Meet The Team: David Willis

Name: David Willis

Title: Creative Director

What are your job responsibilities?
I manage the creative team, which comprises designers and developers, to produce advertising creative for DELVE’s clients.

How long have you been at DELVE?
About a year and a half.

What does a typical workday look like for you?
It’s kind of all over the board, which is one of the things I like about DELVE. The first half of the day is usually filled with client and internal meetings. My dev team is international, so we only have a few hours of overlap in the morning. I’m meeting with them, processing work, and making sure they’re ready to go for the next day.

The second half of the day is all US-based, and it could be anything from client meetings to internal meetings with the creative team, where I’m giving creative direction, concepting, and developing message direction for campaigns.

What is the best part of your job?
My favorite part of the job is working with UNICEF. I’m very much the kind of person that wants to do good in the world. Having UNICEF as a client was one of the most appealing things about taking this job. When you work in advertising, it’s rare and amazing to have this kind of experience.

How do you stay connected with teammates even when working remotely?
When I started at DELVE, that was one of the biggest challenges: how to work in a company where not everyone is physically in the office. Getting used to a remote team was actually helpful leading up to the pandemic. To stay in touch, we use Slack and Google Meet.

As far as how we all stay connected: we have a design standup every week, my dev team does two dev standups every week, and we have a weekly creative meeting where we all come together as a team to share news about work and our personal lives. We use part of this meeting for creative inspiration. I ask my team to come every week with something they’ve seen that’s inspiring, and we all talk about new creative ideas. Instead of just doing deliverable work, we do try to be proactive and to push, and we use that time to discuss what we’re going to push on.

What are you excited about, work-wise, in 2021?
We’re growing so fast at DELVE. I think we’re finally ironing out everything from a mid-manager level and up, and I think we’ve got all the right people in the right seats. I’m excited to see how we grow and how we develop our processes and our culture so we can grow fast but we can also grow in a healthy way. I like that kind of a challenge. That’s what excites me.

What are some characteristics of people who do well at DELVE?
You have to be scrappy. You have to be adaptable. Things are always changing. The people who really succeed are those who don’t take things personally – because things aren’t meant to be taken personally – and who can adapt to a constantly changing environment.

My favorite tech tool is…
That’s a hard one, because we use so many different interconnected tools. My favorite tech is probably all of the communication tools we use to keep our international teams working together.

Outside of work, you can find me…
Somewhere off-grid in my Sprinter van. During non-pandemic times, you could find me onstage or in the audience at a music festival.

Something few people know about me is…
Most people don’t know that I performed more than 50 gigs with my band the year before the pandemic hit.

This year, I’m planning to DELVE DEEPER into…
I’ve been building out my Sprinter van over the past year as my pandemic project. My goal this summer is to take it out for several weeks at a time. I’m looking forward to exploring new areas, working remotely, and meeting new people. I think a lot of the past four-plus years have been very divisive, and from my part I’d love to understand people better so I can help reduce that division.