Steve Susi

Twenty-plus years running creative and strategy teams in New York and London. Agency-side, in-house, and—as Amazon Ads' first-ever executive creative director—both at once.Awards, a patent, one book, another in progress. A handful of expired AI certifications, because the formula keeps changing and I'd rather change with it than argue.What follows is where I've been, what I built, and what I'm doing now.

• LinkedIn

The world's best-known brands

Two decades of client work across brand strategy, advertising and retail media creative, and on-demand consulting.These logos aren't a highlight reel. They're tuition.

Next-gen brand development

Strategy starts with listening. To the customer, obviously. Also to the people running the warehouse, answering the phone, cutting the checks. The brand lives in all of it, whether you designed it to or not.My job is to find the whitespace only you can own, then build the case too airtight to fight.

Brand experiences that ship and grip

The best brand work builds something that didn't exist before and outlives the campaign that paid for it.At Amazon Ads I led the team that invented and shipped SmileCodes—a patented scannable optical language where the brand mark is the code. They ran on roughly a third of Amazon's US boxes and opened personalized brand experiences to anyone signed into an Amazon account.Not a stunt. A system. That's the bar.

Custom AI
for brand voice

Since 2022 I've built bespoke voice models for brands and the people who have to speak for them—training LLMs on brand DNA so the output comes from the brand's soul instead of the inference layer.The through-line across all of it: encode judgment into how the tools get used, so they amplify taste instead of averaging it.

• Sarcasm model PredictiveBrand.ing

The book

Brand Currency: A Former Amazon Exec on Money, Information, Loyalty, and TimeSix years at Amazon Ads bought me a front-row seat to how the company actually runs—not the mythology, the methodology. The operating system underneath the storefront.The thesis: brands compete on all four of those currencies. Amazon mastered them. This book shows how, with case studies from across the brandscape showing how any organization can run the same play.2019 Amazon best-seller. Available in Korean.

• All formats at Amazon

• Korean translation 한국어 번역

Architect of innovation cultures

Not a poster in the stairwell. It's what your teams believe about their own work.Three beliefs I've spent a career building on:

Certified in IBM Enterprise Design Thinking. The work matters more than the credential.

Proven team
leadership

Teams of one to forty-plus. My job is to put every member in position to win—for the customer, the client, the company, themselves.Tell the truth. Praise in public, coach in private. Find every leadership opening and hand it to whoever's ready. No jerks.