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We’re excited to rank 22nd among Adweek’s 2022 Fasting Growing Agencies, an annual recognition honoring the 75 agencies large and small from all over the world who have achieved significant growth over the past three years. With a growth rate of 217%, we also rank 8th among women-led agencies and 3rd in the Southeast.
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Dotted Line has named Jonathan Goldberg the agency’s first executive creative director. He is tasked with elevating the creative output Dotted Line produces for brands including Worksite Labs, Bon Secours Mercy Health and Shades of Light. A 25-year advertising veteran, Jonathan has served as a senior creative at Ogilvy DC, Mono Minneapolis and Arts & Letters (to name a few), helping to promote such major brands as AT&T, FedEx and General Mills.
Continue to AdAge, Little Black Book, Campaign US and MediaPost to learn more about Jonathan and his role at the agency.
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For the first time, Dotted Line has been named to Inc. 5000, a list of fastest-growing private companies in the United States. After reporting revenue growth of 294%, the agency is thrilled to debut at No. 2,039 – more than halfway up the magazine’s list. This makes it the highest ranked advertising and marketing firm in Richmond and the fourth highest Richmond company overall, out of 17 total. Here’s to climbing the list in the years to come!
Continue to Inc. to learn more about Dotted Line’s placement.
We also received coverage in the Axios Richmond, the Richmond Times-Dispatch and Richmond BizSense.
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Lauren Sweeney, founder and CEO of Dotted Line, was named one of the 2022 Women in Leadership by Virginia Business. This year’s list honors 42 women, culled from more than 300 nominations, who set the standard for leadership in business and nonprofit agencies of all sizes across the state.
Continue to Virginia Business for the full list of honorees and a profile on Lauren, which calls out her investment in the next generation of Dotted Line leaders.
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For its lead-generation campaign for Tech Knowledge Associates (TKA), Dotted Line has been named a finalist in three categories of PR Daily’s Content Marketing Awards. The agency is up for Content Marketing Strategy of the Year, as well as the year’s best B2B campaign and best use of content marketing for the purpose of lead generation.
Continue to PR Daily.
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Dotted Line snagged the #62 spot on Virginia Business’ 2022 Best Places to Work list in the small-employers category. Its selection was based on employee surveys that benchmarked Dotted Line on a list of core values, including leadership, corporate culture, work environment and overall engagement. The agency competed with more than 200 companies to be included and is one of only five advertising, PR and marketing companies in Virginia to earn a spot on the small-employers list.
Continue to Virginia Business.
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Since starting Dotted Line in 2014, CEO Lauren Sweeney has learned countless lessons as she built the company into a mid-level marketing agency. She shares how finding A-player team members, sharpening her influence skills and reframing her relationship to failure have shaped her into the leader she is today.
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In her 25-plus-year career, Dotted Line Managing Director of Client Services Marci Schnur has led numerous large-scale campaigns and built lasting relationships with diverse clients. She reflects on her most significant learning experiences, her best and worst business decisions, and offers her insights for the industry’s current and future challenges.
Continue to the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
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Dotted Line’s leadership team has grown to include Managing Director of Client Services Marci Schnur and Creative Director Jason Anderson, while Emily Shane has been promoted to Strategy Director. They’re lending 60-plus years of combined marketing experience to help develop highly effective solutions for clients while bringing a clear vision and passion to the agency.
Continue to AdForum.
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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.