Since her arrival at Joan at the end of 2021, Kristin Van Note has advocated for the original and unexpected. As group strategy director at the former Ad Age A-List Standout creative agency, Van Note—or KVN as she’s known at the agency—has planned some of the biggest campaigns to come out of the shop by not shying away from viewing the world in stark reality. 

Most notably, Van Note helped launch a fentanyl awareness campaign in partnership with the Ad Council, where her insights reframed fentanyl as a cheap counterfeit in order to break down the drug’s allure.

The newest campaign from the partnership, “Substitute Dealers,” brought drug dealers into a high school to teach kids about the drug trade from an insider’s view. An open-source curriculum was then built that taught students about the drug through the lens of school subjects such as health, chemistry and economics.

In the last year, Van Note helped ZenBusiness reimagine the world of work with a fever dream of an ad, “Welcome to the Uprising,” that showed a worker destroying the office to protest the soul-sucking reality of working in corporate America.

In the latest campaign launched in June, Joan used new research about the value of neurodiversity to inspire the next generation of neurodiverse graduates to see thinking differently as an entrepreneurial superpower. 

Van Note also led the global transformation of eBay, which released its first brand campaign in three years, “Everyone Deserves Real,” at the end of 2022 for the sole purpose of reaching Gen Z and millennials through authenticity.

The campaign, which touts the online exchange as a trusted source for luxury goods, is based on studies that show younger consumers look for transparency in marketing and general business behavior.