About

I’m an award winning creative and technology leader, with a career across roles in advertising, founding two startups, and for the past five years establishing Current Studios as a global experience design presence.

I love the creative process and the business. Loving these two things is traditionally seen as contradictory. You either focus on keeping the creative pure, unobstructed from threats of revenue. Or you manage revenue and keeping clients happy, usually at the expense of the creative. I use both creative and business to support each other, rather than work against each other. The energy of both teams focuses on making something real, delivering an experience that lifts people out of their everyday to suspend them in a moment they do not expect.

I’ve had the fortune of leading hundreds of campaigns and projects, with 113 campaigns/projects the last five years. Most of them defined by the client as something they haven’t done or would ordinarily never do. For them, this may be their only project like this of the year or career. For the creative team, it’s managing the feeling of infinite effort, which is what innovative creative processes feel like most of the time. Knowing that the process from idea to delivery is more dirty than any case study is willing to admit, the creative process excels when the client feels it is smooth and the creative team feels it is finite. Much of what I do is managing how people perceive and feel. It’s at the heart of every success and failure I’ve experienced.

I try to spend as much time as I can sharing this, the concept that ideas are relatively easy compared to the effort required to make them real - and that work is only beautiful in the end. I like to go behind the curtain of a case study, or talk about pitching blind to a room of Intel executives when the agency team arrived at the slide titled “Innovation”, or the process used to have the holy trinity of client, creative, and account all feeling like this project is their idea.

When I’m not working, I do everything + relax. Guitar, hockey, Muay Thai, hunting for records, heading up state, or just exploring Brooklyn. If I add in that hiking and yoga are on the list, it’ll read like a Tinder profile. If you’ve read this far, congratulations. You know more about me than most people.

Info

Brooklyn, NY

steveajmartell@gmail.com

www.linkedin.com/in/martellsteve

Twitter @stevemartell

IG @TheSteveMartell