Aubre Andrus

Client: Poppy, an on-demand sitter service in Seattle.
Needs: A voice for the Poppy brand, especially for their mascot. Something approachable, magical, and fun, but also reliable and trustworthy.
Solution: A “Meet Poppy” manifesto that could be used across marketing materials and training materials to introduce both parents and hired sitters to the brand.

Chicago Foodseum is the city’s first food museum. I began working with Foodseum during their Kickstarter campaign in December 2014 until their first temporary pop-up exhibit ended in December of 2015. I acted as Director of Marketing in a freelance capacity during this time. Many of my duties could have been considered a managing editor as well since I hired and worked with many freelancers/interns and I oversaw the social media, newsletter, and blog strategy.

Needs: Full-blown bootstrap marketing strategy for early stage startup’s forthcoming temporary pop-up exhibit.

Thanks to my background as a children's book author, I was hired to develop 12 short stories for IBM that teach security lessons with a classic fairy tale twist. The series is titled “Securely Ever After.”

When most people first meet the Ugly Duckling, he comes off as a questionable character. He’s often the last person someone would think to turn to when it comes to security testing. You’ll likely grow a little suspicious of him for one simple reason: He knows how to hack into anything you can possibly imagine. Just today, he hacked into a major international bank. Yesterday, he hacked into a manufacturer. Tomorrow, it could be your company. It’s the stuff of nightmares.
Exposing the Good, the...

Hansel and Gretel have wised up quite a bit since their harrowing childhood experience with the Evil Witch. Their narrow escape garnered them a lot of attention, so it was no surprise that they went on to become expert threat hunters as security analysts for the forest.

Back in the day, Hansel and Gretel used breadcrumbs as a simple way to (hopefully) find their way back home. It was a defense that didn’t end well for them. Now Hansel and Gretel spend their days following a different kind of ...

Bugsy the Hare was always an overconfident gal. Sick of hearing her brag about her work to other developers, Shelldon the Tortoise challenged her to a race: Whoever built the best mobile app would win.

To win the competition, the developers had to consider both application security and functionality. Whoever’s app was rated most highly on the forest animals’ app store by the end of the month would be proclaimed the winner. The mobile app was considered mission-critical to all of the forest an...

Goldie was uncomfortable. It was her first day on the new job and her desk chair was too hard. She’d ask for a softer chair later — for now she had other things on her mind. She’d been brought in to devise a new access management strategy, but the team was so strapped for time no one was available to train her. She was on her own.

Goldie’s manager asked her to give employees access to the systems and data they needed to do their jobs. This was no easy task. In fact, she’d rather eat a cold bo...

Little Red Riding Hood is stressed out. A job in fraud protection is no picnic — far from it. As the digital banking fraud manager for Fairy Tale Bank, she’s constantly assessing her customers to make sure no fraudulent activity is occurring. After all, fraud is no myth — it’s as real as can be. If Red has her way, her customers will stay safe along every step of their journey. Even in the darkest corners of the financial forest, Red’s customers deserve to feel secure and protected.

A Wolf in...

The Emperor was the greatest chief information security officer (CISO) in the land. He felt like the inside of his digital castle was as safe as it could be — there were no external attacks to be found. Any fraudster who tried to scale those walls would be caught immediately thanks to the oodles of protections he had put in place. No outsider would be able to access the Emperor’s priceless data unless he or she were invited to the party. Inside his castle was a happy place. Those who were inv...

I was contracted to write this e-book opt-in piece for Contently. It attracts freelance writers who in turn can join their platform.

Taco Bell is known for its massively popular, outside-the-box menu items. We head to the headquarters to find out where, exactly, they come from.

Opening the 1,000th restaurant location is a milestone fewer than 40 limited-service restaurant brands have achieved, and Firehouse Subs CEO Don Fox is well aware that with the new Rowland Heights, California, location—Firehouse's 1,000th—his company has joined an elite club.

But Fox also isn't surprised; expansion has always been the only way forward.

Ohio’s often underappreciated capital city celebrates its bicentennial this year. One of Columbus’s longest standing—and most welcoming—pockets lies just south of downtown: German Village. Settled by German immigrants in the mid-1800s, the 223-acre community possesses a quiet charm, with its brick homes, wrought-iron fences, and narrow brick-paved streets.

Two years ago, I started a small graphic design business in Venezuela. I had been selling football jerseys prior to that and I saw the potential in e-commerce. But my new graphic design business was small and I was having a hard time finding new customers. My country was (and still is) suffering from a difficult economic situation, which made it harder to find clients who were willing and able to pay for my services.
One day I was doing some research online and a particular book caught my att...

Running a successful crowdfunding campaign feels a bit like winning the lottery. The results are all over the board: instant successes, slow and steady fundraisers, unfunded flops, and underdogs that rise to the challenge just in the knick of time. But all of these campaigns have one thing in common: Success or failure, they were learning experiences.