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.Award- and patent-winning. Author of one book, working on the next. Several expired AI certifications and counting, because the entire formula changed and I intend to change with it.What follows is where I've been, what I built, and what I'm up to 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 my education.

Next-gen brand development

Strategy starts with listening. To the customer, sure—but also to the people running the warehouse, answering the phone, cutting the checks. The brand lives in all of it.My job is to find the whitespace only you can own and build the airtight case to claim it.

Brand experiences that ship and grip

The best brand work builds something that didn't exist before and lives on long past the campaign.At Amazon Ads, I led the team that invented and shipped SmileCodes: the patented scannable optical language where the brand mark is the code, was printed on roughly a third of Amazon boxes in the US, and activated personalized brand experiences across the SSO AMZN universe.That's the bar. Not a stunt—a system.

Custom AI
for brand voice

Since 2022, I've built bespoke voice models for brands and the teams behind them—training LLMs on brand DNA so the output comes from its soul, not the inference layer.The through-line: my job is to encode judgment into how AI is used, so the tools amplify taste instead of flattening it.

• Sarcasm model PredictiveBrand.ing

The book

Brand Currency: A Former Amazon Exec on Money, Information, Loyalty, and TimeSix years at Amazon Ads gave 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 on the ways any organization can adopt that methodology too.2019 Amazon best-seller. Available in Korean.

• All formats at Amazon

• Korean translation 한국어 번역

Architect of innovation cultures

It's not a poster on the wall. 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, but the work matters more than the credential.

Proven team
leadership

Teams of 1 to 40+. My job is to put every member in position to win—for the customer, the client, the company, and themselves.Tell the truth. Praise in public, coach in private. Find the leadership opening in every project and hand it to someone who's ready. No jerks.That's it. That's the system.