EVP Strategy, Publicis New York — Business Strategy, Experience Design & Innovation
I've spent over twenty years at the intersection of business strategy, experience design, and innovation — working across four continents, inside some of the world's most ambitious agencies, and alongside brands that were trying to figure out what comes next. That question — what comes next, and how do you build toward it — is the one I've never stopped finding interesting.
My work sits in a specific kind of territory: where strategy meets experience, where the digital and the physical have to talk to each other, and where the gap between a bold idea and something that actually works in the world needs to be closed. I don't think of myself primarily as a planner or a designer or a technologist, though I work with all three disciplines daily. I think of myself as someone who helps organizations see clearly, decide boldly, and build experiences that people remember.
I currently serve as EVP Strategy at Publicis in New York, leading strategic design and innovation across a portfolio of companies. My clients are leaders across industries — technology, healthcare, consumer, public sector — including Apple, the CDC, IBM AI, and Wounded Warrior Project. Each comes with a different set of challenges, a different organizational structure, and a different definition of what success looks like. That variety is the job, and I've come to believe it's also the best possible training ground.
Before Publicis, I was Head of Experience and Innovation Strategy at Instrument (Stagwell), where I led a team of 62 strategists, UX designers, and data analysts. We built immersive, innovative experiences for Nike, Google, Meta, and emerging startups like Aleo. In my first year, we hit a consistent double-digit growth rate and an 85% pitch success rate.
From 2019 to 2023, I led the Experience and Innovation practice at Elephant (IPG), working with Apple, NBCU, Goldman Sachs, and Benjamin Moore. This was where I developed much of my thinking around experience ecosystems — the idea that a brand's strategy can't live in a single touchpoint, but has to be designed as a system that comes to life coherently across the entire company. We delivered double-digit profit in 2020–2021, with an 80% pitch success rate, during one of the most disruptive periods the industry has ever faced.
Earlier in my career, I built the experience innovation capability at Clemenger BBDO in Melbourne — where the work for Mars produced the D&AD White Pencil and Cannes Grand Prix for Sustainability. I led strategy at R/GA in Singapore, where we won the Nikon global business and delivered award-winning work for Uber. I ran engagement strategy at TBWA Singapore, where we won the Singapore Tourism Board pitch. Before Asia, I spent years in Europe — leading the European launch of Infiniti across the AMIE region from Paris, and managing key clients including McDonald's, Apple, and Nissan from Italy.
Twenty years. Seven agencies. Markets spanning Italy, France, China, Singapore, Australia, and the United States. The throughline has always been the same: help organizations create experiences that are immersive, coherent, and genuinely useful to the people they're made for.
To me, strategy is fundamentally about purposeful choice. It is as much about what you decide not to do as what you decide to do — the discipline to say no to the plausible, the adjacent, the merely good, in order to say a deeper yes to something that actually matters. That clarity is what separates a strategy from a plan.
I believe strategy is also most powerful when it refuses to separate thinking from making. The best strategic work I've done has always been in service of something that gets built — a platform, a space, a system, a story. And the best creative work I've seen has always been grounded in a clear-eyed understanding of what a business is actually trying to achieve.
I'm drawn to the edges — where disciplines blur, where technology creates new possibilities for human experience, where a brand's purpose and a person's need actually align. I'm fascinated by the relationship between humans and machines, and by what it means to design for that relationship with honesty and care. Several of my research projects — including ObliqueAlphabet.ai, Who Prompts Who?, and my ongoing work at iamljav.xyz — explore these questions directly, outside of client work, because some questions are important enough to pursue on their own terms.
I believe in taking educated risks. I believe in building teams that are smarter than any one person in the room. And I believe that the best ideas are usually the ones that sound slightly too ambitious until the moment they work.
The work has been recognized with what I consider the most meaningful awards in the industry: the Cannes Grand Prix, the D&AD White Pencil, the UNDP Innovation Award, the United Nations Global Innovator Award, and the Campaign Tech Award, among others. I've been part of agencies recognized as Agency of the Decade and Agency of the Year seven times.
I've served as a judge for the WARC Awards for Media, and I've been invited to speak at events including the IF! Italians Festival, Digital Design Days 2024 (where I presented "The Brand is the Interface"), and Politecnico di Torino.
I've been a lecturer in Marketing and Communication at Bocconi University and the IED (European Institute of Design) in Milan since 2007. I've also taught at SCAD's Hong Kong campus and at Université Paris Dauphine. Teaching keeps me honest. It forces me to articulate things I might otherwise leave implicit, and it connects me to people who are thinking about these problems with fresh eyes.
I advise Karakoram, an innovation consultancy focused on the non-profit sector, where I consult on strategy and foresight. I'm co-founder and advisor at Ovolab, an innovation design firm that develops experiences for Apple — a relationship that has lasted over two decades. My independent research, housed at iamljav.xyz, focuses on the impact of technology on memory, identity, and human agency.
I hold a Bachelor of Science in Marketing (Magna Cum Laude) from Colorado State University, a Certificate in AI for Business Strategy from MIT Sloan School of Management, a Certificate in Product Strategy from Kellogg Business School, and a Certificate in Data to Insights from MIT.
I'm fluent in Italian, English, French, and Spanish, and I work out of New York City.