Parallax

Role

Copywriter

Date

Spring 2026

Campaign Highlights

"Does that make us not for the faint of heart? Guess so. "

"What does it mean to be independent?"

For my capstone, I served as a copywriter for the prestigious MOJO Ad. MOJO Ad is a full-service student-run ad agency that only 5% of Strategic Communication students get to work with. As a member of my creative team, I both developed the internal branding for my team and created a campaign for MOJO's annual State of the YAYA (Youth and Young Adult Market). My team was tasked with the question: What is true knowledge?

Ask:

Determine how YAYAs view true knowledge, especially in regards to formal education, digital smarts, and learned experience.

Insight:

For YAYAs, the path to true knowledge is not as simple as in past generations. Formal education no longer serves as the end-all be-all for expertise. Rather they start in formal education and weave this knowledge together with digital smarts through their learned experience.

Idea:

Define this shift as the "Learner's Odyssey": the journey YAYAs embark on to obtain knowledge, visiting three different planets: Academia, Tech, and Life.

Brand Manifesto

For my brand manifesto, I tapped into the ways Ragtag embraces modern political discussions. Many of its viewing series have a radical and confrontational tone to them, such as the "Black Independents", "Feminist Dystopias", and "New Queer Frontier" series. Ragtag has positioned itself as an incubator of political thought and discussion. For these reasons, I worked to infuse the brand manifesto with its confident, bold, and political brand tone.

What does it mean to be independent? A refusal to listen to a higher power? A willingness to challenge anything and everything? The guts to do all of this loudly and proudly? For us at Ragtag Cinema, it’s all three of those things. We will always champion and promote films that push against society’s walls. Our cinema will make our audiences uncomfortable and force them to question themselves and their lives. Does that make us not for the faint of heart? Guess so. At Ragtag Cinema, we cultivate a community that dives into the deeper meaning of culture, brings in experts that will expand our view of art and society, and dares us to envision a better future. We don’t show films made for eating popcorn. Because at Ragtag Cinema, art is defiance.

For my print ads, I wanted to continue the subversion of standard movie culture present in the campaign. I did this by taking standard parts of a movie theater and adding a political twist. These ads spoke to the ways in which Ragtag encourages its audiences to look for deeper messages, as well as the often political nature of art.