WINNING WAS
THE STANDARD.
The sign started as part joke, part standard, part war cry.
Notre Dame has “Play Like a Champion Today.” Players touch it before they run onto the field. It is not complicated. It is a ritual. A reminder. A little piece of theater that turns pressure into identity.
I wanted my own version.
So I made one.
The line comes from Beyoncé’s “Flawless,” but the meaning was campaign-specific: winning was not luck, mood, hope, charm, or vibes. It was the operating system. It was the expectation before the first mail piece dropped, before the first video launched, before the first voter got called, before the first opponent figured out they were in trouble.
At Red Brick, the sign became a reminder that campaigns are won by standards. Message discipline. Creative discipline. Voter contact. Timing. Contrast. Nerve. The stuff that looks like instinct from the outside but is really repetition, pressure, and refusing to blink.
It was crude. It was funny. It was dead serious.
Every campaign had its own candidate, its own terrain, its own math, and its own problem to solve. But the protocol stayed the same: find the argument, build the machine, make the work impossible to ignore, and win the room before anyone else understands the room has changed.
IN CONTESTED ROOMS,
I WIN.
Twenty-five campaigns across one of the hardest political environments in America. A 90%+ win rate and a perfect record defeating incumbents, built by running strategy, creative, and message as a single integrated operation.
MEET MARK YARBROUGH.
Mark Yarbrough was not supposed to be the insurgent candidate who looked like the safer bet. That was the assignment.
He was challenging a popular incumbent for Limestone County Commission Chairman in a place where the Republican primary was the election. No general election reset. No second chance. Win the room early or spend the rest of the race explaining why you belonged in it.
My job was to make him look, sound, and move like the next chairman before voters had fully accepted that the current one could lose. That meant building more than a logo or a mail program. It meant creating the visual authority, contrast message, earned media posture, voter universe, and campaign rhythm that made the challenger feel inevitable.
Yarbrough became the centerpiece of a larger slate built through the Leadership for Limestone PAC. Three campaigns. One message spine. One coordinated political infrastructure. A county race run with the discipline and visual confidence of something much larger.
THE SETUP.
I ran every campaign at Red Brick the same way across twenty-five races and a decade of work: strategy, creative, and message as a single integrated operation. One principal accountable for all of it. No handoffs. No gaps between what the campaign said and what it looked like.
The Limestone County slate is the clearest example of the model at full scale. Mark Yarbrough was challenging a popular incumbent for Commission Chairman. Two other candidates were running for commission seats in the same cycle. Three separate races. Three separate budgets. Three candidates who needed to look like a movement, not three long shots.
I proposed something unusual for a county-level race: structure everything under one entity. We created the Leadership for Limestone PAC, formed it from scratch, chaired it, reported it, and ran it as the organizing spine for all three campaigns. One coordinated message. One unified brand. Three candidates who showed up to every voter contact looking like they were already winning.
In Limestone County, the Republican primary was the election. No general. No second chance.
THE STRATEGY.
The incumbent's campaign had a plan. Yarbrough had chaired the Limestone County Water and Sewer Authority, and they intended to make that a liability. They expected him to run from it.
We ran straight at it.
Yarbrough's Water Board record was not a vulnerability. It was the best argument in the race. Under his leadership, the authority earned an A+ credit rating from S&P — the highest possible for a rural water authority in the country — and built $3 million in reserves. We put those numbers in large type and sent them to nearly 30,000 homes. By the time the incumbent tried to make the Water Board an attack, Yarbrough had already made it his opening argument. The attack had nowhere to land.
The incumbent had his own record to answer for. The L&S building — a half-million dollar public gamble the taxpayers were still holding — was documented in the local paper. We didn't need to invent the contrast. We just needed to make sure every voter in Limestone County had seen it.
The creative approach followed the strategy directly: make the challenger look like the incumbent and make the incumbent look like the problem. Bold type. Clear hierarchy. A visual language that assumed the office before a single vote was cast. And an announcement video that didn't introduce a candidate — it put an opponent on defense.
THE WORK.
We built the whole machine — and held it to a standard that had nothing to do with the size of the office.
I produced commercial video for every candidate we worked with. One firm in Huntsville had owned political production in the market until we came in and did it better, faster, and with more variety. No cookie-cutter ads. No templates. Every spot was built from a brief, not a formula. The Yarbrough announcement video was designed to function as an offensive weapon from day one — establishing his leadership record, drawing the contrast with the incumbent, and putting the opposing campaign immediately on defense. The production quality matched what you would expect in a Senate race. That was the point. We set that standard as the expectation, not the exception, because our goal was to attract larger campaigns. The Reed Award validated it.
Beyond the video: brand identity for all three candidates, campaign websites, and approximately 80,000 direct mail pieces across the Limestone County cycle. Multiple drops. Multiple designs. Every piece built around the same contrast architecture.
Voter targeting ran on a proprietary platform we built in-house. We identified high-likelihood voters — those who had cast a ballot in each of the previous five elections, regardless of what those elections were — and built our universe from that floor. We also worked newly annexed areas of the county, precincts that had not previously been in the district but represented attainable persuasion targets with the right contact strategy. Microtargeted social media supported every phase of the ground effort.
Earned media was handled in full. In an era of declining local news coverage, we generated as much as the market could absorb. We staged contrast news conferences surrounded by sign-carrying supporters that made the visual argument before a reporter asked a single question. One campaign looked like a movement. The other looked like what it was.
THE RESULTS.
Yarbrough defeated the incumbent. 53 to 47. In Alabama, the Republican primary was the election. One race. No second chance.
Jason Black won his commission seat outright in a three-way primary with 50 percent, avoiding a runoff. A third aligned candidate won to deliver a full commission majority. The Leadership for Limestone slate went in together and came out on top.
The announcement video won the 2015 Reed Award for Best Web Video from Campaigns and Elections magazine. Red Brick won two Reed Awards that year, competing against national firms running Senate and gubernatorial campaigns.
THE TAKEAWAY.
Three campaigns under one roof is not standard procedure for a county race. It's a strategic bet. If the coordination breaks down, the whole thing unravels. If it holds, you look like an organization while everyone else looks like a candidate.
It held.
The PAC structure gave us something most county campaigns never have: unified messaging and the ability to move resources across three races in real time. Yarbrough got the creative weight behind his challenger narrative. Black got the organizational lift to avoid a runoff. The coalition signal did the rest.
The incumbent walked into the race expecting to attack a record. We had already turned that record into the campaign's strongest asset. By the time they looked for a target, there wasn't one.
The work that gets noticed nationally usually starts at the county level. This one did.