Harris Davis Gets to the Idea Beneath the Brief
Harris was flipping through Communication Arts while studying at Portfolio Center in Atlanta and saw this ad. There wasn’t a sizzling ribeye or an ironic visual metaphor. The copy alone sold the steak.
“It showed me that an ad can be complete and perfect using just words,” Harris remembers. “I knew right then that this was what I wanted to do for a living.”
He has spent the past three decades discovering everything that has to happen first.
Harris began as a copywriter and went on to hold creative leadership roles across agencies including 360i, Publicis, and Tenthwave. In 2014, he founded By & Large, a boutique creative shop he ran for roughly a decade. Over that span, his clients have included IBM, The Weather Company, Ashley HomeStore, Guinness, Dentyne, the Asbury Park Boardwalk, HP, and the Boys & Girls Club of Monmouth County.
Today, he brings that experience to Sageworx through writing and concepting for campaigns, websites, content, and advertising, along with providing pragmatic creative oversight wherever it’s needed. Copy remains his bread and butter, but he’s never been keen on closing his laptop once the copy is finalized.
If we wanted to get great work produced, we had to roll up our sleeves.
By & Large was never more than five people big. Larger clients like IBM and Ashley could support outside specialists; smaller businesses and nonprofits often could not.
Harris learned to build Shopify sites, use a DSLR camera, light shoots in their studio, edit video, and work across Figma, Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. “You learn out of necessity to do a lot of things a traditional copywriter or creative director would turn their nose up at.”
That’s what he means when he calls himself a “figure-outer.” He may enter a project through the language, but he stays attentive to everything the message has to support.
The experience reinforced how to envision an idea through the entire process: how it would appear in a layout, what it would demand from production, where it might fail under a real budget, and whether it could be carried across every required touchpoint.
That instinct to keep contributing wherever the work needs experienced eyes also shapes how Harris works now. He was diagnosed with primary lateral sclerosis in 2016. The slow progressing neurodegenerative condition first affected his speech; his voice is now largely limited to short sentences and words.
In virtual meetings, he contributes through chat, sends talking points in advance, and works with collaborators who can bring him into the conversation.
One colleague recently called him “the adult in the Zoom.” Whichever way his input is delivered, his collaborators value how it drives complex problems towards simple solutions.
Your job is to know a product better than the company who makes it.
Asked which clients have required him to become fluent in an unfamiliar industry, Harris answers, “Pretty much every client but Guinness.”
“One of the best things about being an advertising creative is that you become an expert on everything, quickly,” he explains. “Your job is to know a product better than the company who makes it and to understand the audience better than they know themselves.”
Sometimes, he has only a few days to get there.
A recent Sageworx project brought him into the world of JULABO, whose temperature-control equipment is used in highly technical settings, including climate testing for Mars rover components. The campaign needed to reach aerospace engineers and help visualize highly controlled or difficult-to-access environments.
Harris and the team had to fully absorb what made those engineers tick: their pain points, anxieties, personalities, and tolerance for an artful brand film versus “a low budget sales pitch by a talking head in a lab coat.”
Sometimes, we have to get nerdy if we have any hope of making a connection.
JULABO also gave the team an unusual opportunity: with AI-enabled video production, Sageworx could bring audiences into technical environments that would otherwise require extensive access, logistics, or healthy production budgets.
But how do you decide what’s worth showing when you have a tool that can show anything?
“Creativity isn’t about making complicated things sound less complicated,” Harris says. “It’s about deciding what deserves attention and what can disappear.”
AI shouldn’t be treated as the approver.
The JULABO work showed Harris what AI can make newly possible from a visual standpoint – and why greater capability places more pressure on human judgment.
He uses AI for thought starters and to refine a headline “six ways to Sunday.” He has watched it accelerate technical tasks across writing, design, editing, and production, many of the same skills he spent years acquiring while running By & Large.
“I don’t see AI as a threat so much as a shift,” he says. “As long as brands need original thinking, human judgment and stories rooted in real experience, there will always be a role for creative people.”
What concerns him is when people outsource that judgment along with the labor. He has seen clients run finished copy through AI for approval rather than making the call themselves.
“AI lowers the barrier to producing words, but it doesn’t automatically produce good writing.”
A tool, at the end of the day, is a tool. Who knows the brand? Who assesses the thinking? More than anything, who accepts responsibility for the choices that build a body of work?
All great advertising starts with a human truth.
For Harris, those questions always lead back to the same place. He found it again while working with Kibeam, an education technology company founded by the inventor of the LeapPad. He learned the scale of the childhood literacy crisis, its effects on children and families, and the frustration of school administrators and teachers overwhelmed by digital tools promising improvement.
Kibeam’s AI-powered handheld wand interacts with paper books. Through voices, music, movement, and story-based games, it guides children word by word without putting another screen in front of them.
For Harris, the project’s central tension was more compelling than the novelty of the device: advanced technology was being used to preserve an experience educators already trusted.
“The most effective way to teach a child to read is still with paper books,” he says. Kibeam was using technology to draw children further into the book already in their hands.
“All great advertising starts with a human truth,” Harris says. “Even if the idea is fantastical or complete fiction, it’s rooted in something we have experienced, felt, seen, laughed at, cried over, endured, loved.”
Write less, say more.
Harris prefers creative briefs that are, in his words, “brief.” The best ones give a team enough direction to think freely without burying the work in minutiae.
That doesn’t mean simply writing less. The power to distill only becomes possible after the research, technical detail, client history, audience tension, production constraints, and competing opinions have been made to point in the same direction. For a growing company, one good line can be the thing everyone rallies around.
“Losing my voice has made me appreciate the power of words even more,” he says. The discipline behind his approach, however, was established long before his diagnosis.
Years ago at Portfolio Center, the steakhouse ad seemed complete because one sentence did all the work without asking a visual to rescue it.
Harris now knows the work hidden behind that kind of completeness: learning the product, understanding the audience, and knowing what to leave off the page.
“A brief can explain but a line can distill,” he says. “Write less, say more.”