Steve Susi

Twenty-plus years running creative and strategy teams in New York and London. Agency, in-house and—as Amazon Ads' first-ever executive creative director—both.Awards, a patent, one best-seller and another underway. A handful of expired AI certifications, because I'd rather augment 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, retail media creative, and on-demand consulting.These marks aren't a highlight reel. Tuition.

Next-gen brand development

Strategy's just another word for listening. Hearing the customer, sure. But then the people running the warehouse, answering phones, cutting checks, cleaning kitchens.Brand lives in every bit of it, whether you designed it to or not. And if you don't see that, we have a real problem. (I don't. You do.)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, not 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 ushered me to the front row to see how the thing runs. Not the mythology, the methodology. The operating system powering the storefront.My thesis: brands compete on all four currencies. Amazon mastered them. This book shows how, with case studies from across the brandscape proving that any organization can run the same playbook.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.I've spent a career on—as follows:

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.