I've spent my whole life creating, telling and sharing stories.
As a child I read book after book creating my own storyworlds allowing me to escape to a better place than I was in.

No surprise when jumping into my professional life, there could be no other job than being a story smith in some way or another. In fact there have been two professions in my life giving me the opportunity to be a story smith in multiple ways at the same time. On the one hand being a writer and creative director in marketing, advertising and public relations building brand stories, creating campaigns, writing copy and commercials, and advising companies, large and small on how to build their brand’s stories and communicate them through all kinds of media. And on the other hand working as a journalist and op-ed writer, writing for television, for movies, and radio shows, and creating musicals and personality shows.

Funny enough I was always keen to keep these two worlds separate, despite the fact that my work in each of the fields brought a lot of inspiration and know-how to the other one. What became clear is that story, is what I was all about. And up through today I am focused on building storyworlds in both fields.

In the early 2000’s I was attending a writing workshop in NYC on how to build multidimensional characters. One day a thought popped into my head - in a peculiar way these methods, tools & tricks were not so different from the methods used for building brands in the marketing and advertising industry. In the agency world the mantra “we want to build brands that are so familiar to their customers as a good friend,” was all-important and these “good friends” should be the heroes in their customers’ lives, just like a hero in a story.

I started to fuse creative writing and marketing and focused my new method around – what makes brands heroes, and that lead me in the completely wrong direction. Early on I concentrated on developing this one of a kind process in order to build compelling stories around brands where they were the hero. What I didn’t realize then was that there is a way better approach, and as I know today, the only approach to get it right: The best story about a brand isn’t about the brand, it’s about the customer. Period.