Hey, let's talk.
I’m Row/Rowe/Ro/Rowena/Ween. She/her.
rowena@yelp.com / rowenajayneharris@gmail.com
+1 628 202 6533
linkedin.com/in/rowenajayne/
About me
Writer, creative director, nerd. From the UK, now living and working in San Francisco. Obsessed with story, audience, and strategy. Big fan of laughter, kindness, and getting shit done. Often silly, always determined.
I ask questions. I love mentoring. Still obsessed with learning.
Experience
ACD copy, Yelp
January 2022—present
- Creatively direct Yelp’s performance marketing efforts. Manage partner agency creative process and approvals. Determine weekly creative strategy for creative testing and quarterly large-scale briefs to deliver thousands of assets each year. Since 2020, our team has reduced CPAs by ~50% and increased CVR by ~90%.
- Developed creative feedback guidelines to help stakeholders improve feedback quality, bring clarity to roles and responsibilities, and smooth up decision-making. This system added efficiency, removed blockers, and helped collaboration.
- Creatively directed and oversaw a large-scale testimonial shoot concept for B2B performance, web, and email, interviewing six local business owners who shared their passions, struggles, and why Yelp helps them succeed.
- Co-developed a proactive creative process to engage, mentor, and coach team members in concepting. Each quarter we held workshops based on a new brief written by an ACD, refined ideas, and presented 3 concepts to stakeholders.
- Assisted determining shot list and art direction for our first branded shoot since the updates. Assets from this shot list continue to outperform stock photos and old-brand assets across performance marketing channels.
- Converted Yelp’s largest brand anthem to date into performance marketing. Assessed 100s of photography assets, OTT video content, and campaign branding to cut down and “performance-ify” TOF creative for Google Discovery, Facebook, Instagram, and programmatic.
- Creatively directed and delivered ~70+ revenue-impacting and ROI positive creative briefs with multiple assets across web, email, performance, direct mail, product, and more YOY.
Copy Manager, Yelp
April 2019–January 2022
- Continued to manage the team writing, editing, proofing, and QA of 130+ global emails for Yelp’s largest and longest running email. Further improved process, decreasing LOE by 77% while continuing to maintain 100% output. Improved the editorial calendar and implemented learnings to increase opens by 44% while decreasing unsubs by 98% from 2019–2021.
- Partnered with Product to launch Yelp’s personalization feature, focusing on everything from the information architecture and branded awareness language to the copy flow.
- Co-wrote Yelp’s second iteration of the brand guidelines, working cross-functionally with marketing and brand to strengthen the voice and raise the quality of the work.
- Helped hire Yelp’s first UX writer, partnering on Yelp's initial Product copy guidelines. Implemented a system via Slack to support and manage Product Design’s copy needs as the team expanded.
- Researched and co-wrote Yelp’s first expanded UX copy guidelines and first UX design principles. Later helped to hire 100% of Yelp's talented UX writers. Continued to support team with brand and copy queries.
- Helped to hire ~80% of the new creative team as we moved towards bringing top agency talent in-house. Trained and onboarded new hires in Yelp’s brand.
- Oversaw and gave feedback on 100% of the creative team’s output, advising on brand, style, design, strategy, and copy. Helped the creative team deliver 100s of impactful, consistent, on-brand projects per year for consumer and B2B across performance, display, email, push, social, and more.
- Managed and lead the creative collaboration of Yelp's first cross-functional 360 campaign to celebrate 15 years. Partnered with data science to deliver a concept based in data from Yelp's review base, anchoring the story in Yelp's brand core—connecting people to great local businesses.
- Continued to manage, onboard, and train writers and designers—agency and in-house—in Yelp’s brand voice, best practices, and style guide.
- Creatively directed and delivered ~100+ revenue-impacting and ROI positive creative briefs with multiple assets across web, email, performance, direct mail, product, and more YOY.
Senior copywriter, Yelp
April 2018–April 2019
- Joined a tight XFN team to tackle the company’s huge effort of modernizing Yelp’s brand and voice. Expanded and co-developed ongoing refinements to Yelp’s company brand guidelines and Product copy guides.
- Concepted and wrote Yelp’s followup social campaign to raise awareness of Yelp Elites, delivering 3.5x ROI, increasing engagement ~40%, and viewer retention of nearly 80% on YouTube. Researched and created a product marketing messaging guide for the Yelp Elite Squad.
- Continued to manage, onboard, and train writers and designers in Yelp’s brand voice, best practices, and style guide. Interim manager for the copy team as we hired a new lead.
- Oversaw and managed the team writing, editing, proofing, and QA of 130+ global emails for Yelp’s largest and longest running newsletter.
- Created and maintained an editorial calendar system to test and improve copywriting, increasing open rates by 24% and decreasing unsubs by 30%. Defined the tone for the Local Yelp newsletter. Streamlined editorial calendar and newsletter process, reducing hours by over 50% while maintaining 100% output.
- Concepted various engaging, eye-catching campaigns and wrote mountains of copy for Community, Social, Product, Consumer Lifecycle, and more. Creative lead on high stakes campaigns.
Copywriter, Yelp
Feb 2017–April 2018
Based on my experience with Yelp’s early brand and style, I joined the creative team at HQ in San Francisco as copywriter and editor. The main focus of my role was concepting campaigns, copywriting, and creating Yelp’s first official brand guidelines.
- Researched and co-wrote Yelp’s first brand guidelines which paved the way for marketing and product to actively align on brand voice for the first time.
- Concepted and created Yelp’s first social campaign to raise awareness for Yelp Elites, delivering 2x ROI, increasing social engagement ~22%, and achieving a viewer retention of ~90% on YouTube.
- Co-developed Yelp’s first OOH B2B campaign promoting reservations software, driving 17% lift in partnering restaurant reservations.
- Co-concepted and wrote TV and OTT campaigns for Yelp features Request a Quote and Reservations leading to 160%+ feature awareness.
- Oversaw and managed the team writing, editing, proofing, and QA of 130+ global emails for Yelp’s largest and longest running newsletter
- Strategized, designed, and tested a successful redesign that delivered between 21–29% incremental clicks during the experiment.
- Helped to hire ~33% new staff to the growing creative team
- Mentored and onboarded new hires in Yelp's brand, style guide, Local Yelp, and email marketing best practice. Copy lead for all high stakes projects.
- Co-concepted and wrote brand campaigns for TV, OTT, radio, social, OLV, and OOH. Also, landing page content, email marketing, product copy, display ads, and performance marketing.
Editor, Yelp
Jan 2014–Feb 2017
- Managed an international team of editors for Yelp’s longest running, largest send email.
- Helped to oversee and managed the team writing, editing, proofing, and QA of 130+ global emails.
- Wrote Yelp’s early style guide.
- Concepted and wrote for email, product, performance, PR, content, and more.
Senior Community Manager, Yelp
May 2010–Jan 2014
I advanced brand awareness of Yelp in Leeds via engaging on social media; blogging and email marketing; organising events, from low-key gatherings to large scale parties; partnering with local PR, brands, businesses, and marketing events; and acting as ambassador to the community of local reviewers.
Skills
Creative
Creative direction
Branding & advertising
Copywriting & graphic design
Creative strategy & marketing
Prompt engineering LLMs
Client
Presenting & pitching
XFN collaboration
Product
Content design & conversation design
Information architecture
Product marketing messaging
Channels
Performance marketing, DR, paid social
B2B & B2C
Email, content, web, UX/UI, social,
DM, OOH, OTT, TV
Leadership
Project management, budgeting, scheduling
Team management & mentoring
EQ & vision
Project supervision & feedback, the “hard” convos
Personal
Photography, painting, pottery, music
Critical thinking, philosophy, mindfulness
Games games games nerd, console and board games
Tech
Adobe Suite
Figma, Sketch
JIRA, Wrike, Asana, Workfront, Trello
Google suite
Chat GPT etc
Logic, Garageband
Education
BA (Hons) Creative Writing, University of Leeds, UK
Hobbies
Obsessed with keeping creative, whatever it is. Right now it’s ceramics.
Walking in the park with our dog Tofu, then getting a beer after at our local.
All things gaming because I’m a massive nerd. Late to the Stardew party, but here we are.
Travelling when I can, then picking up delightful phrases in non-English languages. (English is my native language.)