Macy's Tentpole Campaign System:
From the first concept meeting to the final asset — this is what it looks like when the whole system works.
Context
Macy's was a print-first organization. Hero video came from outside agencies. Print was king. And digital was expected to figure it out from whatever came downstream.
That's not a workflow. That's a liability.
Every major tentpole — Black Friday, Holiday, Mother's Day, Back-to-School, Father's Day — ran concurrently with daily promos, always-on messaging, and unplanned specialty buys that landed mid-flight with their own requirements and their own deadlines. The campaigns didn't wait for each other. The organization wasn't built for that. And the gap between how Macy's conceived creative and how digital actually needed to receive it was costing real time and real money every single cycle.
My job was to close that gap. All of it. Before it became everyone else's problem.
Before a system existed, every campaign started from scratch. Briefs were built for print and handed to a digital team expected to reverse-engineer the media strategy on their own. Assets were shot without digital in mind — wrong framing, wrong negative space, wrong file architecture — and when they arrived, the fixes had to go outside to a single trusted retouch vendor to maintain universal brand consistency. That cost time. It cost money. And it landed on a team that wasn't set up to absorb it.
Designers were making decisions that should have been made three weeks earlier by people who never made them. Creative, media, developers, and ad tech vendors were all moving — just not together. And nobody was sitting at the intersection of all of it, making sure the upstream decisions were right before the downstream work began.
That intersection was where I lived.
Valentine's Day — paid digital display. DCO, HTML5, and programmatic units. Publisher ad specialty formats, including Kargo, absorbed mid-flight.
Our team has come to rely on Tesia's wireframes and checklists to help us better understand new initiatives, enabling us to create more impactful assets.
Melissa Sheehan, Senior Marketing Leader, Macy's
Holiday· Mother's Day · Father’s Day · Back to School · — paid digital display. DCO, HTML5, and programmatic units. Publisher ad specialty formats, including Kargo, absorbed mid-flight.
What I Built — And Where I Started
Most of my job happened before anything went into production. I was in pre-production meetings before a single shot was taken. During concepting. Sitting with marketing teams and media teams and outside agencies, making sure that what they were planning to shoot would actually work for digital — right framing, right negative space, right flexibility across placements — before anyone touched a camera.
If I didn't catch it in that room, it didn't just cost time. It cost a retouch cycle through an outside vendor, coordination to maintain universal brand consistency, and production hours nobody had to spare.
So I caught it in the room. Every major tentpole. Every hero campaign. And for everything else — the shoots that happened without me — I built digital shot guidelines so that the thinking I would have brought was already there. The organization didn't need me physically present to benefit from how I worked. I made that scalable.
From there, the system built forward. I developed a DCO creative matrix that connected audience segments to message variations across every funnel stage and placement — before a single brief went out. I designed modular layout systems with visual rules flexible enough to absorb tentpole, promo, always-on, and specialty flights running simultaneously. I retooled the brief format so any designer on the team could pick it up with as few questions as possible. Not zero — the important ones are always worth asking. But never the questions that waste production time because someone upstream didn't do their job.
I also managed every vendor and ad tech relationship directly.
Results
Creative system adopted as SOP across all major seasonal campaigns. Full DCO strategy deployed across programmatic, HTML5, publisher units, and specialty formats. Faster time-to-market season over season without starting over.
$2.5M
in annual vendor cost savings through production efficiencies
560+
assets delivered per
tentpole cycle
510+
additional assets produced monthly by a team of 5 designers and 5 developers
Zero
missed launches across all tentpoles, promos, and specialty campaigns
Creative Takeaway
The best campaign systems don't just deliver volume. They prevent the problems that kill volume in the first place.
That's not campaign management. That's infrastructure.
Services
Pre-Production Creative Consultation — Digital Shot Guidelines & Standards Development — Campaign System Architecture — DCO Matrix Development — Media Plan Integration & Translation — Modular Asset System Design — Brief Development & Standardization — Ad Tech & Vendor Management — HTML5 & Responsive Ad Leadership — Full Creative Lifecycle Oversight — Motion + Static Asset Production — Cross-Functional Team Operations — QA & Launch Coordination — Creative Operations & Workflow Optimization