Jason Anderson and Mitchell Jordan: The Dynamic Duo at the Helm of Dotted Line’s Creative Department

As 2020 thrust us into unforeseen campaign revisions and workflow innovations, I took stock of our progress over the past 8 years and reflected on where Dotted Line is headed in the coming 8. The changes and challenges of 2020 kicked our growth mindset into hyperdrive, inspiring us to think above and beyond traditional, short-term solutions and lean into exploring lasting, strategically-grounded transformations.

To realize efficient and effective transformations for our clients going into 2021, I knew we needed a top-tier creative department who’s seen it all—from leading huge national brands in large-scale creative endeavors (hello, Walmart and Showtime) to mastering cutting-edge methods for brand storytelling (from experiential activations to original NFTs). That’s why I’m so excited to have Jason and Mitchell on board: they’re not just best-in-class creatives, they’re strategic heavyweights with the invaluable capacity to think across multiple platforms and connect the dots for our clients with bold, brilliant strokes.

With experience spanning a breadth of industries and mediums and countless awards between them (literally—we lost count), this dynamic duo brings a wealth of creative firepower, strategic expertise, and contagious enthusiasm to Dotted Line. Between Jason’s mastery of copy and Mitchell’s unmatched eye for design, these two are a creative agency’s version of a match made in heaven. We’re thrilled to welcome Jason Anderson and Mitchell Jordan on board full-time to lead our creative department as Creative Director and Associate Creative Director.

Introducing Jason Anderson and Mitchell Jordan

Jason has covered some serious ground over his twenty-year agency career. After graduating from Atlanta’s Creative Circus, he cut his teeth copywriting for big-name brands including Walmart, Time Warner, Kellogg’s, Honeywell, and Best Western. Jason found his way to Richmond by way of NDP Agency, where projects under his creative direction racked up impressive accolades—notably, an Emmy for a campaign with Children’s Hospital of Richmond and multiple features in Lürzer’s Archive.

A self-proclaimed design nerd, Mitchell effortlessly marries his creative eye and aesthetic expertise with a proven strategic backbone. Following his graphic design degree at Parsons, Mitchell spent a decade rising through the ranks at Showtime, where he honed his conceptual and technical skills working on print and digital advertising for Dexter, Homeland, and Smithsonian Channel. In Richmond, he pivoted to agency-side work, building NDP’s Design Studio from the ground up and managing a team tasked with everything from production work to custom illustration.

Chasing the “Purely Organic Fun Moments”

When it comes to Jason and Mitchell, it’s not just their individual strengths that make them game-changing agency assets—it’s their teamwork, too. Case in point: during Mitchell’s particularly eventful first week in his Design Studio role, the two kicked off an enduring partnership over long hours of perfecting a new business pitch for a major client—and wound up winning the account. Leveraging their complementary content and design strengths while working side-by-side, they quickly established a creative process marked by effortless collaboration and strong strategic focus.

From there, their natural teamwork brought dozens of campaigns and creative projects to life. One of my favorite projects of Jason’s and Mitchell’s embodies their signature approach. Based on an idea born out of a “purely organic fun moment,” the two devised an interactive holiday greeting: a trivia game called “Pie-jinx” where each colleague’s wrong answer earned them a pie in the face. The end result wasn’t just for laughs; their off-the-wall greeting was rooted in a strategy to showcase the agency’s new “concept, craft, produce” capabilities in a memorable way. At Dotted Line, they’re already bringing the same out-of-the-box collaboration and thoughtful executional expertise to large-scale strategic projects as they do to impromptu jam sessions in undisclosed basements (their recent SpinnakerFest rebrand is a great example).

Trust in the Process

When the three of us reflect on what makes their teamwork—and any team dynamic— so effective, we all agree: it’s trust. First and foremost, a sense of reliability and responsibility among creative partners paves the way for seamless, efficient creative executions. When they undertook an ambitious pitch for Westerly’s comprehensive rebrand, Mitchell and Jason knew without a doubt that they could depend on each other’s high quality of work, and were able to hit the ground running without second-guessing each other’s capabilities (and yes, they won that pitch, too).

But on an even deeper level, trust is the primary ingredient in forming bonds between colleagues that spark brilliant innovations. Often, great ideas don’t start out as great ideas—they first materialize as an impracticable “what if?” in the office, or over lunch that gets built up, wrestled with, and fleshed out into a reality over time. A strong foundation of trust encourages those spontaneous magic moments that precipitate the most innovative solutions for our clients. And when a project inevitably hits a speedbump, trust is the main element motivating colleagues to face a daunting challenge together. Jason and Mitchell credit their longstanding trust in each other’s work with developing an “it’s you and I against the struggle” mentality that’s critical to teasing the best possible execution out of a complicated project brief.

As Dotted Line continues to grow, our culture assumes an even greater importance for me. With our clients’ needs expanding and their ambitions soaring to new heights, it’s not enough to simply bring on board talent that’s qualified on paper. Any new addition to our team at Dotted Line must be a true team player, one that goes above and beyond the call of duty to deepen our philosophy of trust and inspire best-in-class executions for our clients. Jason and Mitchell represent just that: they’re the dream team that I can trust with even the most challenging of creative briefs, and the duo whose upbeat energy make logging into a Zoom brainstorm feel like a treat. Have a creative project for Jason and Mitchell to tackle? Reach out to us here.