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The Royal Oak Halloween Home Map. Check out the history, view the map and learn how to use it.

After 16 years in marketing I know what each channel needs, how campaigns should fit together, and what good looks like across every deliverable. What I don't always have is the time to make all of it happen myself. AI fills that gap for me, not by replacing the specialists on my team, but by picking up the small one-off pieces that would otherwise land on my desk half-done or fall off the calendar entirely.

My team is good at hitting deadlines when a launch is forcing the issue, but the recurring work was a different story. Weekly tasks, monthly check-ins, and back-burner items with no hard date attached were the ones that just sat there. Jira views, calendar reminders, and Slack pings didn't move the needle, so I built each person a daily briefing that shows up every morning with what's overdue, what's due today, and what's coming up next week.

The first six months of my team using AI for copy were exhausting. We could be working on the same product, the same campaign, the same week, and end up with three drafts that didn't sound like the same company. My review notes never changed. Stop overselling. Cut the hyperbole. This doesn't sound like us. I was the only person holding the brand voice in my head, and every piece of copy had to go through me before it could go anywhere.

The first hour of every Monday used to be the worst hour of my week. Calendar in one tab, Jira in another, running the whole thing from memory while everything else got staler. Which beats moved over the weekend without anyone telling me. Which ones didn't have sprints yet. What tasks each of those sprints would need. I was doing data entry at 9 AM while my team was already waiting on me to start.

Last Monday I came into work with five new Jira sprints to build from scratch. Each one had 50-plus tasks that needed due dates, proper assignees, and dependencies linked correctly. Before I built this workflow, that kind of morning would have wiped out most of my day. I finished all five in 45 minutes. This is how the system works. The Part Nobody Talks About If you manage a team inside a project management tool, you know how much invisible time goes into sprint setup. You c

A couple years ago I was staring down a problem I'd dealt with a hundred times in my career, except this time it was sixty tasks in a project management sprint instead of a team member sitting across from me. A product launch date got pushed two weeks. Every task had a due date tied to it, every description referenced the original announcement date, and I had a marketing plan exhibit that visualized the whole thing for leadership. Going through and updating all of it manually

There is a task that lives on every marketing director's plate that nobody talks about. The administrative work that does not move a campaign forward, does not make creative better, and does not add anything to the bottom line, but still somehow eats hours out of your week. For me, that task was sprint setup. If you run a marketing team inside a project management tool like Jira, you know what I mean. Before a sprint goes live, someone has to go through every single task, wri

How I helped turn a generic recruiting flyer into something that actually speaks to why you'd want to join the department.

This year I decided to step it up a notch, and do a Candy Land theme in our front yard. Thankfully I have a husband who is extremely patient, and allows me to experiment... all for the sake of catering to my creative needs! Our daughter will be 4 at the end of December, so we thought it was a good time to get her an outdoor playhouse. I snagged one online for $40!! Just needs a little spray paint, and other customization (if I want), and it'll be like new. This house retails