KENT SZLAUDERBACH
COPYWRITER & STRATEGIST
NEW YORK, NEW YORK

 
Q W E R  Verizon x FIFA Verizon Holiday Verizon Brand Identity U I O P
A S Designed by Verizon.Verizon Packaging Front/Space Killscreen BOMB K L
Z X Cloudera Fastforward Labs Manila Death Squad Civilian Magazine Syllabi N M
S                                                                                                                          

















At the end of 2023, Verizon made a brand book.

We wanted to celebrate how far our young agency had come, and where it was going next.

But it was only image. It had no voice.

Then one day, I was at the office, and they asked me to write the manifesto.

Verizon’s design was always elevated. But the air can be thin up there, and cold.

I thought, let’s bring it back home.

Role: Senior Copywriter






















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I put this first because it’s beautiful.

Also because I got to work with a huge team of highly driven creatives, who in turn helped me elevate my voice.

This is what great collaboration can accomplish, and I loved being a part of it.











Verizon is an official sponsor of the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

Earlier this year, they asked me to write copy systems for the campaign.

Verizon offered access.

All the drama of the beautiful game, played on the world’s biggest stage.

OK, let’s not just bring it to you. Let’s get you in.

Let’s get everyone in.











































Imagine, demigods stuck in traffic on their way to Metlife. In that moment, they’re just like us.

For everywhere else, there’s Verizon.
          













“Manila Death Squad” (2017) is a short co-written with Dean Marcial.

The world got weirder in 2016. And it wasn’t just the U.S.

So we made a short about it.













































I didn’t get to go to the Philippines. That’s fine. The story got to travel the globe.

Thanks to Dean, cast and crew.










The holidays are the biggest brand moment of the year.

In 2024, Verizon was due for a refresh.

We had a new brand. We needed to tell a new story.
One that felt appropriate for the year half the country chose chaos.
Again.

Enter Beautiful Disasters.

Let’s celebrate how real memories get made.


                                                               



















































































































Beyond concepting, I also wrote shooting narratives that would make those concepts live, laugh, and scream with love.







































Copy shows you what a brand is beneath the surface. No matter how small, no matter how transactional, it matters.

Verizon is massive. It speaks to millions, in a million different ways.

That can be really annoying.

How do you change people’s minds? Make them want to listen?

Voice, and its sister, Style. First comes research, then execution. Finally education, iteration, and showing people that good, considerate writing is always within reach. Words shouldn’t be a wall of automated slop. Apps should never confuse.

I looked at 1,000+ assets, articles, placements, and modules at Verizon. Wherever words appeared, I was there. I designed guidelines and workshops to remind people that writing doesn’t stop at the campaign level. I trained trainers and practitioners. I hosted workshops, and teamed up with basically every channel.

Here are just a few interventions. There are a lot more where this came from.







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As one colleague put it, voice had be everywhere, from bills to billboards.

So we went there, influencing across the ecosystem with roadshows, summits, workshops, and presentations. Yes, legal, too.




















As a copy leader whose task was to own and execute the voice across hundreds of touch points on the customer journey, I with product, growth, and CX teams, treating brand governance as a growth lever to reduce friction, promote consistency, and build trust.

















































         














And beyond. We can stop there for now.









One more thing for Verizon.

Also from the brand side, I helped tell the story of Verizon’s sustainable packaging initiative. Check out the full case study over at Pentagram.     

For my part, I helped carry the thread of Verizon’s sustainability efforts all the way through the unboxing experience, which meant making sure that each step in the process reinforced not only the impacts of the effort, but the customers’ own role in that process.

That’s why, as soon as customers open the package, and the high of unboxing wears off, there’s no weird pressure to keep the box around.




























So, for those of us who have the weird habit of keeping those boxes around (just in case?), the box itself is there to remind you that, hey, things aren’t just going to be OK—things are going to be better than OK.
 

            







With my best friends, I made a magazine called Civilian. A real, bound object. It was designed to reunite a fragmented city with a new critical voice.

After college, I moved to a new city and fell in love with the art community.
It was a beautiful relationship, but something felt off.

The deeper we fell in love, the more separate from the rest of the city it all felt. It didn’t have to be that way.

What is love without a little friction?

Role: Editor-in-Chief
























































The people at the Andy Warhol Foundation and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation thought it was a good idea, too. An apparently, so did the local media.

















It’s not every day that a machine-learning lab asks you to write about their research. Good thing Cloudera Fast Forward Labs loves fiction. I do, too.

So I wrote a short story.

What came out was a parable about Kafka and black boxes.















Explaining how technology works is telling the truth about objects.

But what happens if at some level, you can’t?

Does the story end there?








You made it here?

Great. I’ve got clippings about experimental art and literature. The premium stuff.


In all serious, I think writing and thinking about challenging art and literature makes you a better writer and thinker. It’s something I’ll do forever.



















































Thanks to the editors of BOMB.

















And here are clippings about video games for a magazine and foundation called Killscreen, which I also had the honor of contributing research, features, and reviews to. Killscreen was called the New Yorker of videogames, and its editors were asked to help curate MoMA’s first ever collection of videogames.






















































Front/Space was a gallery and cultural center for art, literature, and music programming in Kansas City, Missouri.

Roles: director, experiential designer, and publicist.

Here, I worked alongside designers, architects, and artists to build a community that helped launch emerging artists with solo shows; exhibit interdisciplinary work on relevant topics; and provide local and touring musicians with an intimate performance space. We also sold artwork.

Our programs were made possible in part by support from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the Charlotte Street Foundation, investments made according to Warren Buffett portfolio and the KU Spencer Museum of Art






 

































Are You Sure was a curatorial project at Front/Space featuring two new works by Ryan Kuo examining contemporary displacement.

Nouns was installation aimed at the Front/Space storefront window.

The artists asked me what I thought, so he could set those thoughts out in the gallery for viewers.































I love tech writing. It’s a standard of clarity that’s like eating vegetables for writers.

I also think technology shouldn’t be gatekept. That’s why I’ve also written technical documentation designed to help normal people participate in without having to learn to code, or even vibe code. No judgement.

Here’s a bit of documentation I wrote about AWS. It’s about how to set up your own server in the cloud, and keep it from falling asleep.




















I’ve taught hundreds of New York City college students to write like they mean it. My time in the classroom taught me more than they could ever know.


One of the most important lessons here was to never teach what you are not prepared to fully own. When COVID-19 shattered the teaching model so many of us had grown comfortable in, we had to get creative with remote learning. I produced video, audio, and even wrote a whole lesson book to make sure I had fully adapted all lessons to something one could do at home.

“How to Write Contemporary Literature” was one of those books.



















































I  crafted syllabi that combined ancient rhetoric with new ideas about the social world to teach the social-native generation how to produce ideas clearly, confidently, and ownably.

It also looks like the students from the famously forgiving “Rate My Professor”
were not too hard on me.

The following testimonials are real!

Professor Szlauderbach is the Professor you want to take for English. He is extremely nice, outgoing, and helpful. He cares about his students, and does not hesitate to help. Coming out of this class, I am more confident in my writing ability, and my ability to properly articulate my thoughts, ideas, etc... It was a privilege taking this class.

Professor Kent is the best professor at Queens! Personable, caring, intelligent. Got tremendous values and insights out of his Genre course. Ingeniously he devises his course syllabus in accordance with the concepts, using it as a metaphor, which bolstered my impressions on Genre. Great interactions in the class all the time. Fun readings.











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10+ years as a writer and editor, 6 years building verbal strategy and campaigns at a Fortune 50 brand. I’ve founded a nationally recognized journal of art, literature and politics; written award-winning films; and published fiction and criticism online and in print. I’ve taught at Columbia, CUNY, and The Cooper Union, and I hold an MFA from The Writing Program at Columbia.

Services: Creative Copywriting, Brand Copy, Performance Copy, Brand Identity, Narrative Strategy, Technical Content, B2B Content, Editorial Management, Mentoring, Teaching Writing  

Clients & Supporters: Verizon | Columbia University | Queens College | Hunter College | The Prospect Park Alliance | Killscreen | BOMB | Fast Forward Labs | Front/Space | The Charlotte Street Foundation | The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation | The Andy Warhol Foundation
Call me anytime.

(Yes, this is staged photo. I thought I was the subject of a test shoot for a campaign.
Alas, the phone was the star. Actually, it was just the case.)






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More available upon request.