Seventeen thousand, seven hundred and eighty-two rubber ducks is a peculiar answer to a marketing brief. The client was Cozi, an app for organizing family life. It wanted more people to sign up. A digital campaign was on the table. Buffy McCoy Kelly and her team proposed something that would require rather more bending down: a mile of yellow ducks through Seattle’s Magnuson Park.
The reasoning was easy to follow. Cozi helped families keep their ducks in a row. So the agency would put actual ducks in an actual row, with families helping to assemble them. A familiar expression became an event, and an app acquired something people could photograph. Somewhere between the brief and the park, the sensible solution had grown a beak.
That movement from language to something you can see, handle or join runs through Kelly’s work. She has given a vacuum cleaner a second floor, helped a motorcycle brand find its voice and overseen a snack cake’s social life. The objects are funny. The business questions behind them are usually quite serious.
The catalogue received an unsolicited improvement
As a child, Kelly made commercials and drew advertisements. She also sent the mail-order company Hang Ten a sketch suggesting a better catalogue layout. Hang Ten wrote back, thanked her and suggested she get in touch about a job when she was older. The exchange has the tidy shape of an advertising origin story, with the useful distinction that the child had already done the assignment.
Her education included journalism and advertising at the University of Kentucky and the copywriting program at Atlanta’s Portfolio Center, now Miami Ad School. By 2000 she was at Neiman Group in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where her roles included associate creative director, creative director and vice president. She stayed through 2006, working on creative development and helping lead a team.
She co-founded Tattoo Projects with Rudy Banny in Charlotte in 2006. Over the following years, her responsibilities expanded across the work and the business that made it possible. Clients included Hostess, Victory Motorcycles, Hoover and Sheetz. The agency received Ad Age Small Agency of the Year recognition and appeared twice on Charlotte’s fastest-growing business lists.
Founding an agency gave Kelly scope to follow an idea beyond the line of copy. It also meant hiring people, winning accounts and building the conditions in which the next idea could happen. The childhood catalogue critic had acquired a payroll.
A perfectly respectable app, followed by a mile of ducks
For Cozi, the family audience became part of the execution. Volunteers with children helped put out the ducks over a two-day event. The product promise was organization; the public activity required a considerable amount of it. Kelly’s team designed and managed the effort, which set a Guinness World Record for the longest line of rubber ducks.
The campaign’s reported results included 392 million media impressions and a 168 percent increase in membership following the campaign. Coverage reached the Today show. The underlying creative decision is visible without a spreadsheet: give people a simple picture that tells them what the product does.
There is an operational joke hiding inside the visual one. A mile of ducks looks effortless once someone has lined them up. Before that, it is a plan involving a location, a public event, volunteers and thousands of small objects. Kelly’s career repeatedly puts creative direction close enough to production to discover whether an idea can survive contact with the ground.
The snack cake develops opinions
Hostess arrived through a much smaller gesture. When Kelly learned the company had a new chief marketing officer, she sent a congratulatory note with an image her team had made. He responded within days. A visit followed within the month, and the agency won the social media business without a pitch. He later kept a large framed version of the image on his office wall.
The assignment was to make a familiar brand relevant to younger customers with limited resources. Kelly’s team focused on millennial mothers and gave Hostess a mischievous personality. Little Debbie occupied a more wholesome corner of the category. Hostess could afford to be a little less well behaved.
That required a working rhythm as much as a voice. Social managers brought trends and hashtags into the morning meeting. The team made content quickly, with close client involvement. Imaginary products, including peanut butter pickle Twinkies, became audience favorites. Some ideas eventually crossed into real products, including coffee creamer and scented candles. A snack cake had become a useful accomplice in small indulgences.
The launch of Deep-Fried Twinkies made the absurdity more literal. Kelly built the creative strategy around the pleasures and excesses of state-fair frying. Her team spent a weekend shooting short videos with a fryer, batter and oil, cooking objects that led up to the product reveal. The campaign had a simple organizing thought and plenty of room for variations.
Even another brand joined the game. After a Magic 8 Ball met the fryer, it retaliated on social media by smashing Twinkies. The exchange let the audience watch brands behave like participants in a joke. Kelly also made a ring to wear during the strategy presentation. Apparently, a deck of slides alone would have been underdressed.
Room for the buyer upstairs
For Hoover, Kelly faced a different audience: retail buyers whose attention and shelf space mattered. The brand needed to retain its established promise while finding a more assertive voice. A manifesto she wrote to develop the creative strategy pleased the client enough to be used internally when the refresh was announced.
Then came the architecture. To demonstrate Hoover’s WindTunnel technology at the International Housewares Show, Kelly conceived a booth shaped like a two-story vacuum cleaner canister. She worked with PFI Displays to bring it into being. Demonstrations occupied the lower floor. Buyers could meet upstairs. The vacuum cleaner had become a place to conduct business.
The scale served a purpose beyond attracting a glance across a trade-show floor. Buyers could enter the product story and examine the technology. The campaign also included trade advertising and sales materials. An enormous dirt cup is entertaining; giving the sales team something useful to do with the attention is the part that makes it an assignment.
Victory Motorcycles called for another kind of distinction. Competing in American heavyweight motorcycles meant dealing with Harley-Davidson’s cultural presence. Kelly’s work began with research, customer groups and stakeholder conversations. The opening was a rider moving from performance bikes toward a heavyweight machine while still caring about performance culture.
The resulting strategy, “Modern American Muscle,” became the brand’s tagline. It guided work across television, dealerships, events and other channels. The case shows the quieter labor behind her conspicuous ideas: deciding whom the brand can speak to, and what it can credibly offer them. A memorable phrase has more work to do when it must hold together an entire program.
The executive learns to listen
Kelly expected being a chief executive to mean being the final decision-maker. She discovered how much of the job involved listening and coordinating. Her description of bad listening is particularly vivid: a person under a glass fishbowl, appearing attentive while privately composing the answer. Anyone who has survived a meeting may recognize the specimen.
She also came to question the competitive habits she had learned early in her career. “There is enough success for everyone,” she said. Supporting colleagues became more central to how she understood leadership. Her own account includes an uncomfortable lesson about family: she once gave in to pressure to attend a television shoot away from home over Father’s Day weekend. The commercial was about fatherhood and being present.
“There is enough success for everyone.”
Buffy McCoy Kelly
In March 2021, Tattoo Projects announced expanded leadership, new hires and a move that would add office space and production capacity. Chad Brophy became president. Kelly was still founder, CEO and chief creative officer, speaking about a growing team and its new creative home.
On June 1, she told the team she was stepping away from daily management. The announcement became public that November. She described work already done on the agency’s identity, departments, processes, hires and building, and said she would remain founder with selective involvement in creative and strategy projects. Her stated aim included supporting others, especially working women.
The writer keeps the pen
Kelly’s subsequent work has included a contract role at Wray Ward, as senior director of insights and brand strategy, beginning in 2021. Her portfolio also returns to the practical pleasures of directing, strategizing and writing. Ownership had occupied a substantial stretch of her career. Creative work continued beyond it.
She has made room for fiction, too. In April 2023 she published “The Glitch,” a science-fiction story set in a world governed by cyborgs, where human emotions circulate as an illegal commodity. She was a top-ten award winner in the 2023 NYC Midnight international short-fiction competition. The writing has moved well beyond a client brief, although she still seems interested in what makes people feel something.
Her personal-site motto is brief: “Kick ass. Be kind.” It leaves room for ambition and for the people who have to share the room with it. From a proposed catalogue layout to a park full of ducks, Kelly has kept finding ways to make a thought tangible. After the company, the meetings and the job titles, there is still a writer with an idea she would like you to see.