Mary Mac Moore
What does it take to keep a brand's creative vision consistent, efficient, and impactful across multiple channels?
In this episode of On Brief, we sit down with Mary Mac Moore, Director of Creative Integration and Operations at Away Travel, to explore the often-invisible but crucial role of creative operations. Mary Mac shares how she serves as the "glue that holds everything together," building systems that balance structure with flexibility while managing resources and timelines for Away's sleek, thoughtful creative work.
From her unexpected journey from nutrition science to journalism to agency life and finally to in-house creative ops, Mary Mac reveals how she's mastered what she calls "organized chaos." We dive deep into Away's adaptive creative briefing process, their strategic approach to content diversification—from iPhone TV spots to celebrity productions—and how they've learned to identify which projects need full-scale productions versus simpler solutions. Mary Mac also discusses the constant tension between creative quality and efficiency, sharing practical insights on how her team captures campaign imagery during e-commerce shoots and works with everyone from content creators to photographers to maximize both creative output and budget effectiveness.
Episode summary
Mary Mac Moore has spent nearly four years building and rebuilding the creative ops function at Away — the direct-to-consumer travel brand that reached unicorn status with a $1.4B valuation. In this conversation, she breaks down what creative integration actually means in practice: how Away briefs projects, how they balance speed with quality, and how they've built a hybrid in-house and freelance team that stays nimble without losing consistency.
What we cover
- What a Director of Creative Integration & Operations actually does — and why the role looks different every day
- How Away's creative briefing process works across brand, paid social, and channel teams
- The constant tension between creative quality and production efficiency — and how Away manages both
- How in-house creative teams decide when to use internal resources versus external freelancers and production partners
- Away's approach to creative diversification — from big-budget celebrity productions to iPhone shoots with content creators
- What it takes to build a culture of creative collaboration within a fast-moving DTC brand
- The operational infrastructure that keeps a $1.4B brand's creative output consistent across channels
Key insight
"We're always thinking about who is the best person or best set of people to put on this — skill set, bandwidth, ways of working, rate, if it's something external that we're going to have to budget separately for."
That's the freelance management question every in-house creative team is answering constantly. Away has built a system for it. Most teams are still answering it ad hoc.
Why this matters for in-house creative and marketing teams
Away is a useful case study because the operational challenge they're solving — keeping a hybrid in-house and freelance team running at brand speed, across multiple channels, with variable production scales — is the same challenge most growing in-house creative teams face.
What Mary Mac describes isn't a unique Away problem. It's the defining operational challenge of the modern in-house creative department: how do you build a freelance bench that's flexible enough to meet shifting demand, integrated enough to maintain brand consistency, and structured enough to satisfy the procurement and budget requirements of a company at scale?
The teams doing this well have moved beyond ad hoc freelancer relationships toward something more systematic — a roster of trusted external talent that can be activated quickly, contracted cleanly, and paid reliably without a two-week onboarding process every time. That infrastructure question sits at the center of how in-house creative teams like Away's actually operate.
Topics covered in this episode
- In-house creative team operations
- Hybrid in-house and freelance team management
- Creative ops and marketing ops
- Freelancer engagement and talent bench-building
- Creative briefing and production workflows
- Brand consistency at scale
Related reading
- Why does it take two weeks to hire a freelancer at a big company — and how to fix it →
- In-House Creative Team Structures: A Field Guide to Strategic Ops →
