We recently connected with Yuchien Wang and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Yuchien thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What was the most important lesson/experience you had in a job that has helped you in your creative career?

Project management, hands down.
At CuboAi, a tech company where I led the creatives for two product launches and a Prime Day campaign, I witnessed how ideas are only ideas until you execute them.

Let me take you through one of our biggest campaigns of the year: Prime Day. As the creative lead, I was responsible for getting the marketing deliverables in shape for 8 countries. My team and I started from scratch. We honed in on the strategy and then tightened the creative direction, right in our wheelhouse. But what’s next? After several brainstorming sessions, the project was going in circles- never making it out of the drawing board.

My manager at the time, Cassie Sung, sat me down and told me to create a list. Following her advice, I listed out all the deliverables from email, social, apps, web, to ads. Then assigned them to different teammates. I then set soft and hard deadlines and conducted cross-team check-ins to ensure everyone was on track. Though it was a severe growing pain moment, I gained a new skill in my toolbox. For the first time in my career, I put way Adobe Suite and fired up Google Sheets.

We not only get all the materials out on time, CuboAi’s product scored best sellers in its category across multiple countries. It was a great feat.

Then I applied this skill to the following product launch: Sleep Sensor Pad. It won a seat at CES Innovation Award. Then with the following Sleep Temp product launch, I noticed that my team and I no longer brainstormed in circles. We knew how to turn concepts into tangible executions.

Yuchien, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m a copywriter. People know that I write ads for brands. But I like to tell them that I help brands tell their stories.
My main job is to sell. Be it selling a product, an idea, or a belief. As a copywriter, I’m here to persuade the audience to inch closer to the brand’s point of view. 

I grew up loving words and always looked forward to journaling before bed. Not knowing that writing could be an actual career, I spent a lot of time playing the cello. Thinking I’d probably end up in the music industry. Eventually, I enrolled in Syracuse University and joined their Communications school. Its advertising program offers a creative track for copywriting. So I thought I’d give that a try. That’s when I really got my first taste of what it’d be like to be a writer in the ad industry. I learned that having a solid concept is key to creating great ads; honest writing is writing that could connect with people; and writing is mostly editing.

Being a cellist trained in classical music has prepared me for long hours of boring, meticulous craft. Very much like polishing up a scale, I would sit in front of my laptop and edit my words they sit somewhat right on the screen. All of these long hours of hard work ladder up to this one goal: if my words could make someone’s day better, it wasn’t a waste of time.

Take a look at my portfolio. Most of my work is created to improve people’s lives. Be it lessening food insecurity, streamlining charity donations, or fun quirky ads of getting old couples to reignite their sparks at an all-inclusive resort. I hope my creativity finds a pocket in the world that makes someone’s day better.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

Non-creatives often think they don’t have what it takes to be a creative. But, creativity is a muscle. It can be trained.
Ideas don’t appear out of thin air. A lot of strategic and logical thinking goes into developing an idea. If you can learn to do this, you’re halfway there.

A campaign that can withstand the test of time and be rolled out across multiple platforms needs to be logically airtight from the start. It’s normal for creatives not to know what a campaign will look like when we first start working on it. Research is essential. All my projects are layered with research from start to finish. I spend a great deal of time combing through Reddit threads, Twitter discourse, and TikTok to fully understand “the lore” of the brand and its world before I start writing.

Amazing ideas sometimes look like an “ah-ha” moment. But usually, an “ah-ha” moment is only made possible through hours of work prior. There’s not much magic to it. If you break it down- creativity is a muscle, so flex it!

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

Beyond my love for writing, I want to lessen the pain and fear that some marginalized groups experience on a day-to-day basis. Remember a time when you were in desperate need of help, and someone gave you a hand? I would love for my work to provide that kind of support for people, both in small and big ways.

For example, my campaign for Cannes’ Future Lions, “Play It Forward,” created with my teammates May and Dahlia, focuses on turning streams into donations. If implemented, it could significantly improve the way people donate and help streamline the flow of money to charities.

I live in New York. As glamorous as the city is, people live in poverty and experience food insecurity. This issue worsened during the pandemic. There is a jarring number of children who go to bed hungry not knowing where their next meal will come from. I would love to one day work on brands or projects that help raise awareness or directly assist these individuals in finding sustainable solutions and improving their lives.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.yuchienchien.com/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yuchien-elly-wang-9278b1115/