Somewhere on this site, I already confessed my guilt for being one of the many hands behind the avalanche of Verizon Wireless direct mail that likely made its way into your mailbox. And, in the spirit of full transparency, I have to offer a second apology — because my history with Verizon is even more extensive than that. For nearly two years of my life in Los Angeles, I lived inside a world painted entirely in Verizon red. My days were spent breathing the cadence of “Can you hear me now?” as if it were part of the local weather report.

Everywhere I turned — whether sitting in traffic on the 405 or walking through a studio lot — I saw Paul Marcarelli’s face staring back at me. He and I became unlikely coworkers. I placed him on billboards across the Pacific region, dropped him into direct mail kits, repurposed him for product-driven visuals, and used him as the connective tissue for an immense volume of regional and national marketing materials. He was the glue of a campaign that required consistency, clarity, and the kind of omnipresence that only a telecom giant with a massive advertising footprint can demand.

The work itself was an exercise in versatility: one week, I was building assets for contract-buyout promotions; the next, I was designing upgrade campaigns for phones and accessories; then pivoting into positioning a family-oriented device built for kids — a cheerful little phone outfitted with both voice and GPS functionalities meant to reassure parents across the region. Verizon’s creative pipeline never stopped moving, and I had to match that pace with equal parts precision and stamina.

Because the Los Angeles advertising community is famously tight-knit, word spread quickly about who understood the Verizon brand and who could execute on the finer nuances of the campaign. My reputation grew not through self-promotion, but through reliable delivery and a deep, almost intuitive understanding of the brand’s visual and strategic DNA. Eventually, Verizon’s account executives began specifically requesting me to lead the design legs of various initiatives, even though I was working as a contract creative across two of their partner agencies — Campbell Mithun and Rauxa Direct.

By the end of those two years, I had not only developed a portfolio that could practically hum the Verizon brand standards on command, but I’d also honed the ability to navigate complex multi-agency workflows, high-volume production environments, and the kind of consistency-driven creative problem-solving that would later become foundational to my approach as an ACD. It was relentless, rigorous, and — in its own way — strangely formative.