45-person department as EVP, Executive Creative Director. What made you take the job at Quigley-Simpson, and what do you think makes the agency unique?
I’m basically the poster child for Brand and Demand. The first half of my career was spent at big, brand-led shops. About halfway through my career, I spent a number of years freelancing and fell into doing Direct work. And that was not a no-brainer. There was a distinct learning curve that I didn’t expect. I had to develop a whole new skill set.
Now, I really do embody the best of both worlds and so does Quigley-Simpson. A lot of performance work that you see is strictly rational and offer-led. It isn’t insight-based, it doesn’t offer anything for the consumer to relate to, and often, it doesn’t provide the brand much differentiation. Our work is different because we are leading with insights and creative ideas that consider, or in some cases, create the brand.
“Our work is different because we are leading with insights and creative ideas that consider, or in some cases, create the brand.”
When you’re designing campaigns, how do you balance brand and demand? Do you think some advertisers are focused too much on one side of that equation?
It always starts with the brand. Even if you think you only care about performance, you can’t drive a response from someone who has no affinity for your brand. You’ve got to bring the brand along, even in DR creative. That means leading with an insight or value proposition that only your brand can deliver on. Then, you layer in DR best practices to make it work.
To answer your second question: Yes. Some are too focused on one particular spot along the continuum. It’s critical to remember that consumers are not static, and your marketing needs to meet them where they are. That means trying different things in different places. And then making sure you’re using best practices when you’re there. If you're really trying to drive performance, it is not enough to just end on a URL. You need to build a value proposition. You may need to deposition the competition. There are a lot of best practices in performance, and not all agencies are well-versed in them.
At the same time, not all “creative” in performance marketing is created equal. An agency has to be grounded in the foundational work required to bring the brand along. Thinking holistically like this is critical to making work that actually works.
Looking forward for a minute. With all the buzz around tech, creative, and the role of AI in advertising, what role do you think creative teams will play? And where do you think the advertising industry is heading in the near future?
Creative teams will still be indispensable for original ideas. While AI can certainly create within the confines of what already exists in the world, it cannot invent something truly new. To put this into an advertising context—using one of my favorite campaigns as an example—AI can generate 20 new scripts for Allstate’s “Mayhem" campaign in a matter of minutes, and with some basic proficiency. But what AI cannot do is create the “Mayhem” campaign.
Even AI agrees with me. ChatGPT just told me “I don’t have personal experiences, emotions or a deep understanding of culture beyond the data I’ve been trained on. My ‘creativity’ is statistical, not emotional or intuitive. So while I can come up with creative ideas, the most impactful and meaningful creativity still comes from humans.”
I see AI as simply a tool for creators—not a creator unto itself. As for the future and how we as creatives need to adapt, one thing seems clear to me: The most successful and effective creatives will be the most effective and creative prompters.
“Even if you think you only care about performance, you can’t drive a response from someone who has no affinity for your brand. You’ve got to bring the brand along, even in DR creative. That means leading with an insight or value proposition that only your brand can deliver on.”
Now let’s go back to the beginning of your career, did you always know you wanted to be in advertising?
Yes, though my journey into advertising began from my passion for photography. I started in high school, which had an incredibly robust, college-level photography program. I would see these great ads and for some reason assumed the photographer drove the creative, and that’s what I wanted to do.
At some point, I learned about the existence of the creative team, of art directors and copywriters, and realized they were the ones truly shaping the vision. I wanted to own the ideas. But I'm not artistic at all. I cannot draw. So, the prospect of becoming an art director was out. Writing, however, has always been my strength. That became my path while I was still in high school, and I was very directed when I chose my college.
Where did you go to college, and what did you learn about advertising?
There are many great programs for aspiring creatives today, but I did not have as many options. I found my way to one of the few Advertising majors available, at San Jose State University. To be honest, back then the curriculum was limited for aspiring creatives; there was only one copywriting class, and it used a textbook with chapters like “The 11 Kinds of Headlines.” We wrote just one piece of copy the entire semester. That has changed drastically in the centuries since I attended—it’s a strong program today.
However, SJSU’s Advertising program had two great things going for it even back then: a fantastic internship placement program and a serious investment in us winning the AAF’s National Student Advertising Competition. Our sponsor that year was Burger King, and we leaned in hard to their unique selling proposition—our campaign went all in on the flame broiling. I’m somewhat sorry to say that we changed the lyrics to the song “Fame” to make our point—with “Flame!” [insert ‘face with wide open eyes’ emoji here] Yes, it was a terrible idea. But somehow, we won.
The prize was a trip to New York, where I met with a creative director at Burger King’s agency and saw Cats. Yet truly the best part of my time at SJSU was a six-week internship at an agency in San Francisco. That agency had sadly just fired most of its creative department, so they actually needed help. The ACD gave me real assignments; I wrote ads, some of which even got produced. Those became the first pieces of work in my portfolio.
The world of advertising is different today than when you went to college, but based on your experience—and the experience of the people you’ve hired and mentored since—do you think a specific advertising program is the best choice for people who know this is what they want to do?
I don’t, actually. I believe it’s really important to have a general education. A good liberal arts foundation is going to serve you well; if you focus too much on advertising, you won't have that broader knowledge of art, history, science, and culture that could inform your work—and, more importantly, the way you think.
If you want a career in advertising, I recommend taking Logic to learn critical thinking, studying English and reading deeply, and studying Film to learn technique and what makes great directors great. You should be a student of history, astronomy, biology, whatever, you name it—it’s all background that might inform your work someday.
If you go straight to portfolio school, you're really short-changing yourself. That’s a great next step after college, but college is important even if you just do junior college for two years to get some general knowledge under your belt. It will make you a better creative and a more interesting person.
“As for the future and how we as creatives need to adapt, one thing seems clear to me: The most successful and effective creatives will be the most effective and creative prompters.”
What about getting your foot in the door after college? Do you have advice on the best way to do that?
For me, it was all about perseverance. I knocked on so many doors to get actual interviews, even after my book was shot back. I wanted to know why it was getting rejected. At one point, I managed to get a sit down with a famous creative director at Chiat/Day, who told me that my stuff was fine and to keep doing what I was doing. I remember sitting there knowing he was lying to me and not having the wherewithal to say, “Dude, be straight with me.”
I had a lot of other interviews, and finally, I found someone who told me the truth. He looked at my book and said that it was terrible. He told me to stop trying to be clever and to cut out the wordplay, pointing out that I wasn’t actually saying anything interesting. He told me that I had to start by thinking of something meaningful to say—to focus first on what I was saying rather than how I was saying it. That’s when the concept of finding the insight clicked for me. I redid my whole book and got a job.
Seeking out advice like that—and being open to hearing something hard—is a really important step toward growth.
You got to work for a number of big agencies in your early career. Can you tell us about some of those roles?
J. Walter Thompson was my first big job, but I knew before I even started that it wasn’t where I wanted to stay. My whole mode back then was about leapfrogging to the next place. I worked my ass off wherever I was, but I always had my eyes on moving up. My ultimate goal was to work at Chiat/Day.
“The most important thing to remember is that you can and will learn wherever you go. Sometimes, you can learn more from your mistakes than from making the right move. And you can always make another move.”
Did you ever get that chance to work at Chiat?
I did! Once I got to J. Walter, I started really stepping up my game and getting recruited to more creative shops, first to Della Femina and then to BBDO. But a friend called me on the day I got my headshots taken for BBDO. He was at a small, kinda hot creative boutique. His partner had just left, and he asked me to come be his new partner. I loved my friend, as a friend and as a creative. It was an easy choice—until I had to tell Steve Hayden that I wasn’t coming to BBDO.
I probably don’t need to tell you that it was a huge mistake. But I course-corrected pretty quickly. I stayed for five months. The agency was on the wane, bleeding accounts, and I wasn’t producing much work. My next job was at Chiat.
Do you regret giving up your BBDO offer? Do you have any advice for someone who feels they made a mistake in their career path?
I mean, parallel doors is such a tough game to play. All of your unlived lives are fascinating, but it’s hard to extrapolate what would actually be different in the long run, at a high level.
The most important thing to remember is that you can and will learn wherever you go. Sometimes, you can learn more from your mistakes than from making the right move. And you can always make another move.
Before we let you go, you just participated on an internal panel for International Women’s Day. Why was that important to you, and what questions did people ask?
We’re a woman-owned agency with a lot of female leadership, and we value all voices being heard. It made sense to collect a panel of female leaders at the agency in honor of this day. We were asked some tough questions and had a great conversation.
For example, we were asked, “What’s a misconception about female leaders, and how do you overcome it?”
I said the biggest misconception is that female leaders will behave in any specific way. Some women are more emotional, nurturing, and lead with their hearts; others are more rational and lead with their intellect. But this is true of men, too. Some men are warm, and others are more logical. We don’t suggest they act any particular way because they’re men.
We should simply focus on the fact that there are many different leadership styles. We should talk about the need to lean into your strengths, leading authentically by being true to yourself. If you're tilting too far in one direction, then by all means, you should work toward more balance. And that means that some women should try to be more emotional, not less. Leadership really shouldn’t be a gender conversation, in my view.
April 3, 2025
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