Art director Corinne Daldorph is known and respected throughout her field for spearheading dozens of innovative campaigns for a long list of illustrious brands. Her job demands that she draw attention to her clients, many of which compete for consumers in a saturated market. To that end, Daldorph is remarkably effective. Her expertise covers a broad swath of applications within the creative and advertising industries, including an unmatched talent for the use of social media platforms to reach potential customers in the most crucial demographics.

“Without labeling myself as an Art Director at the time, I think my first art direction position was in my own company,” Daldorph said, describing her early experiences with the enormous array of responsibilities her future career would hold. “I would create concepts, be on shoots making sure the overall idea and execution were in line with the concept, and then oversee the entire edit.”

For decades, her predecessors focused primarily on the artistic and creative side of advertising. In the modern world of social media and big data, however, there are more tools than ever to help advertisers identify who their current and potential customers are and what appeals to them. One of the effects this explosion in the use of “big data” has had is to create a sort of arms race within the advertising industry. The cost of ignoring or misusing these new tools can be staggering. Working as an art director in advertising today demands that Daldorph be as fluent in the high-tech data-driven aspects of the industry as she is with the more conventional creative component.

“I got interested in strategy and worked for a start-up as an influencer marketing strategist, at the time when influencers started to become more and more relevant. I moved to New York, where I continued my career in integrated strategy,” Daldorph said. “The plan was always to return to the creative field once I gained an understanding of how data works, in order to make smarter creative work… Having an understanding of how to work in a social field is crucial not only for advertisers, but for any creator.”

Daldorph stands at the cutting edge of the advertising industry. Not only is she an exceptional creative force in her own right, she’s also capable of utilizing the full potential of social media platforms to deliver meticulously-crafted content to millions of possible customers.

Among her illustrious clients is Hugo Boss, the iconic German fashion company. The Hugo Boss brand has long been associated with its ultra-high-end formalwear, and is perhaps best known for its sleek and stylish men’s suits. In 2018, however, the company began a new venture to reach a more youthful, casual clientele. It would continue selling its classic, more mature formalwear under the brand name BOSS, while offering a new line called HUGO, which embraces a younger aesthetic and audience. Determined to put the best team together to promote the launch, Hugo Boss contracted advertising firm Annex88, where Daldorph worked at the time.

“I, together with Annex88, was tasked to create a campaign to highlight the collaboration and to create hype around the launch event,” she explained. “This was the first big activation for the HUGO brand which allowed me to not only create a multi-platform campaign, but to establish their social presence and legacy.”

Because of her proven effectiveness on similar projects, Daldorph was the obvious choice to head the project. The firm immediately approached her to be the art director for the campaign.

“Hugo Boss is one of Annex88’s clients, and I was assigned to the project as they saw it fit my skill set, as it tied social concepts together with an experiential execution,” she said. “Together with Annex88, I was tasked to create a campaign to highlight the collaboration and to generate hype around the launch event.”

As the lead creative figure, Daldorph was given an immense amount of responsibility on the HUGO release promotion campaign. She headed up the campaign’s social media channels, designed imagery for each of the accounts, and developed promotional concepts that would connect the brand’s roots with its new brand ambassador, Liam Payne. Fans of the enormously successful boy band One Direction will remember Payne as a singer in the group.

“I was the lead creative for the entire campaign, in which I was responsible for creating digital teaser content for HUGO’s social channels including Youtube, Facebook and Instagram,” Daldorph recalled. “By taking inspiration from HUGO’s logo and the Liam Payne campaign footage, I designed the profile pictures for all of the channels. To further our teasing phase, I was tasked to come up with a concept to tie-in Berlin with the overall image of Liam at the forefront of music and fashion.”

Her tireless efforts and brilliant creativity were critical to the campaign’s ultimate success. The amount of work Daldorph did on the HUGO campaign drove a massive wave of buzz around the launch. Those who worked alongside Daldorph on the campaign saw up close just how talented a leader she is. Among those is Reginald Van Nurden, Assistant Creative Director at Annex88.

“I’ve worked on a number of accounts, projects and campaigns with Corinne over the past two years, each one more complex than the last,” Van Nurden said. “Working with Corinne is an incredibly collaborative process driven by both strategic insight and pure creativity. In tandem with her indefatigable work ethic, these qualities contribute to an incredibly strong working experience.”

The HUGO launch was not the only Hugo Boss campaign on which Daldorph worked. She was also at the forefront of the company’s other big launch event for the BOSS line. The counterpart to the HUGO line, the BOSS line was aimed at a more traditional and mature clientele. Daldorph elected to design the campaign around a concept that while the new line was formal, the high-end fashions were versatile enough to be worn in any occasion.

“I was the sole art director on this campaign which included everything from concept, choosing talent and locations, making storyboards and directing on set,” Daldorph explained. “I was tasked to shed some light on what’s possible to do while wearing a suit. I picked athletes from the worlds of BMX, basketball, skateboarding, and freerunning, with campaign content featured on the brand’s website and Instagram. By working with a range of athletes, BOSS is showing consumers there is a place for tailored suits in more adventurous settings.”

 

The BOSS campaign, dubbed Suit Challenge and featuring actor Chris Hemsworth (of Marvel’s “Thor” and “The Avengers” series of films), was an enormous success under Daldorph’s leadership. Olivia Reid Cooper, senior art director at the marketing and advertising firm Laundry Service, worked with Daldorph on the launch event campaign and sang praise of her colleague.

“I worked closely with Corinne on an influencer-driven project featuring Chris Hemsworth called Suit Challenge for the fashion brand Hugo Boss. Corinne created and executed the campaign to shed light on what exactly is possible when wearing a suit, collaborating with athletes from a variety of sports,” Cooper said. “Corinne brought a high degree of craft to both the ideation process and to her directing of the video series for the campaign. It’s by her hand that the project came fully to life.”

Daldorph’s experience leading the campaigns for Hugo Boss granted her a sizable advantage in another of her incredibly successful projects. One of her most effective projects to date, at least in terms of its social media reach and response, is the campaign she ran for the launch of the MAFF.tv website. The site’s name is an acronym for ‘Music, Art, Fashion, Forward,’ fields which comprise the central focus of the media platform’s content.

“The platform highlights new and upcoming artists as well as established musicians, curators and painters to name a few. All of the content lives in the world of either music, art or fashion, the purpose being to bring those worlds closer together, with creativity as the common denominator,” Daldorph said, describing the project’s objectives and how she became involved.

“Lauren Nadel, the founder of MAFF.tv, had seen my work for Adidas Originals and had been to a few events I art directed. She reached out to me and we had a conversation about it, and she immediately brought me on.”

Nadel swiftly saw how valuable an asset Daldorph would be to the site’s ultimate success. For MAFF to take off, it was critical to spread awareness of the project and to steadily increase the momentum of the growth of its user base. The first step was to constantly keep the site full to the brim with content from new artists, designers and musicians. The next challenge was to reach through the noise and tap into the deep well of ideal potential users. This particular challenge would be Daldorph’s domain, and was yet another opportunity for her to prove herself an unrivaled art director. According to Nadel, she couldn’t have hoped for a more skilled and efficient person for the job.

“Corinne art directed the most beautifully designed site, being a master of Adobe creative suite and understanding the web and its code. Corinne developed from scratch our latest CMS and front interface in a trendy and brilliant way,” Nadel said, explaining how varied and important Daldorph’s work was to MAFF. “Not only did Corinne spearhead the creative direction of the website but she also leads our social channels… She was responsible for the brand’s art direction and graphic design for all mediums, and she contributed tremendously to the success of the design team and marketing program.”

Measuring the success of a campaign like MAFF’s is much more accurate and immediate in the digital age of big data. Upon taking charge, Daldorph immediately set about exceeding even the most optimistic hopes for the campaign’s success. Nadel, who had placed her confidence in Daldorph, was blown away by the results.

“Under Corinne’s direction, MAFF’s social media followers increased by 700-percent in less than three months — improving the engagement and visibility of the brand, as well as the sales,” Nadel said. “Corinne has garnered up nearly a 10k platform across social networks within 3 months. She has strategized and creative-directed our YouTube channel, which has a total of more than a million views.”

The level of growth seen following Daldorph’s work as MAFF’s art director is simply staggering. The number of MAFF.tv site users and social media users sharing posts about MAFF grew to a fever pitch, building a solid foundation for the site’s future. Much of Daldorph’s success with the MAFF campaign can be attributed to her strong personal belief in the project’s importance. Unlike other streaming platforms devoted to a single niche, MAFF offers artists and creators across mediums the chance to be featured in the spotlight.

“When all of the spotlight shines on the musician, it’s usually not visible who was behind the production of the actual video. So with Maff I saw a possibility to bring a greater focus to the creators themselves,” Daldorph explained. “Every single person that we know who was a part of a given production automatically gets their own hubpage on the site that will be populated with all of their content.”

The spirit of MAFF reflects Daldorph’s own beliefs in the power of art to reach the masses. In a saturated industry, she stands out among her peers as one of her generation’s most skilled and successful art directors. Entrusted with the success of hugely-expensive campaigns for brands like Adidas and Hugo Boss, she has never failed to exceed the hopes and expectations of those who seek her out. Corinne Daldorph is an art director capable of maximizing the power and reach of her position far more effectively than any other figure in the industry today.