Working As A Creative Director: Making Something Out Of Nothing At All
by Alina Gonzalez '08
Even with an older brother and a father as Dartmouth alums, Kelley Fead,
Class of ’78, always thought she wanted to attend an all-woman’s college.
Nonetheless, during a ‘just-in-case’ college visit, Dartmouth worked its Big
Green magic and Kelley experienced a personal epiphany.
“My family and I came to Dartmouth on a college trip and my dad took me
around on a guided tour saying ‘Here’s where I lived my freshman year, and
here’s where I lived my sophomore year, and…you get the idea,” she says with a
smile. But when Kelley found herself with some time alone, she fell in love
with the college independent of her father’s enthusiastic opinion.
Growing up in New Brunswick, New Jersey, Kelley says Dartmouth was
“everywhere.” She remembers trips to the college as a little girl, and visits
to see her older brother once he enrolled as a freshman. With a family full of
alumni--and after the college opened its doors to women during Kelley’s junior
year of high school--it seemed only natural that the youngest Fead child would
find herself in Hanover. Still, Kelley had her heart set on attending a female
college.
“It’s quite serendipitous that I ended up here,” she says over coffee at
Collis, upon returning to the Big Green for the Alumni Office’s weekend-long
celebration of thirty-five years of women at Dartmouth. Ironically, the girl
who was determined to attend a women’s college ended up graduating with only
the third class of women at a historically all-male college.
“On that final trip with my parents, I started realizing...oh wow…I really
like this place. I decided right then it was the college for me. It seemed as
if at Dartmouth, I could be whoever I wanted to be and do whatever I wanted to
do.”
Kelley Fead’s odyssey both at Dartmouth and since graduation has proven the
wisdom of her intuition.
As an undergrad in the Upper Valley, Kelley nurtured her childhood passions.
“I kept a journal as a kid, but I’ve also always liked to delve into many
different areas,” she says. "In 8th grade, my creative writing
teacher asked me what I wanted to be and my answer was a writer, a minister, an
orchestral flautist, and an oceanographer. Oh, and I also wanted to go into
politics.” She majored in English modified with creative writing, and took an
environmental journalism course with Professor Noel Perrin, who she praises as
“a great role model in terms of writing.”
She also freelanced for the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine and worked all four
years for The Dartmouth where she met her husband of twenty-seven years, Garry
Slack ’76. “I worked and wrote all the time,” she says.
In her current job as creative director and partner of Slack Barshinger—a
marketing and advertising agency based in Chicago and founded by her husband
and their close friend—Kelley does exactly what she has always taken great
pleasure in: writing and creating. “My goal has long been to be a creative
director,” she says. “The person in an advertising agency who oversees the arts
and graphic designers, helping them come up with the concepts, the big ideas,
and then executes them in all sorts of forms whether that be posters,
brochures, online ads, interactive presentations or massive events…whatever you
can imagine,” she says.
“And while I’m not an oceanographer, I do know all sorts of things about
various industries,” she says. “What was important to me as a child and at
Dartmouth has carried me through the rest of my life. My job is a blast and I
love coming to work everyday.”
The road that led from Kelley’s Dartmouth days to her current days as Slack
Barshinger Creative Director included a host of fascinating turns, as she
worked in various fields and took up different freelance writing and editing
positions. For several years, she acted upon her 8th grade dream to
go into politics: during her last year at Dartmouth, Kelley landed a public
affairs internship with the New Hampshire Democratic Party working as the
party’s Press Secretary. She then went on to intern for New Hampshire
Democratic Senator Thomas McIntyre in Washington, D.C..
Upon graduating, Kelley gave the West Coast a shot and took a job in San
Francisco with a libertarian-run magazine, Inquiry, founded by the CATO
Institute. After four months, the publication offered her the job of Poetry
Editor for an annual salary of $8,000, but Kelley chose to return to the
nation’s capital to scout new work and opportunities.
She found a job with a publishing company in Washington that covered the
happenings of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the executive branch.
“I was a daily reporter in the Capitol building and I had to write three
stories a day, which makes you good at writing,” she says.
“There was a real need for precision. I would be in the sessions where the
congressmen and women were marking up bills and I had to go write the stories
immediately because my readers wanted to read the news right away,” she
explains. “I covered health and higher education-related issues, school law and
news, and major decisions of the Supreme Court that related to education. It
was a great grounding in how the federal government worked.”
Kelley stayed on Capitol Hill for six years, but after having her first
child in 1984, decided to take up more contract work due to the flexibility it
allowed-- with writing, editing, politics, and education serving as the themes
that linked all of her subsequent freelance positions.
Over the course of several years, Kelley became a stringer for minority
issues in higher education in Chicago where she reported on equal opportunity
concerns for the African-American community; she worked as the editor of a
publication called Demonstrative Evidence, which covered the trend of using
marketing in courtrooms to influence jurors; she wrote a book called “The Hows,
Whats and Wows of the Sears Tower” for which she created activities for
children to engage in when visiting the Sears Tower; and she worked as a
public relations and marketing consultant.
While in Chicago, Kelley also wrote speeches for the president of an urban
commuter school with an average age of 32, Chicago State University.
“It was about as different from Dartmouth as you could possibly get,” Kelley
says. “The President was an African American woman, Delores Cross, for whom it
was terrific to write speeches because I had to figure out how to find stories
through her voice”. Kelly later helped Cross with her autobiography, “Breaking
Through The Wall.”
Shortly after the birth of a second child in 1988, Kelly and her husband
Gary Slack, who had been by her side since Dartmouth, decided to found Slack
Barshinger with a fellow entrepreneur.
“My husband had worked for a company called Porter Novelli, which had
pioneered the idea of social marketing,” Kelly explains. “They applied the
principles of marketing and advertising to social issues like breast exams and
campaigns to stop smoking.” So, with her husband’s experience in the
field of PR and her own skills as a gifted writer, the team set out to create a
business of their own.
“We used the equity from our home to start, because you really don’t need
machines to do this, “ Kelley says. “All you need are smart people and a few
computers. When we opened our doors, we had brainpower and some Macs that had
cost us $3,000 a piece,” she adds with a laugh.
Since the project took off when the couple’s second son was six weeks old,
however, Kelley’s role was limited and only gradually evolved into what it is
today.
“I was involved,” she says, “but certainly not to the extent I am now.”
So while Kelley’s husband and business partner, Don Barshinger, built Slack
Barshinger from the ground up, the Renaissance woman worked as a full-time mom
and volunteer.
“I’ve always loved to volunteer extensively in my own community because I’ve
had this interest in education that started in high school and was nurtured by
the work I did as a reporter in D.C.,” she says. “I’ve always had a passion for
helping in the growth and development of people.”
Now, in her town of Winnetka, Illinois, Kelley helped found a
before-and-after school program, and has served as President of both the PTA
and the Winnetka Alliance for Early Childhood, which promotes the idea that, as
Kelley puts it, “a child’s work is to play.”
Kelley also volunteers for her alma mater.
She has been the President of the Dartmouth club of Chicago, President of
the Alumni Council, and President of the Association of Alumni, and has worked
for the Joint Committee and Task Force on Alumni Governance.
“Volunteering for Dartmouth means a lot to me, “ she says. “It’s been very
satisfying, and a great deal of fun, especially as a woman, trying to balance a
job and a home life. The work has given me a lot of leadership opportunities
and I recommend it highly to anybody.”
From her job to her family to her volunteer work, Kelley certainly has had
her hands full over the years. What is a day in her life like?
“Pretty long,” says Kelley. “but it’s part of being a partner and liking
what I do and being committed to it. Maybe it starts at 7:30 and it may end at
7:30 or 8:00. But there is just never a dull moment. There are clients calling
asking for advice on issues, then I may have two art directors and a writer
working on a project they want to talk to me about. There is lots of
brainstorming and problem-solving involved in the creative field,” she
says.”
Kelley describes Slack Barshinger’s clients as very diverse, including
Google and the milk industry, and, in the past, Nabisco and NutraSweet.
“With dairy,” she explains, “we help them get big companies to use dairy
ingredients in their products and keep them up on current research. With
Google, we help them try to increase their world content.”
“The people who are successful in the business that I’m in have deep
curiosity,” Kelley says. “An almost geeky curiosity. People get excited about
new research and products. It’s a very intellectual field,” she says. “And it’s
very strategic. You need to have a lot of really great insights into what the
customers need. And, of course, there are lots of deadlines, but being busy is
my favorite state to be in.”
Kelley also notes that the advertising/marketing field is open to any and
everyone.
“You need all different perspectives to do great creative work,” she says.
“People from different demographics and ages. We’ve had interns who had majored
in advertising, interns who were liberal arts majors, and everything in
between.”
To undergraduates who are not sure what they are going to do after
graduation, Kelley wants them to know that it is a common feeling.
“First, don’t be scared,” she says. “And know that whatever decision you
make, you don’t have to do it for the rest of your life. Try to find really
interesting work and people that you want to learn from. It doesn’t matter
where that is because by working with someone else who is good at what they do,
you’ll learn a lot. But I do think you can find the seeds of the things that
really interest you by thinking about what you liked when you were a kid,” she
says. “I always made stuff, always designed things, and always wrote. So
I need to be in a creative field where I look at blank white boards all the
time, and I work with somebody else and we make something out of nothing
together,” she says.
Kelley also urges students to find balance.
“It’s a constant struggle to find the time to do everything that you want to
do,” she says. “Finding balance is difficult and I can get it right for a
while, but then it all goes off-center. You see in children that they are
always going through periods of equilibrium and disequilibrium, and these
things continue throughout your life. It is always a challenge. Sometimes I
know that I am working too hard, but I also know that life will eventually
re-center. I still play tennis with my friends, I am in a cooking club, I still
write poetry. It’s hard to make time for things, but you have to try,” she
says.
Kelley’s bottom line: “You have to do something that you enjoy. I never,
ever, look at the clock.”
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