Recently, I was asked what gets me excited about advertising. I paused, thought, and exclaimed: Infrastructure.
In order to get the right information to the right people at the right time across the right platform, it requires a workflow that ensures the message is accurate, accessible, compliant, relevant, and ready to move. It requires systems that connect strategy to creation, creation to distribution, and distribution to people.
Because great advertising isn’t just about the idea. It’s about everything that has to happen behind the idea to make it work.
When I applied to the MFA Design for Responsible Innovation program in 2024, I wrote about how I wanted to explore “how inclusive design can be applied in an omnichannel world while creating resources that can be better integrated into undergraduate curricula.”
Inclusive design gave way to accessibility, which gave way to compliance.
This led to my work developing Create with Compliance—a multimodal instructional toolkit designed to help advertising students and educators apply accessibility, compliance, and regulatory principles within creative work. The ultimate goal is to move beyond teaching regulatory information toward developing the ability to identify, interpret, and respond to compliance considerations in context.
But let’s get back to my love of infrastructure.
I like knowing what the rules are. Not because I want to play it safe, but because I want to know where the boundaries are—and what we can create within, around, and beyond them. My neurodivergent brain really hates being misunderstood. I like clarity. I like knowing what is expected, why it matters, and where there’s room to push, question, or reimagine. Maybe that’s why compliance doesn’t feel restrictive to me. It feels like a way of making the invisible visible—turning ambiguity into something we can understand, navigate, and ultimately create with.
My work in web content management came of age during the time of 37signals, a web software company based in Chicago, Illinois. Co-founded in 1999 by Jason Fried, Carlos Segura, and Ernest Kim as a web design company, its focus shifted from web design to web application development. The company is best known for Basecamp, followed by products including Backpack, Campfire, and Highrise. In 2006, Fried published a book that helped shape my perspective on project management. Getting Real, a practical guide to business and software development, explores how to build a web application smarter, faster, and with less overhead.
What I remember from the book—and what I use regularly in my professional and academic life—is this: “Constraints force creativity…Constraints drive innovation” (Fried, 2006, p. 17).
At the time, I worked at an all-girls boarding school, and we bent over backwards trying to be everything to everyone, even in spite of ourselves. We taught the classics—Latin, Greek, Chaucer—but also Mandarin. We made it so that students could be on the swim team and in the winter musical. While this definitely appealed to eager students and their families (especially for the price!), it created huge headaches for faculty, staff, and coaches. How can one be in the lead in the school play when she is restricted from rehearsals due to away games? Are we the embodiment of modern educational theory, or are we simply an old-fashioned girls’ school trying to do modern things with an antiquated system?
I read Getting Real with voracity. Why did we have to do it all? Why not hone what we’re good at and then add to it over time?
Fried’s words resonated with me:
Make features work hard to be implemented.
The secret to building half a product instead of a half-ass product is saying no.
Each time you say yes to a feature, you’re adopting a child. You have to take your baby through a whole chain of events (e.g., design, implementation, testing, etc.). And once that feature’s out there, you’re stuck with it. Just try to take a released feature away from customers and see how pissed off they get.
Don’t be a yes-man
Make each feature work hard to be implemented. Make each feature prove itself and show that it’s a survivor. It’s like “Fight Club.” You should only consider features if they’re willing to stand on the porch for three days waiting to be let in.
That’s why you start with no. Every new feature request that comes to us—or from us—meets a no. We listen but don’t act. The initial response is “not now.” If a request for a feature keeps coming back, that’s when we know it’s time to take a deeper look. Then, and only then, do we start considering the feature for real.
And what do you say to people who complain when you won’t adopt their feature idea? Remind them why they like the app in the first place. “You like it because we say no. You like it because it doesn’t do 100 other things. You like it because it doesn’t try to please everyone all the time.”
(Fried, 2006, p. 51)
This wasn’t just a book about software and product development. It was a guidebook for decision-making and workflow processes.
You see, this is advertising. Everything that advertising is stems from knowing who your audience is, what they want (or don’t want), and crafting a message that resonates with them in a way that gets them to take action. A brand that offers too much or not enough is a brand that hasn’t figured out what its audience actually needs—or how to deliver it.
And that’s where infrastructure comes in. The strategy, systems, processes, platforms, people, and policies behind the message determine whether that message can actually reach the right person, in the right place, at the right time, in the right way. Good advertising isn’t just about having something to say. It’s about building the system that makes sure it can be heard.
My next influence came from the world of content strategy. The Elements of Content Strategy, by Erin Kissane, is a concise, 88-page guidebook published in March 2011 that explains the foundations, methodologies, and core practices of digital content strategy. It has become my bible and is required reading for most of my students.
Kissane’s seven basic principles of good content are permanently tattooed on my brain: good content is appropriate, useful, user-centered, clear, consistent, concise, and supported.
She writes that “content creation encompasses writing, illustration, information visualization, metadata and text-equivalent production, and interface writing,” all supported by creative direction and editorial leadership. In other words, content doesn’t simply happen. It requires systems, people, processes, decisions, and support to make it work.
If that doesn’t sound like infrastructure, I don’t know what does.
Rounding out my professional appreciation for content strategy and infrastructure is Content Strategy at Work. In 2012, author and content strategist Margot Bloomstein published a detailed plan for how organizations can create, publish, and manage useful, usable content to meet specific business goals. It introduced me to the idea of a message architecture—another useful tool that I share with my students—which provides a hierarchy for organizing and prioritizing the ideas a brand needs to communicate.
What I love about message architecture is that it forces us to make decisions. What matters most? What supports that idea? What can be left out? Before we worry about the words, the visuals, or the platform, we need to understand the structure underneath them.
Once again, infrastructure.
So, you see, advertising isn’t just about the medium or the message—it’s also about the infrastructure that makes the message possible: the people, processes, systems, platforms, policies, and decisions that move an idea from concept to connection. Which brings us back to compliance.
Right now, I’m reading an amazing book that was published with impeccable timing—Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better by David Epstein. In it, he argues that constraints, not limitless freedom, stimulate creativity and innovation. Sometimes those constraints look like a beloved children’s book written using only 50 words (The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss); sometimes they look like understanding how laws and regulations shape what we can say, show, collect, share, and create.
A disclosure requirement might change how an ad tells its story. A privacy law might force us to rethink what data we collect. An accessibility standard might change how an audience experiences the work. The rules may define the boundaries, but creativity happens in figuring out what we can do within them.
Throughout my MFA, I am often reminded that advertising can sometimes be at odds with art and design. This tension reinforces the need to add more seats to the table when it comes to how we create, communicate, and make decisions. It’s also a reminder that, when defined separately, advertising, art, and design are distinct disciplines with different purposes, practices, and measures of success. But in practice, they overlap, influence one another, and increasingly depend on one another.
Maybe that’s what gets me excited about advertising. Not just the message. Not just the medium. Not even just the creative idea. It’s everything underneath it.
The infrastructure may be invisible, but it’s what makes responsible creativity possible.