Creative Problem-Solver with Expertise in Design, Filmmaking & Marketing.

Most of my energy right now goes into building AI workflows and agents that accelerate creative execution across paid, social, and design. I design production pipelines that take a single brand concept and fan it out into platform-native, performance-tested creative — cutting iteration time, reducing cost per asset, and freeing the team to focus on taste and judgment.

I'm an LA-based creative director with 15 years across design, filmmaking, photography, and performance marketing — Microsoft, Ford, Electronic Arts, Wieden+Kennedy, American Airlines, Lufthansa, Rosetta Stone. The range is the point. I can take a campaign from brief to hook to shoot to paid creative to measurement without handing off to four different people, and I can build the tools to do it at scale.

The work: at Momentous (2024–2025) I rebuilt the brand's paid-media creative and shot with NFL and Olympic athletes. At Moment (2019–2023) I co-founded the online education vertical — zero to $1M+ in year one, forty-plus courses, a two-person team. At Matador Network (2016–2019) I was Art Director on global tourism campaigns for Lufthansa, Subaru, Visit Turkey, Visit Slovenia, Visit Norway — directed a Japan forest-bathing documentary that picked up film-festival awards, and ran a team of eight filmmakers. As DP on the Rosetta Stone × American Airlines in-flight series I shot five seasons across Mexico, France, Israel, Brazil, and South Korea.

Earlier: five years as senior product designer at Ace Metrix (iSpot.tv), leading design across their iPad, iPhone, and desktop analytics dashboards. Before that, agency work at Cinco and Liquid in Portland on Microsoft, Ford, Electronic Arts, and Wieden+Kennedy accounts. And in 2011, an app my brother and I built at Fling Soft — a video-streaming service that became the first paid app on Roku and launched at #1 in the App Store.

All of this now lives under Miru Studio, the independent practice I run out of LA.

"An incredibly talented person with a unique creative eye. He balances multiple projects simultaneously while traveling — quite the feat. If you're lucky enough to have Mike on your team, be grateful."
— Megan Snedden, Content Strategist

The last year has been a shift. I’ve gone deep on AI for creative at scale — building agents that ingest brand books, ad-account reports, and raw interview footage, then propose the next round of creative. I’ve written tools that turn a one-hour interview into twenty ad variants, source hooks directly from a CEO’s own words, and generate Figma and DaVinci-ready ad statics. My view: AI isn’t a replacement for craft, it’s a multiplier. Used well, one creative director can now operate at the scale of a small team.

What I bring to a team isn’t “prettier.” It’s creative that measurably moves the business — and a mindset that reads data as fluently as it reads a storyboard. I work tightly with strategy, product, and engineering. Calm in fast-paced rooms, direct in writing, always looking for the leverage point where one decision changes ten downstream things. My background has a thread of engineering in it — I was headed that direction before I switched into design — and that framing still shapes how I work: I think in systems, I'm comfortable in code, and I'm suspicious of pretty work that doesn't do a job.

Off the clock: I've traveled to 65 countries, I'm working on Spanish, French, and Japanese, and I'm raising a one-year-old with my wife (who's Japanese — we make it back to her family most years). I shoot for myself when I travel. I've been getting deep into coffee, cocktails, boxing on and off, and small-batch AI tools. I was on the Navigating the Fear of Imperfection podcast with Sam Elkins talking about the creator economy and why so many creatives freeze instead of posting — if that resonates, it's worth a listen.

Currently open to full-time creative-director roles in Los Angeles (on-site or hybrid). Most brands are leaving real performance gains on the table because nobody on the team knows how to operationalize AI. That's the gap I close.

mike@zermato.com · LinkedIn · Let's chat.