ASSOCIATE CREATIVE DIRECTOR (COPY)
Arnold Oluwaseyi Kobina Lawson is a Nigerian-American Copywriter and Filmmaker. He leads Cricket Wireless’ African American and HBCU platform at Dieste(Omnicom), Ad Age’s Multicultural Agency of the Year. His grounding in cinema is the engine behind his copywriting and the reason he takes an idea 360 from concept through development and into production across television, print, digital, and social. He builds campaigns the way he builds films, with the finished frame already in view at the moment the thought arrives. His screenwriting drew recognition from the Sundance Institute, praising its clear tone, specific world-building, and exciting visual storytelling.
Thirteen years of leadership in multicultural advertising stand behind the work. He has led integrated creative development for national brands, where the thinking and the making answer to each other across advertising, branding, and digital. He has carried campaigns from first concept through production on multiple accounts, and built creative teams he mentors toward a high bar and real collaboration.
Client List
Pandora
SiriusXM
Walmart
WWE
Cricket
ABC
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
MIZIZI #DIASPORADIARIES
Every February, feeds fill with brands borrowing Black culture for 28 days. MIZIZI makes apparel where the culture is the product, and the brand needed Black History Month work that proved the difference.
MY TASK: Create content that lets a heritage apparel brand show up to Black History Month as a member of the culture it dresses, earning attention through real storytelling instead of a calendar date.
ACTION: I pitched #DiasporaDiaries, a documentary mini-series built to let the brand step back and put real voices out front. As director, I found four stories inside the MIZIZI community that tie heritage to the present day. Yonnas, a queer African makeup artist. Gabe, a Jamaican creative. Be My Fiasco, an Afro Latina singer. Jasmine, a Black American plus-size model. Each episode explored identity, craft, and what it means to wear culture on your body. I shaped the work from concept through final cut, structuring every installment to stand alone while the four built one emotional arc together.
RESULT: The four-episode series launched across MIZIZI's website, YouTube, and Instagram, and gave the brand the rarest thing February offers: a reason to be listened to.
"I hired Arnold to lead our Diaspora Diaries campaign, and from day one it was clear the project was in very capable hands. He was meticulous, professional, and thoughtful down to the smallest details, which made the entire process seamless." - Paakow Essandoh, Founder and CEO, MIZIZI
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.
CYSTIC FIBROSIS foundation
One month out from its Dallas gala, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation needed a film that could move a ballroom of donors past polite applause and into real commitment.
MY TASK: Deliver the emotional centerpiece of the foundation's biggest fundraising night. A short film, under ten minutes, built to make a room act.
ACTION: I threw out the traditional script format. Instead of writing a voiceover and cutting footage to fit it, I got on the phone with families living with CF and asked the questions nobody asks at galas. By morning, I had the architecture: no voiceover, no narrator, their words and their silences carrying the film. Even the call to action lived inside the structure rather than on a title card. The story did the asking.
RESULT: The final film ran 8 minutes and 40 seconds. The gala beat its fundraising target, and the foundation sent the film out to its entire donor list. Mark Cuban was in the room that night. He told me the film was "eye-opening."
