Jury Selection: Shayne Terry

Jury Selection

Shayne Terry

Director of Content Strategy,
Trekk

Shayne Terry is the Director of Content Strategy at Trekk, a tech-driven creative services agency based in Rockford, Illinois. She’s worked on multi-channel campaigns for clients of all sizes, from family-run small businesses to global corporations. Trekk is a 20-person full-service agency with a mostly B2B client base. Check out their Davey Award-winning pop-up augmented reality mailer for a taste of what they do.

Prior to joining Trekk in 2017, Shayne spent five years at the healthcare technology startup Zocdoc. She studied English and American Literature and Irish Studies at New York University and earned a Master of Arts in Modernity, Literature, and Culture from University College Dublin.

Shayne’s Selects

We ask jurors to weigh in on what they find interesting in culture. Shayne chose categories currently offered this season at the Davey Awards and paired projects in the industry that she feels exemplify those categories.

Podcast — Individual Episode

The Bowery Boys, a history podcast about New York City, is reliably good fun, but the boys really outdid themselves with the episode The Story of Flatbush: Brooklyn Old and New. They managed to cram so much (extremely well-researched) Flatbush history into one episode while also giving listeners a taste of what Flatbush is like today. I am lucky to live in Flatbush, and one of my favorite recent memories is listening to this episode while walking up Flatbush Avenue, past many of the landmarks they described, like Kings Theatre, Erasmus Hall, and the Flatbush Dutch Reformed Church.

Podcast — Cohosts

The Home Cooking podcast from Samin Nosrat and Hrishikesh Hirway was a bright spot in 2020. These two on their own are individual creative powerhouses but get them together and they make the most joyful, love-filled experience for your ears. The show is ostensibly about home cooking — they take questions from listeners like “What do I do with five pounds of dried beans?” — but it’s also about friendship and family and grief and how to keep going when things feel hard. They officially ended the series in December of 2020, but they still get together for the occasional bonus episode.

Online Advertising and Marketing — Mobile Marketing

It’s tough to get SMS marketing right. You want it to feel conversational, but your audience knows it’s automated. Clinical psychologist and founder of Good Inside Dr. Becky Kennedy is, IMO, doing it right. Her free opt-in SMS subscription delivers just one parenting tip per week. It arrives every Wednesday morning, right on time. Some contain prompts you can text back if you want a little more on the topic, and the automated replies are on point — whenever I engage with these texts, I feel like I’m getting words of encouragement from Dr. Becky herself. There are also prompts you can text any time for a bit of encouragement in those tough parenting moments, e.g. “Hard drop-off.” What parent out there hasn’t had a hard drop-off? This is content marketing that feels like a true act of service, and I’m here for it.

Social Content and Marketing — Social Good

I am amazed by the work that architect Adam Paul Susaneck does over at his Instagram account Segregation by Design. This project “aims to document the destruction of communities of color due to red-lining, ‘urban renewal,’ and freeway construction” using aerial photography and demographic data. Even if you understand the history of redlining intellectually, the before and after images are shocking. The goal is to create an “atlas of urban renewal” that will eventually include all 180 municipalities that received federal funding from the 1956 Federal Highway Act. (14 have been covered so far.) Learn more about the project here.

Non-Broadcast Film and Video — How-to & Instructional

Trekk is a HubSpot Solutions Partner and we use HubSpot to execute many of our client projects, from marketing automation to custom website development. Part of my job is to stay ahead of every new HubSpot tool and feature, which is a big lift because they are constantly rolling out new ones. Kyle Jepson, HubSpot Evangelist, is a must-follow on LinkedIn. He regularly shares HubSpot how-tos, tips, and tricks in the form of quick, digestible videos. Kyle is a great teacher and his enthusiasm makes it easy to get excited about what HubSpot can do.

Non-Broadcast Film and Video — Low-Budget

I am a big fan of the work that librarians are doing on TikTok and Reels (not to mention the work they do in general!). There are so many fantastic library accounts but I think my favorite is the Milwaukee Public Library’s. Whether they are celebrating the act of getting your first library card or smashing stereotypes about who reads what, these folks are clearly having a ton of fun.

Personal Websites

Personal websites should be full of personality, and I love what the writer Catherine Lacey did with hers. It’s got all the elements of a typical author website — bio, book promotion, links to work published online, etc. — but it’s all presented in an off-center way, with floating ephemera and thought-provoking questions like “When did people stop allowing their websites to be any fun at all?” On one page you can submit a form to answer the question “What have you lost?” These form submissions really do go to Catherine, and she has been known to discuss them in her newsletter. (If you like her site, you’ll probably love her most recent novel.)