Just two years after graduating from COM, Vanessa de Beaumont won her first Clio Award—among the highest honors in the advertising industry—for a viral social media campaign. She’s since picked up a One Show Gold Pencil, seven more Clios, two Effies and six Cannes Lion awards—including a gold Lion for an attention-grabbing Super Bowl commercial—making her a recipient of all the ad industry’s most prestigious awards.

Earlier this year, the editors of Adweek included de Beaumont (’17), an associate creative director at Mischief, a Manhattan ad agency, in the magazine’s annual Creative 100 list, noting that the 29-year-old “has a history of making culturally relevant, viral ad moments.” 

“To be seven years removed from school and on a creative 100 hot list is a consequential accomplishment,” says Doug Gould, a professor of the practice of advertising. “It’s very difficult early in your career to create the kind of positive noise that Vanessa has.”

Always Collaborating, Never Giving Up

De Beaumont initially enrolled in COM as a journalism major, hoping to combine her love of writing and her passion for football into a job as a sports reporter. After discovering a flare for copywriting, she opted to double-major in journalism and advertising. She excelled in both fields, but writing news articles often felt lonely. In advertising, she says, “you’re never working in isolation—you’re always collaborating.”

After graduation, de Beaumont took a job as a copywriter with the Boston ad firm Arnold Worldwide and later moved across town to MullenLowe. She worked remotely for DAVID Miami during the pandemic and then moved to New York in 2021 to join Mischief. The agency was only a year old but was already doing exciting work, she says. 

To write successful ad copy, de Beaumont pushes herself creatively—something she learned to do while writing headlines for Mark Nardi, an advertising lecturer at COM. The meaning of a truly great headline, Nardi taught her, isn’t immediately obvious to the reader.

“It should take, like, point eight seconds for people to process,” de Beaumont says. “Because if it’s so obvious, then you haven’t really led people anywhere. If it’s too complicated, you lose people.”

Perhaps the most important lesson she learned at COM came from former advertising professor Edward Boches, a notoriously tough critic of his students’ work. Boches’ classes taught de Beaumont not to let failure deflate her. Watching your ideas be rejected by creative directors or clients is “undeniably the hardest part of our jobs,” she says.    

“Sometimes you’ll spend all weekend working on something, and you show up to work on Monday and have to start over. The person who can rebound, who has the mental resilience to say, ‘Okay, I’ll just do it better the next time,’ is the person who’s going to rise to the top.”

Big Results on Small Budgets

With so many vehicles available in today’s splintered media market, deciding where and how to spend limited ad dollars is a constant challenge, and de Beaumont is awed by the creative ways her colleagues rise to that challenge.  

Some of her favorite ad campaigns don’t look like ads at all; they’re essentially clever stunts that draw big attention but cost little to execute. Two years ago, for example, she was impressed when Back Market, a seller of refurbished tech, airdropped messages to the demo iPhones inside Apple Stores. Shoppers who accepted the messages were taken to Back Market’s website, where they could see the considerably cheaper prices for refurbished phones.

 “So subversive,” says de Beaumont, with obvious respect.

She pulled off a similarly savvy stunt herself in 2019, when she was tasked with promoting the return of Burger King’s funnel cake fries, which hadn’t appeared on menus since 2010.

It’s very difficult early in your career to create the kind of positive noise that Vanessa has.

Doug Gould

De Beaumont received a creative brief for the Burger King project that included no budget for execution. “But my then partner and I were super ambitious,” she says,” and we just were hellbent on making something happen.”

Their idea: Burger King’s Twitter profile would like influencers’ tweets from 2010 to remind people that some things from the past are worth revisiting.

The results: Influencers took the bait, publicly asking why Burger King was liking their old content, unwittingly creating the buzz BK wanted for its relaunch. After realizing he’d helped promote sugar-coated French fries, YouTuber Casey Neistat posted a video pretending to be outraged that a fast-food giant had exploited him.

“The thing that upsets me the most about all this,” Neistat says in the video, “is just how genius it was.”

The advertising industry agreed with his assessment. The “Twitter Bait” campaign garnered de Beaumont that first Clio, along with several other industry awards.

Pushing Boundaries

When it comes to traditional television ads, de Beaumont appreciates concepts that reach beyond the screen. One of her all-time favorite TV spots is an ad from 2017 that featured a Burger King employee saying, “OK Google, what is the Whopper burger?”—setting off smart devices inside consumers’ homes.

De Beaumont set off action of her own last year with her award-winning Super Bowl ad for the streaming service Tubi. The 15-second spot, which featured Fox sports announcers Kevin Burkhardt and Greg Olsen, tricked viewers into thinking the game had come back from commercial break—and then made it appear someone was scrolling through Tubi’s library, searching for something else to watch.

The ruse sent football fans everywhere scrambling for their remotes. “Interface Interruption” was one of the most talked about ads of the game, and, according to Tubi, it prompted 70,000 people to open the company’s app in the minutes after it aired.

De Beaumont also admires ad campaigns that promote a brand while accomplishing something good in the world. She cites Adidas’s recent “Runner 321” campaign, which highlights the achievements of marathon runners with Downs Syndrome (which is also known as Trisomy 21).

In 2021, de Beaumont helped create Budweiser’s “Bigger Picture” campaign. Budweiser, traditionally a major spender on Super Bowl ads, announced it would skip 2021’s big game and instead dedicate its $5 million ad budget to educating the public about COVID vaccines.

“I love the way this industry has the potential to drive change,” de Beaumont says—in obvious ways (creating poignant public service announcements) and in subtler ones (casting same-sex couples or differently-abled children in commercials).

“I know, a lot of times, the general public doesn’t like to think that advertising is a part of culture, but it has enormous influence on culture,” she says. “And I love that we get to be people who move that needle in a positive direction.”