About
Creative strategist who turns audience insight and performance data into messaging that converts.
I joined Kikoff, a consumer credit-building fintech, as its first copywriter in August 2023 and spent three years building the creative engine behind its growth from an 80-person startup to a $1B+ company. I wrote or directed the creative behind 740,000+ new paying customers and 60 percent of a $64.6M paid-social program, work seen four billion times, with zero compliance violations across 800+ launches in one of the most regulated categories in consumer finance. Along the way I wrote the company's first narrative TV, authored the Marketing Compliance Guide its marketing was reviewed against, named its cash-advance app, and built the AI-assisted workflows that let a lean team test more, faster. I carried the same discipline into B2B as the voice of Kikoff Enterprise.
Before that
- Accenture, for Google (2022 to 2023). Senior writer and technical writing analyst. Led a global team of writers on Google-branded content, and contributed early structured feedback and prompt work to Bard, Google's first consumer LLM.
- VERB (2022 to 2023). Content and strategy manager. Analysis and communications for a DeFi coverage protocol written under strict regulatory-language constraints, and data-driven strategy for fintech and Web3 clients.
- FORT:LA (2020 to 2023). Digital content director for the award-winning architectural education nonprofit: multimedia programming with the Huntington, the Getty Research Institute, and the Los Angeles Conservancy, grant writing, and research, editorial, and QA on the digital restoration of Dreams of Dodge with Thomas Hines.
- UC Irvine (2016 to 2022). Writing lecturer and graduate instructor. Original courses in adaptive, cross-genre nonfiction; co-developed a research-writing course with the urban theorist Mike Davis.
Education
MFA, English, UC Irvine (Gerard Creative Writing Fellow). BA, Creative Writing, Pepperdine University (Board of Regents Scholar). Professional certificates in Contract Law (HarvardX) and Blockchain Technology (UC BerkeleyX).
What I do
Creative and content strategy. Messaging frameworks and hierarchies. Creative testing and experimentation design. Performance-data fluency: cost per customer, return on ad spend, test reads. AI-assisted workflows and self-serve creative systems. Copy, script, and campaign writing. Compliance-fluent writing in regulated categories. Cross-functional work across Growth, Product, Legal, Design, and Video.
Why it looks like this
Plain type, blue links that turn purple, nothing in the way. That comes from craigslist, which I once painted by hand for a poetry seminar. That project, and the rest of the writing.
Contact
joel.wood55@gmail.com · LinkedIn · Los Angeles