Qualitative And Quantitative

I am a creative director and business intelligence consultant with The Hartsema Group, a B2B FINTECH I helped launch to make businesses better by providing them with informed guidance derived from data collected from the voices of their best customers.

In this role I use a wide variety of skills (both quantitative and qualitative) to collect data, analyze it to find meaningful inferences, and turn it into creative visual stories that inform, inspire and motivate audiences at all levels.

Prior to starting The Hartsema Group, I was the chief marketing officer of Charlotte Metro Credit Union where I created an in-house agency and rebranded the Credit Union for a very successful entry into a new consumer market with an increased digital presence. Our award winning TV and digital campaigns helped increase all of our targeted KPIs by 50-100% and raised the brand's awareness (in market) with high-profile media campaigns that included Super Bowl commercials with NFL and NBA personalities.

Prior to my marketing career, I was an editorial cartoonist and illustrator for The Gaston Gazette and The Charlotte Observer where I also wrote occasional editorial features.

Creative Background And In-House Agencies

I began my creative career as an illustrator and cartoonist for my local paper while working my way through college on the night shift of a data operations center. For one year, I took a leave of absence from my night job and worked full time for The Gazette, immersing myself in learning as much as I could about layout and design from its team of creative professionals. One of those professionals was a wonderful lady named Sally Griffin. Sally was a prolific writer and storyteller who taught me the value of marrying type to visual imagery for effective communication of ideas, and the divine influence of white space. But more importantly, I learned from her the power of transforming data into emotionally compelling stories that move audiences to action.

Early in my marketing career I learned the value of being able to quickly produce professional-level creative work while working in front-line operational departments. This arrangement allowed us to be more nimble with our tactical planning and to get ideas into production much more quickly. It also saved the time and expense of relying on outside agency involvement. Later, as a marketing manager and chief marketing officer, I was able to demonstrate that establishing our own in-house agencies not only allowed us to produce our work more timely and cost effectively, it also allowed us to keep our work more on brand. Time normally spent explaining our brand, mission and strategy to outside creative directors (who would then explain it to their artists, photographers and designers) could be spent focusing on that brand, mission and strategy with less chance of losing any vital elements in the translation.

I continue to be a proponent of using the in-house agency concept as a GTM marketing strategy wherever possible. And leading edge technologies such as AI and robotics are making that strategy more and more effective every day.

Artificial Intelligence

As an undergraduate student, I spent my first two years in the computer science department before a logic class sparked a change of major and a lifelong love of philosophy. But in postgrad I returned for some additional classes in programming and systems under the department head Dr. Bill Davis who, interestingly enough, also held a PhD in philosophy and was an avid proponent of artificial intelligence. Our lab time that should have been focused on C or UNIX was instead spent building experimental heuristic simulations in LISP. I thought it was fascinating work, and I carried that fascination into the development of LLM/SLM agents in the 2020s.

Today, I primarily use small-parameter local SLMs for agentic automation which gives me greater control over the security and integrity of training data. I use Ollama and Anything LLM to develop most of my agents, but my workhorse is an 8 billion-parameter version of DeepSeek R1 running on a sandboxed LINUX machine. I'm a proponent of comprehensive XML-based initial prompt structures rather than successive iterative refinement. In my experience this seems to be the best method for keeping models (especially larger frontier models) focused on useful output while reducing unrelated artifacts.

For my creative workflows I prefer to keep the AI use limited to augmentation. This usually results in an expedited and efficient final product that retains the look and feel of the highly-customized creativity that clients expect. Sometimes I will start with a layout image prompted in a frontier LLM model that I use as an onion skin over which I can more quickly build a custom image. Sometimes I incorporate AI-promoted imagery into layouts created with photography or hand-drawn art. And, like many creators, I will sometimes use my agent as a co-developer to jumpstart the ideation process.

For me, it's important to remember that AI is the tool, not the product.

Skill Mix

My Profile Infographics include visuals that better explain my general professional background and skill mix.

The Skills Distribution chart which shows how my professional acumen is distributed, an Adobe Professional Software Usage graph which shows my competency in the Adobe packages I use most often, and a visualization of my Emotional Intelligence (EQ) from a personality assessment that was provided by Six Seconds North America.

EQ Assessment

Emotional Intelligence or EQ is emerging as a key assessment tool in the science of understanding interpersonal relationships between people and teams. Human beings are extraordinarily complex creatures with a broad operational (and dynamic) range of emotional conditions. Understanding your own tendencies as well as those you interact with is a key to successful teamwork.

We recently participated in an EQ assessment through Six Seconds North America that provided tremendous insight into each of our operational tendencies and noble goals.