I joined Amazon the first time in late 2013, six months before the launch of Amazon's audio streaming product, Prime Music. At the time, the Amazon Music team was less than 40 people — now it's many thousand. I joined in a multi-disciplinary content role, overseeing social media, editorial, brand voice, UX, and marketing content, all with the goal of driving increased product engagement and awareness of the Prime Music brand out into the industry and world.

Previously, Amazon's music CX was strictly transactional — buying CDs, vinyl, or digital downloads. Now I needed to transform it into an engagement-driven UX across channels. My work ran the gamut — on social, I adopted and grew existing Facebook and Twitter channels; I launched and grew Amazon Music on Instagram and Snap; I launched a blog on Tumblr and integrated its content into the Prime Music app UX. I worked with music content creators, labels, and artist managers to secure increasing amounts of content for our channels. Over nearly three years, I increased social followers by 3M+ and engagement more than 30x.

I also launched Amazon Music Front Row, an intimate acoustic and interview series with artists who dropped into Amazon's Seattle studio. And I worked with developers to create and test a new section of the Prime Music app called Spotlight, to program video, photos, and text into the UX to test its ability to drive increases in product engagement. It did.

When Alexa launched in 2014, I immediately started experimenting with it as a new avenue for Amazon Music. I developed, launched, and managed "Song of the Day" and "Today in Music" — the music team's first original Alexa content. I also owned, programmed, and marketed a playlist called "Prime Picks," based on the latest news from the music world, which drove more than 23M Prime Music product engagements. Combined, these efforts helped transform Amazon's customer UX from transactional to engagement-driven, reaching tens of millions of customers.

I returned to Amazon Music in May 2023 as Head of Creative Content & Strategy with the Audience Development Marketing team. I was tasked with working across teams and orgs to create, produce, and source content for cross-channel marketing campaigns — both in-app UX and the static and short-form video assets used across O&O channels and paid spends with YouTube, TikTok, Meta, Reddit, and beyond.

This meant closely tracking the performance of 0:15–0:30 cuts of content created by partner teams, including Amazon Music City Sessions live concerts, Amazon Music Songline, the Amazon Music Live concert series in partnership with Prime Video and the NFL, and sports partnerships with Formula 1 and Overtime Elite. Working with an external media agency, I created and maintained the guidelines that helped our team build content that drove growth.

I joined Amazon's Devices Brand Studio as Creative Director, Content Strategy in February 2020, reporting to the Executive Creative Director, and was later promoted to Global Head of Content Strategy, reporting to the Director of Brand. I founded this discipline and team within the Devices Brand Studio, owning voice, tone, narrative, and creative and content strategy across 20+ product lines — and across always-on, cross-product narratives including sustainability and accessibility, two sensitive, high-trust communications managed at the SVP level.

I joined the Amazon U.S. Global Selling org's marketing team in November 2022 as Sr. Creative Director, Content & Strategy, owning messaging, creative, UX design, and marketing. The USGS org's goal was to enable brands selling with Amazon in the U.S. to expand to and thrive within global markets — from the EU to LATAM to MENA, JP, and beyond. However, this was a difficult, months-long process that often scared off prospective brands, or stopped them halfway through.

I joined Ticketmaster in late 2017 as Creative Director at an exciting time for the brand. After 40 years in ticketing — and often receiving fan and artist wrath — C-Suite leadership saw an opportunity to rehab the Ticketmaster brand based on the success of several new digital products, specifically Verified Fan, which protected fans from online scalpers and bots.

Reporting to the CMO, I led a rebrand workshop to define and document a new, fan-centric Ticketmaster brand, then pulled together a content strategy for projecting that brand across channels and user experiences — from email and SEM campaigns to blog and social, web and app shopping UX, live events, mass advertising, and more. Our strategy hinged on collaborating closely with talent and their brand cache, and showing the world that Ticketmaster was a fan, too.

I was poached from SPIN Magazine by Fuse TV in late 2011, first as a Senior Editor, before quickly being promoted to Head of Digital / Editor in Chief. This appointment was in support of owner Madison Square Garden Company's bold new vision for Fuse TV as a peer competitor with MTV, following its years as a pop punk- and Warped Tour-focused broadcast backwater. My job was to lead the redefinition and delivery of the voice of a major music TV network across platforms, and build a new digital operation from the ground up. With broadcast, web, and social at my disposal, I led an integrated strategy that found me working closely with the broadcast studio team's executives and leadership.

Following my internship with Rolling Stone, I was offered a freelance role as an Editorial Assistant, Digital with SPIN Magazine's website. For the next three years, I received one of the best educations a writer could ask for — I wrote thousands of articles, including daily news and longer-form features, for the website under the wing of the best editors in the business. I traveled the country, festival to festival, interviewing countless artists, from breaking bands to festival headliners.

I also began my career as a manager, overseeing the quarterly intern pool (4–6) that later produced some of the biggest names in music editorial and indie rock (Speedy Ortiz, Parquet Courts). As my career and our staff grew, I found myself increasingly in the editor's seat. I loved reviewing Google Analytics and working with the magazine team to strategize on breaking stories and content to support the monthly print issue. In my role as an editor, I oversaw daily news operations, assigning stories each morning, and managed editorial calendars and content strategy integral to increasing traffic.

Select reads: Q&A: Noel Gallagher Tells Stories About Solo LP · Feature: Chris Martin's Quiet Riot · My Favorite Things: Blink-182's Tom DeLonge · In Bed With Feist · Full writer's page →

After years of reading each and every issue of Rolling Stone with great ceremony, then studying journalism in college — acting as the school paper's music editor and hosting a weekly radio show — I got the offer of a lifetime: an internship at Rolling Stone Magazine.

My creative application was a success: a guitar, called the "Goodman Intern-o-Matic 5000," that described my skills via the lingo of a guitar manual. I leapt at the opportunity and moved to NYC.

Amazon Music was sitting on an underutilized growth lever. Prime Video had secured major sports rights — Thursday Night Football and Formula 1 broadcasts — giving Amazon direct access to massive, highly engaged sports audiences. Amazon Music had a presence inside those broadcasts, but wasn't converting that exposure into subscribers. The content existed. The paid social infrastructure existed. The connection between them was missing.

In July 2023, Amazon Music launched a partnership with the BWT Alpine F1 Team — becoming the first and only music DSP in Formula 1. F1 presented a unique opportunity: a global league with events across Amazon Music territories and an increasingly young fan base (62% of F1 fans are under 35, with 35% between 16–24), driven by the success of Netflix's Drive to Survive. The objective was to connect music and sports in an authentic way — reaching primed audiences to drive brand awareness and subscriber growth.

For each race, the team identified an artist with genuine interest in F1, traveled to the Grand Prix location, and produced bespoke content inside the BWT Alpine garage — drivers learning tire changes, hot laps, and behind-the-scenes moments that highlighted the intersection of music and sport fandom. All captured with a crew of 2–3 people within the strict production constraints of an F1 facility, which forced more creative, authentic content that outperformed traditional formats. Artists included Benson Boone (Mexico City), Lainey Wilson (Austin), Prince Royce (Las Vegas), Shenseea (Miami), NAV (Montreal), and Headie One (Silverstone). Content ran across paid and organic social on TikTok and Meta.

Over 18 months, the campaign produced content with 7 artists across 6 Grands Prix, secured brand placements at 9 races, and ran 3 growth marketing campaigns. Amazon Music earned $6M in Earned Media Value — 50% above the $4M target — generated 88M impressions against a 45.9M goal, and ranked as the 3rd most recognized Alpine sponsor across three separate brand surveys, while paying a fraction of the sponsorship fee of the other 20 partners. The campaign was entered in the 17th Annual Shorty Awards.

Amazon Music's always-on paid social strategy was effective but diffuse — spread across genres, artists, and moments without a concentrated push behind any single one. Country was one of the platform's strongest audience segments, and October presented a natural concentration point: Country Music Month, with Amazon Music Live Nashville performances already scheduled featuring Garth Brooks, Lainey Wilson, and Chris Stapleton.

I was tasked with building the content strategy for the Country Music Month tentpole — identifying, sourcing, and curating the highest-performing assets from Nashville performances and coordinating with the external media agency on creative guidelines and placement strategy across TikTok and Meta.

I tracked and pulled the top-performing 0:15–0:30 cuts from Amazon Music Live Nashville concerts, working closely with the production teams to get access to the best moments as they happened. For the Garth Brooks performance at his Nashville bar — one of the campaign's signature moments — I ran the full content strategy, from the initial brief through the selection of video edits and stills used across paid and organic channels. The creative guidelines I built with the agency kept the content feeling authentic to country culture while optimizing for platform performance.

The Garth Brooks concert alone drove 2M+ viewers. Using exclusive content moments — Amazon Originals including songs from Garth Brooks and Lainey Wilson — we converted that viewership into growth, driving 400K high-value actions and new customers into the app experience. Country Music Month became the team's most successful tentpole campaign of the year, validating the concentrated genre-and-moment strategy as a repeatable playbook.

Ticketmaster had a brand problem. Customers associated it with fees, frustration, and friction — not with the joy of live events. Yet Ticketmaster was the infrastructure behind some of the most culturally significant moments in sports and music. The brand was invisible at the good part and visible at the bad part. A rebrand was underway, and it needed a campaign that could shift perception at scale.

I was tasked with leading the creative strategy for the cornerstone brand campaign — something that could anchor the new fan-centric identity and run across TV, digital, and paid social. The insight had to be simple enough to work as a tagline and true enough to actually land.

"Live Only Happens Once." The insight was as direct as it gets: you can't replay a live event. The energy in the room, the crowd, the moment — it only exists once and then it's gone. I led the creative strategy working with agency partners to translate that into a campaign that leaned heavily into user-generated content — raw, authentic fan footage blended with polished production across NFL and NHL partnership spots. No stock. No actors playing fans. Real reactions, real arenas, real moments. The spots ran as paid media across TV, digital, and social, with the UGC approach giving the campaign a texture that advertising rarely achieves.

Working with Contend, an LA-based creative agency, LOHO drove a 23% increase in brand sentiment measured over the 2017–2020 campaign period — a significant and sustained shift for a brand with deeply entrenched negative associations. The campaign became the tentpole of Ticketmaster's rebranded identity and established the fan-first creative framework that governed the brand voice going forward.

In early 2025, I stepped away from Amazon after nearly a decade — two stints and four roles across Music, Devices & Services, and Global Brands. I'm proud of that chapter.

But I left because I saw what was already here (AI), and what was coming (AI accelerating itself).

I didn't want to manage AI from the sidelines. I wanted to secure the skills to build the future with it. So I enrolled in MIT Professional Education and completed three rigorous, three-month certificate programs back to back.

Somewhere in the middle of the coursework, the product idea crystallized.

I'd spent years at the intersection of music and technology. I kept watching independent artists gain more distribution power than ever — and still lose. Not because the music wasn't good. Because the infrastructure around the music — distribution, royalties, sync licensing, tour logistics, fan data, legal — was still controlled by the same institutions it always had been.

Labels don't own artists anymore. But artists still need what labels do.

Conductor is my answer to that. A SaaS platform that replicates every service a label provides and puts the artist in control. One dashboard. Real-time analytics. A voice AI booking agent. Sync licensing workflows. Fan engagement tools. The full stack — without the gatekeeping.

The challenge isn't technical. The challenge is trust. Independent artists have been burned by platforms that promised ownership and delivered dependency. Conductor has to earn trust before it earns a subscription. That's the design problem I'm most interested in solving.

Amazon had yet to release any sustainability narrative targeted at the average customer. What existed was a stockholder-facing page of legalese — dense, legal, and entirely disconnected from the people buying Alexa, Echo, and Ring. Earth Day was approaching. The opportunity to go big was sitting wide open.

I put together a pitch — an Amazon PRFAQ and a visual deck presentation — and brought it to leadership with a request for budget to make it real. The pitch was approved, and I was granted $4.5M to bring the campaign to life.

The core insight was simple: being sustainable doesn't have to be extreme. Whether it's tossing a bottle in the recycling bin, turning down the thermostat, or biking instead of driving — small choices add up. That insight sparked the idea for a bold, humorous spot that exaggerates the outsized impact a simple choice can have on the planet. We aligned on a humor register, wrote and tested multiple scripts, built mood boards, and went into a 3-day production shoot. The result was a 0:45 hero spot, a custom Earth Day landing page, and two original Alexa voice UX flows — "Alexa, let's get sustainable" and "Alexa, plant a tree" — that let customers take direct action through their devices.

20M+ views on YouTube. 6M+ landing page unique visits and 1M Alexa voice prompts. The campaign successfully reframed Amazon Devices as approachable and responsible, humanizing the sustainability story in a way no Amazon team had done before. It became the template for all future cross-product XPL work at Amazon Devices — directly leading to the $1.2M accessibility campaign that followed.

Following the success of the sustainability XPL campaign, leadership recognized an even more urgent gap: Amazon Devices had never directly spoken to the People With Disabilities community, despite the fact that Alexa, Echo, and other devices offered features specifically designed to improve their lives. It was a missed connection — and a high-stakes one, requiring SVP-level sign-off on every word.

I was tasked with replicating the XPL model at a significantly larger scale, this time targeting five distinct PWD cohorts: vision, hearing, mobility, speech, and learning. The campaign needed to feel specific and human for each group — not a broad, generic nod to accessibility.

We developed a full campaign architecture: a 0:45 hero spot aimed at the entire PWD community, nine 0:15 cohort-specific clips, a new landing page with tailored UX flows for each cohort, and a $1.2M media buy spanning Amazon Display Ads, Prime Video and Freevee OTT, online video, paid social, and a full O&O blitz across Amazon's own channels. Pre-launch market testing validated the creative direction before a dollar was spent on media.

Ten videos produced. Five cohort-specific UX flows launched. Full paid media campaign executed across every major Amazon channel. The campaign drove 4M+ views across all videos and 5M+ visits to the landing page — and established the accessibility narrative as a permanent pillar of the Amazon Devices brand, proving that the XPL model built with sustainability could scale to the most sensitive communications in the org.

In 2022, Amazon, Cisco, and Lockheed Martin partnered with NASA to embed Alexa aboard the Orion spacecraft as part of the Callisto technology demonstration payload — the first AI assistant sent to deep space, on the first mission of the Artemis program intended to return humans to the Moon. The story was extraordinary. The challenge was telling it without violating a confidential pre-launch embargo with NASA.

The Content Strategy team was tasked with building the full public-facing narrative for Callisto: an educational landing page, a 0:45 hero video, and a coordinated O&O and PR campaign to go live alongside the November 2022 launch. Everything had to be ready — and approved by three partner organizations — before a single word went public.

We built the landing page and hero video under embargo, coordinating closely with NASA and Lockheed Martin on accuracy and tone. At launch, the O&O campaign rolled out across Amazon's owned channels simultaneously with the PR blitz. After liftoff, we went back for behind-the-scenes content — capturing footage and interviews with Amazon and NASA engineers, as well as celebrities on site including Nick Jonas.

The Callisto campaign delivered 50K video views, 1M+ landing page visits, and 300K Alexa voice experience interactions. Press coverage was extensive — Time, Forbes, Bloomberg, Fast Company, and dozens of others — placing Alexa at the center of one of the most significant space missions in a generation. The landing page and hero video served as the definitive public-facing record of Amazon's role in the mission.

Amazon Devices and Amazon Music were two separate orgs with two separate product mandates — and historically, they launched products in silos. The Echo Studio, Amazon's high-fidelity smart speaker, was a natural opportunity to bridge that divide: it was a music device, and Amazon Music had artists and content. But cross-org collaboration at Amazon required someone to build the connective tissue.

The Content Strategy team was tasked with running GTM strategy and content for the Echo Studio launch — including identifying an artist partnership that could give the product a cultural anchor beyond its spec sheet.

I reached out directly to Amazon Music's Artist Relations team, we reviewed the brief together, and landed on Breland as the right creative fit — an artist whose sound and story matched Echo Studio's positioning at the intersection of music quality and technology. We produced a brand spot that positioned the device inside a genuine music moment, with content strategy extending across the full customer journey: product page, category page, paid social, and email.

The Echo Studio launch secured a stronger, more structured model for artist collaborations on future product releases — demonstrating that Amazon Devices and Amazon Music could produce something neither could alone, and becoming a proof point for how the cross-org model should work going forward.

Astro was unlike anything Amazon had launched before — a home robot that moved autonomously, responded to its name, and could navigate rooms on its own. The challenge was that "home robot" meant almost nothing to most consumers in 2021. The product needed two jobs done simultaneously: an emotional launch narrative that answered "why would I want this in my home?" and a technical explainer that answered "how does it actually work?"

The Content Strategy team was brought in to manage and contribute to both video deliverables, coordinating with product, engineering, and marketing teams across one of the most complex launches of the year.

My team determined the narrative direction — we saw the innovation story as the real hook, and pushed for a documentary-style approach that put viewers behind the scenes with the actual product teams who built Astro. That drove the decision to shoot the BTS explainer in a doc format rather than a polished brand video. For the launch video, we shaped the brief around warmth and personality over specs: Astro as a companion, not a machine.

Both videos shipped at launch and drove 100K+ views across the social campaign. The dual-video approach — one emotional, one technical — became a model for new-to-world product introductions at Amazon Devices. Astro was one of the most-covered Amazon product launches of 2021.

Alexa is a voice-activated device that lives in customers' homes and listens for its wake word. That premise generates a fundamental question — one that Amazon's competitors exploited and the press amplified: what does Alexa hear, and what does Amazon do with it? By the time the Content Strategy team inherited Trust Marketing, the existing copy was legalistic, defensive, and written for lawyers rather than customers.

The team was tasked with owning all Alexa Trust Marketing communications across web and app — the highest-scrutiny writing in the Devices org, requiring SVP-level sign-off on every word. The mandate was to make complex data and privacy practices clear and human without oversimplifying them, and to do it for an audience ranging from highly technical users to first-time device owners.

We audited all existing Trust copy across the web and app experience, rewrote it in plain language, and built a messaging framework that scaled across new trust initiatives as they arose — including the Amazon Privacy pages and Community pages, which required ongoing updates as policies and features changed. Every piece went through rigorous review with legal, privacy, and product teams before reaching SVP approval. The framework established consistent voice and hierarchy across all touchpoints: what we collect, why we collect it, how customers control it — in that order, always.

The Trust pages became some of the most visited and most-updated properties in the Devices web ecosystem. By making the communications feel honest rather than defensive, the work helped reframe a potential liability — a voice device in your home — into a demonstration of Amazon's commitment to transparency.

I continue to act as a contributing music writer and editor for Billboard.com, where I contribute 1–2 articles per month, from artist interviews to anniversary pieces on seminal albums.

Visit my writer's page on Billboard.com →

I joined the NYC-based boutique agency Night After Night in fall 2016 for a contract role as Creative Director, leading a team across two clients: Grammy-winning rock band Kings of Leon and Jameson Irish Whiskey. For Kings, this meant pushing the band's brand into new territory for their seventh album, WALLS.

Pernod Ricard, the then-new owner of Jameson, wanted to transform Jameson into a younger, social-first brand that was less about shots and more about lifestyle. My work with Jameson ran the gamut: I led the team in developing and producing print ads, marketing emails, websites, collaterals, social media content and cocktail recipes, and national broadcast spots for the brand's always-on campaign, "Sine Metu," celebrating Jameson's longtime motto, which means "Without Fear" in Latin. The team also received a Digiday Award nomination for Jameson's Movember Snapchat lens.