Matt Butcher, Brand Planning Director at The Richards Group

Emily has a potent combination of insightful thinking, strong creative writing, and fantastic presentation skills. She’s able to bring a story to life in an engaging and captivating method that ensures the audience is deeply engaged. Be it with internal audiences or creative teams, she does an excellent job of digging for the most important truths and sharing it in an inspiring manner and is continuing to grow. Emily collaborates well and is always looking for opportunities to hone her craft, meaning she’s teachable and driven.

Jennifer Billiot, Brand Strategy Director at GSD&M

Emily is a fantastic budding brand strategist. I had the pleasure of working with her at GSD&M. Her sharp planning mind, enthusiasm, and work ethic were incredibly appreciated on the Southwest Airlines account. Emily will go far!

Molly Paskal, Account Planner at The Integer Group

I was privileged to work with Emily when she was a Planning intern at The Integer Group. Account Planning is not a discipline that's easy to find someone who gets it from day one, but Emily is one of those talented few. Her drive to learn and her innate planner intuition were clear from the beginning, as she was excited and willing to help out on any project. Aside from writing briefs, pulling stimulus, tackling business questions with case study examples, she showed the ability to establish strong creative relationships, which in my opinion, is the tentpole of the planning role. 

Michael Mackert, Ph.D. Associate Professor at The University of Texas at Austin

I am writing this letter of recommendation for Emily Bradford, as she is a hard-working and skilled student who I believe to be a promising professional.

I had Emily in class twice. The first time was in an account planning seminar, which is an introduction to account planning and provides basics of the role of account planners in advertising agencies and pairs student teams with “real world” clients and advertising agency partners. The second time was in my advertising campaigns class, a class which is also mostly team-based and involves completing work for a variety of clients over the course of the semester. In both courses, Emily was always engaged with the class content and worked hard to help her team succeed on projects. She contributed to her team’s work and was always a key presenter helping share their ideas with clients. In both classes, she was highly valued by teammates.

Emily also excelled on individual assignments, including a final paper in the campaigns that was a thoughtful assessment of what “effective advertising” means to her, her personal approach to creating effective communication campaigns, and what it means for the rest of her professional career. She was more active than most students in coming to office hours, discussing additional books and materials that she might want to read to enrich her in-class education and generally demonstrating a thoughtful approach to her education and preparation for her eventual career. Not all students can thrive in both the team-based and individual assignments in these classes, but Emily showed her ability to work as part of a team or complete individual assignments with ease.

I loved having Emily in class. When I saw her walk into campaigns after having already had her in account planning, I knew there would be at least one team who had a talented and thoughtful person to help ensure its work would be excellent all semester. I believe Emily will do very well in her career, and she will be a great asset to any organization she joins.