Rebecca
Faulkner
Bay Area Creative Director and Copywriter
Wake + Make
For Upwork
Winner: ADC Silver Cube.
Finalist: Corporate Film, seventh annual Brand Film Awards
Shortlist: One Show, Branded Entertainment
Shortlist: One Show, Brand Partnerships
Shortlist: Physical Product, Promotional
Our community is made of millions of entrepreneurs and talent, fueled by creativity, hard work, late nights, and, well, coffee. So when International Coffee Day came around, we had to celebrate in a way that only Upwork could.
The idea actually started with a simple request from our sales team: a basic one-sheet to showcase our Creative and Design category to enterprise-level prospects (e.g., CMOs, creative leadership). Instead, we saw an opportunity to do something bigger — to contextualize the Upwork brand in an unexpected, human way and bring our illustrator community to life in a form no PDF ever could.
With the help of five illustrators and one hand letterer from our platform, we partnered with Red Bay Coffee, a Black-owned roastery and certified B-Corp that shares our values, to create a signature coffee line dedicated to the grind. Each bag featured original artwork from global talent on Upwork — turning a sales asset into a piece of storytelling people could hold, smell, and savor.
Our sales team sent the coffee to enterprise-level marketing and creative leaders, sparking warm conversations and new relationships. The campaign drove a 400% increase in social engagement over similar efforts, generated more than $100,000 in new business leads within weeks, and, most importantly, helped our illustrators gain new visibility and paid projects as a direct result.
Motherhood Works
For Upwork
When the pandemic pushed millions out of the workforce, 80 percent were moms. Within 18 months, decades of progress vanished. By 2022, many moms weren’t just missing work. They were missing a sense of identity, independence, and momentum.
As a platform built to support independent professionals, Upwork had a unique opportunity. It wasn’t just about helping moms return to work; it was about helping them reclaim a vital part of themselves.
I led creative direction for a campaign designed to shift the narrative around working moms. We used real footage and photography to tell honest, unvarnished stories of what moms experienced and what they still had to offer. The creative needed to feel raw, human, and unignorable.
We paired this storytelling with a go-to-market strategy focused on building awareness and driving action. Our message encouraged clients to think mom first when hiring. To extend impact, we backed the campaign with real support, launching partnerships with Skillshare, Mastry, and Care.com to provide resources for moms re-entering the workforce.
Results:
9.4 million total reach
578.6K organic impressions (goal: 222K)
2.43% average engagement rate across Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok
16.7 million paid impressions (goal: 12M)
22.4K landing page clicks
This was more than a campaign. It was a call to recognize the talent, resilience, and value of moms who never stopped working. We just needed the world to see it.
Look Beyond Login
For Okta
We launched a targeted awareness campaign aimed at CMOs and their teams to position Okta as an essential partner for customer engagement and loyalty. The message was simple but urgent: customer identity isn’t just a backend concern — it’s a brand differentiator.
We partnered with the Wall Street Journal to drive visibility and credibility, creating high-impact placements that exceeded expectations. The campaign generated over 150 million impressions, with WSJ ads outperforming internal benchmarks by 19 points — and delivering even stronger engagement metrics.
Be There
For Stubhub
2020 marked the first year StubHub took its brand awareness work in-house. The work resulted in a jaw-dropping 400% ROAS (Return On Advertising Spend). I led the copy team as ACD, and even flew to Toronto with my 9-month old baby to shoot these spots! The campaign consists of over fifteen :06 unskippable pre-roll videos, along with other short form social videos to hit on StubHub’s “reasons to believe” in memorable, relevant and, above all, entertaining ways. We leaned into the short format of pre-roll to quickly hammer home each idea, and allow for optimization through time as we learned which assets performed best among fans.
Next, to celebrate the month of October, aka the busiest season in sports, we created the “#Sportober Challenge” to inspire and reward fans for getting out and seeing as many live sporting events as possible. We partnered with YouTube all-star team Dude Perfect to create a StubHub Sportober trick shot video and drive fans to and through the challenge.
Creative Testing & Scalability
For Okta
At Okta, I partnered with performance marketing and growth teams to transform creative from one off campaign output into a scalable testing engine. As Creative Director, I led the development of a structured creative testing framework designed to connect narrative strategy with measurable business impact across paid media channels.
When I joined, performance creative was being produced quickly but without a consistent system for testing, iteration, or shared learning. Messaging varied widely and production scalability was limited. We needed a way to increase output without sacrificing craft, test messaging systematically, connect brand narrative with performance data, and build repeatable infrastructure for experimentation.
Working closely with my creative team and cross functional growth partners, we established a creative testing framework that defined variables, hypotheses, and measurement standards for ongoing experimentation. Our art director designed a modular Figma toolkit that enabled rapid asset production and versioning at scale while maintaining brand and voice consistency. We also introduced recurring growth insights reviews that connected creative, brand, and paid media teams, creating a continuous feedback loop between storytelling and performance.
This work significantly increased production scalability, improved consistency across channels, and generated measurable gains in paid media effectiveness through clarity driven messaging. More importantly, it shifted the organization’s perception of creative from campaign support to performance driver, embedding experimentation and learning into the creative process itself.
Music and Sports Illustration
For StubHub
StubHub needed a way to depict iconic performers and athletes without relying on expensive licensing or generic stock photography. The challenge was to create work that felt authentic to live events while building a recognizable visual language unique to the brand.
My partner and I worked with award winning illustrator Lauren Tamaki to develop a series of bespoke illustrated GIFs featuring musicians and athletes. Rather than treating the work as one off assets, we designed a scalable illustration approach that could flex across campaigns while maintaining a consistent visual identity.
The illustrations gave StubHub a distinctive, human centered aesthetic that captured the energy of live performance and resonated strongly with music audiences. The system allowed us to represent artists in a way that felt expressive, current, and unmistakably ownable for the brand.
Brand Voice Development
For all clients
A brand’s voice isn’t just how it sounds. It’s how it earns trust, shows up consistently, and stays human no matter how big the company gets. I help teams define and operationalize that voice so it’s not just a deck on a shared drive but a living system people can actually use.
That work often includes exploring how AI can support and scale voice adoption responsibly — helping teams write faster without losing their personality or purpose.
Services include:
• Defining tone and voice characteristics
• Creating detailed voice and messaging guides
• Leading workshops and training sessions
• Building infrastructure that supports companywide adoption
• Using AI to test and maintain consistency across teams and channels
• Ensuring long term clarity and cohesion across all communications
Awards & Recognitions
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B2B Design Craft, Illustration
Wake + Make for Upwork
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National Association of Advertisers
For Upwork
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Issued by Brand Film Awards presented by PRWeek, MM+M and Campaign US
Beautiful Coffee for Upwork
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Issued by ADC, Wake + Make, In-House Branded Comms/Promotional Materials
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Illustration/Packaging, Series Promo/Collateral - Series In-House - Advertising - TV Film / Online Video In-House - Interactive - Online / Mobile Websites
Wake + Make, Beautiful Coffee, Cook It Up! for Upwork
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For StubHub
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Moderated panel with executive creative leadership from notable agencies. Topic was New Technology and the Evolution of Creative.
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Ticket Oak in the Body Issue
For StubHub