Two companies have outsourced their marketing to me.

Above Ground

An event agency with twenty years of extraordinary work. Luxury brands, global programs, impossible briefs, beautiful rooms.

The problem with event marketing is that once the room is gone, most of the evidence looks exactly the same. Lights. A stage. People holding drinks.

Underneath

VIBE did not need more marketing. It needed its marketing to explain why the work mattered.

A beautiful event is the output. Underneath it are the decisions: why this room, why this experience, what problem the client was solving, what changed because VIBE was there.

My job became connecting those decisions to everything that sells the agency.

The Cut

The work was already good. The marketing needed to stop decorating it.

I cut the habit of treating every project and every piece of content as equally important. Less activity, more evidence, and fewer event photographs without an argument attached to them.

What Changed

The portfolio became proof instead of decoration. Case studies start with the client's problem, proposals inherit a point of view instead of starting from a blank page, and marketing supports the next conversation rather than documenting the last event.

And I am still there when the next problem arrives.

Above Ground

You see the building. Hospitality, mixed-use, multifamily, a performing arts center. Finished, photographed, awarded.

Architecture makes unusually good marketing material.

Underneath

What you do not see is everything that had to happen before, and everything required to turn the finished work into the firm's reputation.

A 140-person architecture firm with no marketing department. For eleven years, I have been the function without becoming the department.

I direct how the firm presents itself, its brand, website, collateral, awards, credentials and proposals, while working the other end of the equation: the developers, brokers, consultants and conversations that tell us where the next project may come from.

The Cut

By the time a project becomes an RFP, marketing is already late.

So I stopped treating the proposal as the beginning. The pipeline starts much earlier, and the brand has to be ready long before the opportunity arrives.

What Changed

Marketing became continuous, not something the firm turns on when it needs a proposal, a new website, an award entry or a piece of collateral.

Eleven years later, they could have built a department. They keep hiring me.

Above Ground

NV Brand & Design, which I founded in 2016 and still run. Before it, Soma Creative, a branding agency I co-founded in Miami in 2008 and ran for eight years.

Two companies with my name on the risk instead of the invoice.

Underneath

Soma worked.

• 15 clients secured in the first 3 months
• National summer campaign, Barceló Hotels & Resorts
• 4 industries: food and beverage, real estate, hotel and tourism, architecture and interior design
• Profitable from opening to closing. 8 years

Anyone can close a failing company. Closing one that is still working is a different conversation, and I had it with myself for most of a year.

The Cut

I closed the one that was working.

An agency has to keep feeding itself. Payroll decides which clients you take, and after eight years I was spending my judgement on keeping the lights on rather than on the work. So I ended it while it was still good, and started again with one person in it.

What Changed

NV Brand & Design is the same skill with the overhead removed. I take the clients I want, and I stay long enough to run what I recommend.

Which is also why everything impressive on this site is buried. A credential is a fact about my past. It does not tell you what I would do about your problem on Monday.

My own title has said Founder, Storyteller since 2016. I finally built a site that behaves like one.

Five marathons, Orange Theory four mornings a week, and Yin yoga once a week. The only numbers I fully trust.

Bridger Conway, then Propeller

2002 to 2008, six years running other people's brands with other people's money and my name on the outcome.

Condo towers sold off a floor plan at one agency. Danish furniture, hotels and restaurants at the next. The category changed every few months. The problem underneath never did.

• Trump Hollywood / The Related Group
• St. Regis Resort & Residences, Bal Harbour / Starwood
• Ritz Carlton Seville / Lionstone
• $1.5M across three real estate and resort accounts
• DK Vogue / Authentic Danish Design
• Real estate, hotels, food and beverage, home furnishings, events
• P&L on every account. Promoted to senior Account Manager in 90 days

A client is never wrong about the problem and almost never right about the solution.

Accor

1997 to 2003, a phone, a territory and a number. This is the part of my career nobody hires me for, and the reason everybody does.

• 50 corporate accounts built in 7 months, before the flagship opened
• $4.5M in revenue, New York
• $11M in revenue, Miami. 25% of the hotel, carried alone
• Territory: United States, France, United Kingdom, South America
• 44 accounts monitored monthly. Market analysis and pricing

Every brand strategist says they understand buyers. For six years a number told me every month whether I actually did.

1991 to 1997

Where it started / New York, marketing Coordinator, which was a generous title for what I actually did. I spent those years on the outside of the box. Three inches of card with about two seconds to make someone reach for it instead of the one beside it.

I have been arguing about the inside ever since.