Romy Nehme

Building memorable brands and experiences

My mission

Hi, I'm Romy Nehme. After looking for that elusive thing, purpose, in the worlds of sports & entertainment, advertising, immersive arts, and civic media and imagination in the last 15 years, I've come back to my original passion: sports and fandom. My mission is to help shape and amplify the work of transformative organizations that are designing bold business models and spaces where vibrant public life can flourish.

I apply the most innovative and efficient tools from the worlds of digital advertising, emerging technology and experience design to worthy missions and ideas (why do anything, otherwise?).

Generative starting points

Here's what you can expect from working with me en route to building memorable brand, creative and media systems:

  • Creative research that illuminates fertile opportunity areas that are ripe for our time of reimagining;

  • Connecting data, research and insights from unexpected sources into a single and exciting strategic perspective from which business, product, brand and marketing decisions can flow;

  • Dynamic workshops and collaborative methods that bring different people to the table in invigorating and effective ways.

Beautiful Seams refers to a design philosophy (coined by Marc Weiser of Xerox PARC) that speaks to designing seams into a system rather than seamless-ness. And it's core to my approach as a leader, strategy designer and collaborator. Top-down overdesigned / overproduced brands and experiences don't leave room for agency, participation and generativity -- which are the most important design principles of all (!).

If you are an organization that seeks to reveal, rather than to conceal, and that demands we bring forth our curiosity, courage, compassion and creativity, I would love to talk to you.

How I got here

  1. Sport is the only language my father and I share. Consequently, the rituals of fandom have shaped who I am, and the beginnings of my career. After my masters in sport management, I worked in sports & entertainment.

    Fluencies developed: Building CRM systems to nurture fan and donor relationships, developing tracking and measurement methods for sponsorship programs, and creating programs and rituals that deepen relationships between a community, fans and its sports teams.

  2. I had the great fortune of starting the discipline of research & strategy at VaynerMedia, one of the fastest growing digital and emergent technology agencies. There, I learned the importance of creating campaigns grounded in communicating with different audiences based on each digital platform’s cultural dynamics. I also built a team of 25 wonderful cultural researchers and strategists and a prototyping studio.

    Fluencies developed: Creating spaces where diverse groups can experiment and grow; putting together the agency’s stack of research and analytics tools; designing dynamic research projects with a wide range of communities using various digital interfaces; planning campaigns and growing digital properties for Fortune 50 companies using the combined power of creative and media.

  3. I’ve consciously searched for collaborators whose practices were more immersive, embodied and participative. I’ve become a core member of the Columbia Digital Storytelling Lab, a group that creates platforms for exploring complex societal issues through reimagining literary works with emergent technologies; a frequent collaborator with Technology, Humans and Taste, where I curated “research” dinner conversations and prompts to explore issues in more dynamic ways; and a student of IX’s thick ethnography methods and collaborator on various projects.

    Fluencies developed: Methods of speculative design to explore uncertain futures; deeper modes of conversation design and research, from ethnographies to appreciative inquiry, world cafes and becoming more comfortable with ambiguity; prototyping human dynamics and mechanics of immersive productions; developing virtual workshops and toolkits for global participants.

  4. I found myself thinking often about how our media mostly connects a lot of strangers to a personality, or idea, and how poorly it does a job of making it easier for people to connect with each other. And I marveled at the city’s ability, at its best, to be a serendipitous collision machine. I designed an independent study and read a lot about the city and public spaces, and ended up creating a little podcast series called The Third Person, where I interviewed people who design for bodies in space across a wide range of disciplines. I wrote a reflection that led me to Eli Pariser, and New_ Public, an incubator for reimagining the internet as a public space.

    Fluencies developed: Translating complex ideas, research and principles into a delightful brand and digital ecosystem for a public-spirited community, curating and designing a virtual festival, and re-thinking digital spaces through spatiality rather than through temporality.

Ideas that guide me

Everything is interesting, and eventually, useful in some unpredictable way (which only reveals itself at the time of doing it). I spent years inhabiting a humanistic corner of the art+tech community when it could have been deemed “useless” to my work before incorporating it into my own practice and projects.

Certainty is destructive, and getting people to sit with ambiguity is trying (for me, and others!), but rewarding.

The right metaphors and visual language aid in making the unfamiliar feel more tangible, in transporting us away, at least temporarily, from the high stakes of our present conditions and entanglements.

Similarly, imagination is real. Fiction is a form of experiencing. Speculation can be a powerful way of organizing.

Ethnographies work when you let people know you’re interested in them, not in their answers. Aim for the intersubjective, not the interactive. (Thanks, Ben)

We breathe merely to survive. What if we instead breathed to the rhythm of life? (Thanks, Tynan.)

We will not have succeeded at creating a just society until we have difference without domination.

What others are saying

Romy has one of the most innovative and thoughtful creative minds I've worked with. She's strategic and visionary, a deep thinker and a smart creator — and she's great to work with, too.

Eli Pariser - Co-director, New_ Public and previously Co-founder, Upworthy

The hardest part about collaborating with a genius is that they know everything. In Romy’s case her massive intellect and wealth of knowledge is infused with a deep curiosity. This wild concoction creates a lethally strategic tincture that applied in liberal doses can soothe any business problem, heal any consumer need and allow real creatives to grow in crazy directions.

Nathan Phillips - Co-founder and CCO, Technology, Humans and Taste

Romy is the rare kind of creative strategist and collaborator who combines intuitive understanding, innate and sophisticated insight and an ability to bring teams along with her while shifting the lens of thinking to get to more expansive powerful ideas.

Katie Hankinson - SVP, The Sasha Group

Romy is *whiplash* smart, a gifted polymath who curates the most interesting-est things in the universe, and a robust thinker guaranteed to uplevel your strategy and imagination.

Sharon Panelo - VP, The Martin Agency

Romy creates a vortex of intellect and emotional power that condenses possibilities into the clearest steps toward the brightest point on the horizon. A true cultivator and champion of the unimaginably right idea.

Ben Doepke - Principal, Brand Mythologist and Ethnographer, IX

Romy is a wonderful collaborator. The way that she can process and synthesize information in real-time is incredible; her reservoir of knowledge and ability to actively listen and embrace ambiguity make her a unique and important part of our lab. And most importantly -- she is an amazing human being!

Lance Weiler - Founder, Columbia University Digital Storytelling Lab

Projects & talks