Steve Schonberg

The full story

The Higher Story, start to finish.

I call my approach The Higher Story: find the story that rises above the one a brand is already telling, then build the strategy around it. Trends are part of how I find it. I've made a habit of getting there early.

That approach has powered industry-award-winning work for Johnson & Johnson, 3M, Procter & Gamble, Newell Rubbermaid, Kraft Foods, Zumba, Brita, the American Heart Association's Go Red for Women, Target ALS, Eating Recovery Center and Pumpkin Pet Insurance, among others.

For years I was NBC New York's sole on-air theater contributor, and I hosted BroadwayWorld LIVE and Show-Score LIVE, a streaming interview series that was part of Show-Score's content strategy. Interviewing taught me the same thing marketing did: get past the talking points to the story people actually connect with.

Early on, I pitched, starred in and co-led the media campaign for an MTV True Life special about marriage equality. It won the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Documentary, and it was part of a movement that made history.

Now I'm applying The Higher Story to AI. I coauthored With All My Circuits Showing with Claude, I run AI immersion workshops for marketing teams, and I built The Higher Story AI Visibility Audit to show brands whether AI is telling their story at all.

Experience

• Pumpkin Pet Insurance: Senior Marketing Manager, WellnessRepositioned Wellness from a transactional "savings club" into a preventive care authority, building the division's first retention and lifecycle marketing strategy, the same higher-level rebuild he'd done years earlier on Johnson & Johnson's K-Y and Listerine brands.
• Target ALSBuilt the foundation's consumer-facing brand from the ground up and, working with Development, helped raise $122M in 2022. Grew site traffic 400x, making it the world's second most-visited ALS resource. In the middle of the pandemic, wrote, produced, and directed a star-studded streaming tribute concert, "Becca," that raised nearly $250,000 for research.
• Eating Recovery CenterHelped dismantle the myth that eating disorders happen only to young white women, built an ambassador network out of former patients to tell the real story, and lifted patient intake 54%.