Hi, I'm Brodrick

At 23 years old I reported to my first Navy command with a camera, a laptop, and something to prove.

My title was Mass Communication Specialist. My job was to tell the Navy's story through video, photography, and writing. I was good at it. Good enough to win a Navy Media Award within my first few months. In the military, that kind of recognition comes with a catch. Do your job well and they give you a bigger one. Before I knew it I was leading content production for the entire command. I was the youngest person in the room and suddenly the one everyone was looking at.

The problem was the content we were making was terrible.

Not technically. The shots were clean. The edits were tight. But nobody was watching. We were producing the kind of content you'd expect from a government agency. Safe, predictable, forgettable. We had a massive audience and plenty worth saying. We just had no idea how to make them care. I'd grown up watching storytellers on television make the whole world stop and pay attention. What we were doing was the opposite of that.

So I went to work. After hours, in my rack, I was reading Seth Godin on what makes ideas spread. Robert Cialdini on why people pay attention. Watching lectures from Stanford and Yale on storytelling and human behavior. I was teaching myself something the Navy had no framework for. Creative strategy. Audience psychology. The art and science of making people actually care.

Then I made the mistake of thinking any of that would be welcome.

The resistance was immediate. The Navy runs on tradition and chain of command. New ideas arrive like threats. There was one Senior Chief in particular who seemed to take my ambition as a personal affront. He questioned everything. Challenged every departure from how things had always been done. Made it very clear that enthusiasm was not a substitute for experience.

Looking back, he had a point.

Because when I finally got my shot I blew it. A project I had championed, the one I had sold to leadership as the future, fell flat in ways that still make me cringe. I had pushed hard for something new, failed publicly, and handed every skeptic in the building exactly what they needed to shut the whole thing down.

The Senior Chief called me into his office.

I sat down expecting the worst. What I got instead was one of the most honest conversations of my career. He told me the failure wasn't the problem. Walking away from it would be. He said he had watched how I stepped up to this challenge, rallied the team around my idea, how I listened, how I led without ego. He still didn’t understand what I was building, but he believed in me. He wanted me to try again.

So I did.

We built the command's first real social media strategy. Clear goals. A defined audience. Content built around what that audience actually wanted to feel and see. We committed to it and we stuck to it through an entire six month deployment. We treated every piece of content like it mattered. Because it did. Sailors' families were watching from thousands of miles away. They deserved better than forgettable.

The numbers told the rest of the story. By the end of the deployment our Facebook following had grown from under 50,000 to over 200,000. People were engaged, sharing, responding. Leadership was paying attention. That Senior Chief walked past my workspace one afternoon, looked at the screen, and just nodded.

That nod meant everything.

I’ve carried what I learned on that ship into every project since. Strategy without creativity is just a document nobody reads. Creativity without strategy is just noise nobody hears. And the organizations doing the most important work are almost always the ones least equipped to tell their story in a way that makes people stop and pay attention.

After the Navy I kept going. Emmy nominated at PBS. Content strategies adopted as national templates by government agencies. A 700% increase in community meeting attendance for the City of Seattle. Work with brands, nonprofits, and leaders across the country. Every single win traces back to what I learned on that ship and what a tough Senior Chief believed before I knew it myself.

I'm Brodrick Aberly. If your content isn't connecting the way it should, let's change that.