Stefano Marrone on storytelling, curiosity and the winding road to the C-suite
From building an agency to becoming CMO, Stefano Marrone reflects on the unexpected turns of his career, the value of creative thinking and what he's learnt about leadership along the way.
For this feature, we chat with Stefano Marrone, CMO at Siebert Financial, about how an unexpected injury forced him to rethink his dream job, his longstanding fascination with comic books and the challenges of making decisions as a CMO. Along the way, we ponder the importance of curiosity, knowing when to take creative risks and why the most interesting business problems often extend beyond a single discipline.
Creative thinking remains an essential part of Stefano's approach to business decisions, bringing with it a wealth of insight. Having moved from animation to agency ownership and marketing leadership, he offers an interesting perspective on what happens when creative ambition meets commercial expectations, and how those experiences have shaped his judgement.
Stefano:
Absolutely. Creative thinking teaches you to look at a problem from different angles before deciding on the answer. As a storyteller, you are constantly asking: What am I trying to communicate? What does the audience need to feel or understand? What can I remove to make the message more effective? Those questions are just as useful in a board meeting.
What changes when you move into a leadership position is total accountability and learning to talk the esoteric language of spreadsheets. You can't judge an idea only by whether it's interesting or beautifully executed, but think about revenue, resources, timing, people, risk, and whether it actually solves the problem. I haven't stopped thinking like a creative; I've just had to add more layers, and creative thinking has helped me in every CMO challenge I've faced.
D: You started as an artist and animator before becoming an agency founder and eventually a CMO. Do you still think like a creative when making business decisions? What changes when you switch seats?

D: You built Nucco from a small studio into a business that was eventually acquired by UNIT9. What were the most valuable lessons you took from the agency world?

Stefano:
Probably nurturing curiosity, more than anything else. Running an agency gives you this extraordinary education because one week you're trying to understand financial services, the next you're dealing with technology, energy, healthcare, or entertainment: your clients become your teachers.
It also teaches you very quickly that ideas are only one part of the job. You have to sell them, explain them, budget them, produce them, manage people around them, and ultimately prove that they did something useful. Building Nucco also changed my relationship with creativity: I started out wanting to make things; running a company taught me to become equally interested in why and how we made them. This holistic curiosity is one of the biggest things I carried with me to the brand side, too.
D: An injury early in your career changed the path you had imagined for yourself as an animator. How much did that experience teach you about reinvention?
Stefano:
A lot. In 2012, I had what I thought was my dream job, working as an animator and visual developer in Canada. Then, within a few months, I developed chronic cubital tunnel syndrome, ulnar neuropathy, and tendinitis. Suddenly I couldn't physically do the thing I had spent years training to do.
But there wasn't a grand reinvention plan, just the need to still be able to work in the creative industry. So I moved to London, went back to university at Goldsmiths to study the business side of creativity, started working, networking, and learning a different set of skills.
What it taught me is that reinvention is usually much less glamorous than it sounds afterward; at the time, you're just trying to find the next viable move.
It also taught me that skills travel: I couldn't continue as an animator the way I had imagined, but storytelling, design, and visual thinking turned out to be valuable in many other contexts.
​
"Successful marketing is an act of radical empathy mixed with powerful creative execution."
D: As someone with strong creative instincts, how do you separate personal taste from what’s actually right for the audience?

Stefano:
I try to treat taste as information that needs to be kept constantly up to date to match the zeitgeist. Having taste is useful and, in fact, I think it becomes more valuable as technology makes execution easier. But personal preference shouldn’t impact the campaign: it’s all about the audience. The questions have to be: who is this for? What do we want them to do? Where will they encounter it? What cultural references make sense to them? I might personally dislike something that is completely right for the audience.
The opposite is also dangerous: something can be beautifully designed and completely ineffective. Successful marketing is an act of radical empathy mixed with powerful creative execution. You need enough conviction to recognize something interesting, but enough distance from your own taste to understand that you are usually not the audience.
​
D: When you took on the role, Siebert had nearly 60 years of history in an industry that often rewards caution and tradition. How do you decide which parts of that legacy to protect, and which to challenge?
Stefano:
I think the key is to protect the meaning, not necessarily the specific expressions of it. Siebert has something most brands would spend enormous amounts of money trying to manufacture: a genuinely remarkable founding story. Muriel Siebert was the first woman to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange: that isn't marketing mythology, real history. That’s what we had to cherish, protect, and elevate. What you don't have to protect is every convention that accumulated around the company or the industry afterward.
When we approached the brand, the interesting question was not: "How do we make a nearly 60-year-old financial company look younger?" It was, "How do we make what was radical about this company in the first place visible again?" That leads to very different creative decisions.
D: Your role at Siebert now extends far beyond advertising, from brand and product to media and AI. At what point does marketing become part of the business itself?
Stefano:
I think it always was; companies just separated it organisationally. Rory Sutherland argues that Marketing and Innovation in a company should factually be the same functions; I believe that’s a horizon successful companies should walk towards; I certainly push for this approach inside Siebert and have found that most of the other departments appreciate the support and help, as long as you approach them with respect and collaboratively.
I don't believe marketing should sit downstream waiting for the business to decide everything and then receive a brief asking us to make it attractive. Marketing influences how people understand your product, but also influences what products you build, which audiences you pursue, which partnerships make sense, how you distribute content, and even where future revenue might come from. If the product experience, brand promise, and commercial strategy are pointing in three different directions, no campaign is going to fix that.
​
D: What’s one thing agencies do that still drives you mad?
Stefano:
Only one thing? Hard to choose; agencies are imperfect, ever-growing experiments, and I hope they stay so. But here’s one: Not listening and trying to make your needs -whatever they might be- fit their process forcibly. If I want to fill an insanely long form, I’m not willing to pay a human team for this exquisitely dry experience. Human connection is essential in the process of building a true partnership; we don’t have to necessarily build it in person in 2026, but presence and attention matter.
Since agencies are ever-evolving and growing, human connection is essential to the process of building a true partnership.
​
D: AI is making polished execution faster and more accessible. If production value becomes less of a differentiator, where does creative value move next?
Stefano:
When almost anyone can produce a technically polished image, film, or piece of copy, polish itself becomes less valuable. The scarce things become the idea, the taste behind it, cultural understanding, and knowing what deserves to exist in the first place.
I've always thought AI is much more interesting as a tool for execution than as some magical replacement for human creativity. In fact, it’s the opposite of the highly random magic of creativity, which is born of new connections between best practices and the yet unexplored. We're going to be surrounded by an extraordinary amount of perfectly competent content, a universal rumination of fully charted territories; an empowered rococo of polished content devoid of meaning. The competitive advantage will be having a point of view people can recognize and a story worth paying attention to, with imperfect human elements that make it so.
​
"Having to question the problem rather than respond with a proposed solution leads to the most interesting outcomes."
D: At TOML, we rarely work in the traditional “client briefs, agency responds” model. What changes when a creative partner is involved early, before a solution has been agreed?
Stefano:
You get to question the problem rather than simply respond to the proposed solution; this inquisitive approach leads to the most interesting outcomes, even if the process to get there can be more resource-intensive. A traditional brief often contains an assumption: "We need an experiential activation"; but maybe you don't. Maybe you need to update the product experience, create a partnership, build a content series. If a creative partner arrives after all those decisions have already been made, most of that territory is closed.
Bringing people in earlier creates shared ownership of the problem, which is also why a lot of agencies have become obsessive about “clarity of the brief” rather than “building the brief together”, an approach I favored when I ran my own agency: it builds true partnerships.
​
D: You’ve said marketers sometimes need to make a singular choice, even if it means upsetting senior leadership. How do you balance collaboration with knowing when to say, “This is the direction”?
Stefano:
I think good collaboration and consensus are two very different things.
You should listen broadly: particularly in a complex business, there are people around the table who understand parts of the problem far better than you do, and ignoring that expertise is stupid. However, eventually somebody has to make a choice and be accountable for it.
Brands become diluted when every decision is treated as a negotiation, and every stakeholder gets 10 percent of what they wanted. You end up with something nobody hates, but nobody particularly cares about either: that’s just a bad investment for your marketing dollars.
I think leadership is listening broadly and deciding narrowly.
​
D: One marketing phrase you’d happily ban forever?
Stefano:
“Planning a viral campaign”; it’s the equivalent of saying that you want something to defy your expectations structurally: an oxymoron, often stated by a moron.
​
D: You’ve always been into comics. Which have influenced you most, creatively or personally, and which would you recommend?
Stefano:
Comics have influenced how I think about visual storytelling, the connection between words and images, and how our brains engage with information at a neurological level.
What I love about the medium is how much information can be communicated through intentional simplification. A few lines, the composition of a panel, and, crucially, what happens between two frames. Your brain fills in an enormous amount; that’s where the magic happens; a lot of the best ads in history work with the same principle, filling a gap and thus feeling like co-creators on the content itself.
Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics is probably the book I would recommend about the topic. It articulates ideas about abstraction, visual language, and empathy that I've found useful far beyond comics. I referenced some of those ideas when writing about animation and how stylization can make characters more universal. More generally, I'd tell people to read broadly across comics, graphic novels, and manga rather than getting trapped in format: they're an extraordinary education in economical storytelling.
​
D: You’ve spent much of your career balancing creative ambition with commercial reality. When the two genuinely clash, which one should win?
Stefano:
The business objective should win, but that doesn't necessarily mean choosing the safest idea. Commercial reality defines the problem, while creativity is how you find an interesting way through it. Where companies get into trouble is when they interpret "commercial" as "dull." Often the creatively ambitious answer is also the better business decision because it gives people a reason to notice you. It’s well-documented that greater creative impact makes your ad spending perform better; it’s frankly baffling to me that this is an argument marketers have to keep making in the boardroom and outside it.
At the same time, creative people need to be comfortable hearing that something simply doesn't make commercial sense and adapt to it. There’s a useful tension that needs to be kept for best results: business should determine what success looks like, but it shouldn't necessarily dictate what the answer looks like; otherwise, every company in a category eventually starts behaving and communicating exactly like everyone else.
​
D: For someone younger trying to get their foot in the door today, what should they focus on, and what matters less than they think?
Stefano:
Focus on making things, anything that is actually finished. Done and dusted, and move on to the next small thing you want to make. It's very easy to spend years preparing to be ready: another qualification, another course, another refinement of the portfolio. At some point you need evidence that you can actually do the work; that’s what I look at first; the resume comes a distant second and the schools I completely ignore. Also, deliberately learn outside your discipline. If you're a designer, learn something about business. If you're a marketer, understand film production. If you're a strategist, learn how things actually get made. One of the biggest consequences of AI tools is that the paradigm of the expert as we know it is going to disappear, a blip in history.
Lastly: meet people. My own career changed dramatically because I kept putting myself in rooms where I didn't know anybody and learning from people in industries I knew very little about. Not always comfortable, often looking like an idiot after dipping my toes into uncharted circles and environments, I've formed some of the most lasting relationships of my professional life. What matters less than people think is having a perfectly linear career. Mine certainly wasn't. Curiosity, reliability, and the ability to keep learning will take you a long way.
​
D: What’s your favorite Italian saying?
Stefano:
If I had to choose one that is not based on swearing and fits my life particularly well, it would probably be “Non tutti i mali vengono per nuocere.” Roughly: something good can come out of something bad. It's not saying that bad things are secretly good -sometimes bad things are simply bad- but they can force you somewhere you would never have chosen to go voluntarily.
My hand injury ended the career I thought I wanted. Without it, I probably wouldn't have moved to London, studied the business of creativity, built an agency, or followed most of the path that came afterward.
​
D: What are you still trying to get better at?
Stefano:
How long do you have? If I had to pick one thing, it would be focus. Curiosity has probably been one of the most useful characteristics in my career, but strengths have a habit of becoming weaknesses if you don't manage them. I'm interested in a lot of things. I like understanding different businesses, technologies, cultures, and disciplines. That has helped me connect dots throughout my career and actively cultivate my creativity and transferable skills. The downside is that there are always another five interesting things you could be doing.
So I'm trying to get better at choosing where to focus my attention and being comfortable saying no to things that could be interesting but not important, especially short-lived fads that everyone on the internet says you should be paying attention to. If we’re at that stage, you can be sure it won’t be relevant for much longer.
​
D: If you weren’t doing any of this, what do you think you’d be doing?
Stefano:
Probably something connected to visual storytelling. Animation was the original plan, and if my tendons had cooperated, there's a very plausible version of my life where I'm still doing that, but I suspect I would have eventually moved towards directing, producing, or building something anyway: I like to work for something bigger than myself or bounded by my personal abilities and limits.
I've realized that the thread running through most of my career isn't really marketing, animation, or even advertising: it's storytelling and building things. The format can change; but the instinct didn't.
​
Written by Debora Deva
Debbie is a writer, art director, and multidisciplinary creative at TOML Collective. With a background in advertising, she brings fresh perspectives to the journal — aiming to educate, question, and spark new ideas.
Get in touch with debora@tomlcollective.com