Blaise Hart-Schmidt

Atomicdust has been around for over 20 years in St. Louis — as the person responsible for marketing the marketers, what’s the weirdest or most uncomfortable thing about having to sell your own agency’s brand?

Our team’s talent makes my job easy. They develop amazing creative; I just have to put it out into the world.

But sometimes I have to be the creative police. My teammates have big, bold ideas, but they’re not always things we should tie to the Atomicdust brand. One time during the pandemic, Mike and Jesse (Partners at Atomicdust) sent me a video of them putting hot dogs into a giant industrial fan we have at the office. They were finally trying an experiment they’d joked about for years. It was Covid—we were all stir crazy and the office was empty, so they went for it. Mike wanted me to post the video on social, and it probably would have gotten tons of engagement… but we needed to consider the optics.

Most of the time I’m helping promote the team’s genius, but every once in a while I have to be firm about where to draw the line.

(Now that I’m thinking about it, there are several Atomicdust stories about hot dogs. You can buy me a coffee to hear the other ones.)

The agency sits at this intersection of branding and web design, which means you’re probably surrounded by people with strong opinions about fonts and button colors all day — has that changed how you notice (or silently judge) design in your everyday life?

Growing up, my mom was an agency art director—so I’m not new to strong opinions or things needing to be exactly right. (I remember her helping me lay out a 4th grade research report in Quark, which was a precursor to InDesign. RIP Quark.) But Atomicdust has taught me even more about why design matters. To paraphrase and combine a bunch of different quotes, everything in our lives is designed, and it’s not just how they look, but how they work and impact the human experience. Whether you realize it or not, it’s all a product of design.

Now I’ve become the person pointing out a billboard with too much text, or bad wayfinding in a store or a site with really great user experience. My husband tolerates it.

St. Louis has a bit of an inferiority complex when it comes to being taken seriously as a creative market — do you actually believe that’s changing, or is it something people in the local industry just say to make themselves feel better?

St. Louis is overflowing with talent. That’s not what holds us back. What does sometimes hold us back as a creative market is when the talent here is overlooked by organizations based here, too. I’ve seen cultural institutions and companies here hire agencies outside of St. Louis without even considering local teams. That sends a message, and it’s a missed opportunity. The creatives here are just as qualified and capable as anywhere else.

With 25 people, Atomicdust is small enough that everyone probably knows everyone’s business but big enough to have real specialization — where does a Director of Marketing actually fit in the social ecosystem of a place like that?

I’ve always been a generalist. I just have too many interests to not be. And our team doesn’t really care about job titles. If you have good ideas, or the skills to do something, you’re encouraged to jump in. That means I’ve gotten to be involved with almost every aspect of our company.

In seven years at Atomicdust, I’ve (unofficially) sat in a ton of seats, from account manager and brand manager to copywriter, salesperson and digital strategist. A few years ago I joined the leadership team. Since my main role is running Atomicdust’s own marketing and sales, I’m not always in the day-to-day of client projects like my teammates are. But I think (I hope) my teammates value my input because I see things from multiple perspectives.

If you had to describe your job to someone at a dinner party without using the words ‘brand,’ ‘strategy,’ ‘storytelling,’ or ‘digital,’ what would you actually say you do all day?

I figure out what marketing teams need to grow their business, how Atomicdust can deliver it better than anyone else, and then communicate it as clearly and memorably as possible to bring them on as clients.

And stop the team from posting hot dog videos.