From Classroom to Client
What a broken airline, a cleaning brand, and an AI travel app taught me about doing real work.
I’ve been doing a million things at the same time lately. School, which includes homework, studying, and projects. Marketing for The Old Spaghetti Factory. Bartending and serving shifts. Running my own LLC, North Signal Marketing. Working for my first client, Maps 2 Moments. And making sure I don’t miss my Tuesday Margin Notes post.
So when I say the classroom and the real world are running, no, sprinting, parallel right now, I mean that literally. And here’s the thing I keep noticing. The classroom is the dress rehearsal. Everything I practice in there shows up, eventually.
The Boeing Project
In one of my management classes right now we’re working on Boeing. Let’s be honest. Boeing only exists the way it does because there are only two major commercial airplane manufacturers in the world. If this were a normal market, they’d have been replaced by a safer, more dependable company. The fact that they’re still standing isn’t proof that they’re fine. It’s proof that consumers don’t have another option.
The answer isn’t a new ad campaign. It isn’t a rebrand. Our thesis is this: rebuild a safety first culture from the inside out. Fix the culture from the top down so employees can speak up, accountability has a name on it, and the public can see and trust the difference.
You can’t market your way out of a trust problem. You have to earn your way out of it.
A lot of brands try to solve internal problems with external messaging. It doesn’t work. You can’t put the cart before the horse and in Boeing’s case, the horse is the culture. What Boeing actually needs, what any brand in crisis actually needs, is proof of change, not promises of it. Marketing comes after the work, not instead of it.
The Clorox Project
On the other end of the spectrum, I’ve been working on a collab concept between Clorox Wipes and On The Rocks, the pre-mixed cocktail brand. The idea: turn chores into happy hour. The target audience: people who are actually home. Housewives, retirees, anyone who cleans their own space and deserves a reward for it.
The creative direction I landed on was inspired by the opening credits of Why Women Kill, a darkly comedic Paramount+ series about women across three different eras who each find themselves pushed to their limit. The show is sharp, stylish, and never talks down to its audience. It has a signature visual style: flat cartoon illustration, high contrast, retro glamour with a very sharp edge. That energy felt exactly right for this collab. The Clorox x On The Rocks target audience is women. Women who are home, women who are doing the work nobody applauds, women who have earned the drink in their hand. They don’t want to be marketed at. They want to be seen. Why Women Kill gets that. And so should this campaign.
The Real Thing
Meanwhile, in actual North Signal news, the Maps 2 Moments contract is fully signed. For those who missed the last edition: Maps 2 Moments is an AI travel app that builds your entire trip from scratch. Input your flights or find them in the app, search hotels, and it pulls everything into one clean roadmap itinerary. It’s especially great for group trips where everyone can see the same itinerary, stay on the same page, and actually agree on a plan for once. It’s the travel planner that does the work you don’t want to do.
Here’s where we’re starting. Pinterest: new account, zero followers. Facebook: account exists, but basically starting from scratch. That’s the reality of building a brand that hasn’t had an active marketing presence yet. There’s no shortcut around zero. You just have to start.
I’ve already made posts for Pride Month and Mother’s Day, plus a couple of pieces that introduce what Maps 2 Moments actually is and does. Because before you can sell anything, people need to understand what they’re even looking at. Awareness first. Always.
School is the pregame meeting. North Signal clients are the game. You can draw up every play you want in that classroom, nobody remembers what you said in the locker room. They remember how you played.
The classroom gives you the framework. The client gives you the stakes. And when someone’s brand is on the line, you stop treating strategy like a hypothesis and start treating it like a responsibility. That shift changes how you think, how you work, and what you’re willing to put your name on.
Honestly? I’m doing okay. Not perfectly, not effortlessly, but okay. The pressure is there. I feel it. But I’ve got a trip to London in June and I’m already turning it into a work trip, because that’s just where my head is right now. Content to make, a client to show up for, a brand to build. The pressure means it’s real. And real is exactly where I want to be.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read this and follow along with me. See you Tuesday.
— Sydney
Good stuff, Sydney. Love how you’re documenting your work and how it all comes together.