Campaign Strategy
Video Production
Integrated Marketing
Print Design
Working with Smartypants Pictures, the American Library Association, and the New York Public Library, we developed The Secret Life of Librarians, a three-part video series built around recipients of ALA’s I Love My Librarian Award, 10 librarians selected from more than 1,400 nominations from the communities they served.
Rather than simply telling audiences about Carnegie’s support for libraries, we put the people doing the work at the center: librarians helping communities recover from tragedy, preserve their histories, create opportunities for entrepreneurs, and much more. The series gave audiences a more human entry point into the impact of Carnegie’s grantmaking.
I collaborated with Smartypants and Carnegie’s team to refine the films in edit, then built the campaign around them, designing social graphics and carousels, editing promotional video, and developing content that could extend the series well beyond its initial release.
I also saw an opportunity to take the campaign offline. At the American Library Association’s largest annual conference, where Carnegie was a co-sponsor, I pitched a much larger physical presence for the series, including seven-foot-tall print installations and supporting marketing materials designed to turn thousands of librarians and vendors into an audience for the work.
The original ambition was even larger: The Secret Life of Librarians was conceived with the potential to become a format that could eventually be pitched to a streaming platform. While shifting priorities prevented us from pursuing that path, the project helped establish a different model for Carnegie communications: lead with the story, make people, not the institution, the protagonists, and let the organization’s impact reveal itself through the work it makes possible.
Carnegie often moved quickly from one initiative to the next, leaving strong work without the sustained promotion needed to reach its full audience. With The Secret Life of Librarians, I pushed for a different model: treat strong storytelling as the foundation for an ongoing campaign, not a one-time launch.
With The Secret Life of Librarians, I pushed for a different approach: treat a strong piece of storytelling not as a one-time launch, but as the foundation for an ongoing campaign. It became part of my broader effort to bring more 360-degree campaign thinking to Carnegie, continually finding new formats, channels, and cultural moments that could give our strongest work another life.
That included pushing the organization to submit the series for Webby consideration and then built the awards campaign around the librarians themselves. Working with our social lead, I developed paid creative from the films’ strongest moments and partnered with Smartypants on a new trailer built around the call to “Vote for America’s Librarians.” Rather than asking audiences to rally behind Carnegie, we gave them a reason to rally behind the civic heroes at the heart of the work.
The campaign drove a substantial new wave of viewership, earned radio mentions, and helped The Secret Life of Librarians secure Carnegie Communications’ first Webby nomination. More importantly, it reinforced a broader shift I was pushing internally: strong creative can keep generating attention when it is repurposed, reformatted, and given new reasons to re-enter the conversation.
Anna Rowe, Smartpants Pictures (Executive Producer)
Eric Nichols, Smartypants Pictures (Executive Producer)
Suzanne H., Smartypants (Director)
Christiana Mecca, Smartypants (ADC)
Chase O., American Library Association
Catriona W., Carnegie (Social)
Daniel U., Carnegie (Web Design)