Andrew McClellan

The call came on a Sunday night: “Client’s on the way to the airport, and the work may go with them.” By Monday morning I was on a flight to St. Louis. In a windowless conference room, Saudi Aramco leaders were zipping their bags, politely explaining they would finish the project elsewhere.

That project—Aramco’s Accelerated Transformation Process (ATP)—was no routine brief. It was the playbook the world’s largest petroleum exporter would use to diversify its future, protect the Kingdom’s economy, and create roughly 5 million new jobs by 2030. Months of workshops had produced binders of strategy, yet nothing resonated. The material felt like homework; the stakes were epic, the story invisible.

Overnight I became both Executive Creative Director and de-facto Account Director, tasked with rescuing one of the most consequential strategies in global energy—while the agency’s account lead was oceans away at her daughter’s wedding.

The first 48 hours I listened more than I spoke. Frustration, I learned, wasn’t ego—it was anxiety. Decks drowned readers in data but lacked a spine they could retell on a tarmac in Riyadh or an elevator in Houston. The work didn’t need more facts; it needed a narrative.

That night a war-room of writers, designers, developers, and translators reduced hundreds of slides to a single hand-drawn arc: 

• Act I What’s at Risk 

• Act II Where the Opportunity Lives 

• Act III How ATP Gets Us There 

Tuesday morning, we walked Aramco through that page. No theatrics—just a story that flowed. Heads lifted; laptops stayed shut.

Over the next weeks we expanded the arc into a bilingual system that could travel anywhere the company did. Training films and interactive modules let managers run “what-if” scenarios and see instant impact. A universal mission and vision lived as lightly in an email as it did on the Dhahran video wall.

I also handled day-to-day stewardship—dawn stand-ups with Aramco, late-night code checks with dev teams, steady assurance to agency leadership that the sky was not falling.

Within the first year, more than 250 managers—across Saudi Arabia and every global hub—adopted the toolkit, using it to educate and align their teams around ATP. Leadership seminars now open with our film; playbooks travel offshore. The conversation moved from “Why change?” to “How fast can we get there?”

I creative a vision anchored in strategy, technical fluency that de-risks execution, and calm that steadies relationships when turbulence hits. When the future is complex, the story must be simple, human, and impossible to ignore—a discipline I bring to every brief.