ASSOCIATE CREATIVE DIRECTOR (COPY)
Arnold Oluwaseyi Kobina Lawson is a Nigerian American copywriter and filmmaker. He leads Black audience creative for Cricket Wireless at Dieste (Omnicom), Ad Age’s Multicultural Agency of the Year, and for IKEA at Alma.
Cinema is the engine under the copy. He takes an idea the whole way, from concept through development into production, across television, print, digital and social. He builds campaigns the way he builds films, with the finished frame in view the moment the thought arrives. His screenwriting drew recognition from the Sundance Institute for its clear tone, specific world-building and visual storytelling.
Thirteen years of multicultural advertising stand behind the work. He has led integrated creative for national brands and carried campaigns from first concept through production. The teams he builds, he mentors toward a high bar. Those years also taught him that the industry still runs on shorthand about the people it sells to.
So he gets in the room. He pushes the creative, strategy and writing past the old tropes, and the work that comes out gets bought by clients and recognized by the industry. Right now that means Cricket, a brand that has backed HBCUs since 2018 and holds the HBCU football title sponsorship through 2027.
PentaMania
Cricket and WWE have been partners since 2015. PentaMania put Penta Cero Miedo at the center of Cricket’s multicultural work, with PentaMania :30 as the lead cut.
I stayed on it through pre-production, the shoot, and post, until the final export. That meant working directly with Dave Meyers, Radical Media, Coffee&TV, and Republic Studios, the same room for the idea and the finish.
Over the stretch this work ran, Cricket posted a third straight quarter of growth and a 20% jump in subscribers.
First Saturday - Cricket MEAC/SWAC Challenge
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First Saturday - Cricket MEAC/SWAC Challenge *
HBCU football opens in Atlanta every year with the Cricket MEAC/SWAC Challenge. Cricket’s name has been on the game since 2020, and it holds the HBCU football title sponsorship through 2027. This year the game was August 29, on ABC and ESPN.
Most of the work here was creative for the in-stadium and network package. The rest was taking spots Cricket already had and recutting them so they spoke to the people watching on ABC and ESPN, a different crowd from the one they were first written for.
1.2M people watched on average, 1.7M at peak, up 10% on last year. Cricket’s share grew 8% in the same window, the biggest gain in the category.
BRUCE'S BEACH
Self-initiated film. Directed, shot, and edited by Arnold Lawson. Photographs by Temi Lawson❤️
This started as a film photography shoot. One film camera, a creative friend named Barbara Polanco in front of the lens, and the Manhattan Beach shoreline doing what it always does for a portrait. Then we walked up to a bench on a small plot of grass above the water, and the shoot became something else.
The bench sits on Bruce's Beach. In the 1920s, Willa and Charles Bruce built a resort here where Black families could swim, eat, dance, and belong. Their neighbors answered with harassment and fire, and in 1924 the city seized the land. It sat mostly empty for decades. Nearly a century later, Los Angeles County returned it to the Bruce family's descendants.
Black families could swim, eat, dance, and belong.
I made this short for the photography channel my wife Temi and I ran together, and it carries the question underneath everything I make, personal or paid: what's behind the picture? A portrait is the surface. This film goes looking for the ground it stands on.
Cricket Wireless x Pandora. One video and two radio spots, written by Arnold Lawson as AA Lead Creative Copywriter, with a hand in directing all three spots.
Working with a platform that puts a button under every ad reading "Why Ads?" My job, more or less, was writing the answer.
My answer became the campaign line: “Black music is the soundtrack, and Cricket 5G keeps it going.”
These black songs raised most of us, scoring the cookouts, the graduations, and long drives home, so the brand takes the supporting role and lets the record play.
Writing radio in 2026 sounds like a punchline until you sit down to do it. The whole project ran on one rule: be a good guest. Know the house, add to the party, never talk over the music. Or, as the brand likes to say, smile, you're on Cricket.
CRICKET WIRELESS: BLACK MUSIC MONTH CAMPAIGN
