Most people who reach the top of the advertising industry spend the rest of their careers defending it. Steven Moy has spent his time arguing with it. In 2023, the Advertising Club of New York named him an industry ICON, an honor that usually arrives near the close of the story. He treated it as a midpoint. Within a year he had founded two companies built on the premise that most of what his industry produces is clutter.
Six Titles, Two Disciplines, One Person
Steven Moy is the founder and CEO of Digital Fix, an advisory firm he built with Sean Halter for executives trying to make sense of AI adoption without the sales pitch attached. He has served as CEO three times and chief technology officer three times, a combination almost nobody in advertising holds.
His clients have included American Express, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Marvel, Shiseido, Johnson & Johnson, CVS Health, Samsung, nike, and AT&T.
Apollo Aegis, INFORUM, and the Long Road to a P&L
The engineering came first, and it never left.
In 1987, two years before he finished a BS in electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern, Moy was doing software quality assurance at Apollo Computer, later acquired by HP, writing test plans against Aegis and Unix operating systems. It is unglamorous work. It is also where a person learns that systems fail in specific, predictable, findable ways. He spent the next eight years at Bernier & Associates leading a software development team, building an electronic data collection platform and then commercializing it as a shrink-wrapped product called INFORUM. He was learning how engineering becomes a business, not just a deliverable. That lesson would become a through line in Moy’s career: technology matters most when it changes a business outcome. What began as an engineering career gradually became a business career—building products, creating new capabilities, growing client relationships, running P&Ls, and eventually running companies.
Then came Reed Elsevier, where he sat inside the R&D group figuring out what the internet was going to do to publish, with LexisNexis as the test case. This was 1997. The answer, as it turned out, was everything.
He collected the credentials as he went. An MS in computer science from UMass Boston. An MBA in marketing and general management from Boston University’s Questrom School. That last one matters more than it looks. It is the moment the engineer decides he wants a seat where the money is decided, not just where the code is written.
Sapient gave him that seat, and then kept giving him bigger ones. Over eight years he moved from director of digital technology to vice president and general manager, eventually running the East Coast region and the Boston office with full P&L responsibility for clients including CVS Caremark, Staples, Dunkin’ Donuts, Puma, New Balance, and The Hartford. At Isobar he became chief commerce officer, then CEO of the UK business, folding eCommera into the operation and landing on Campaign’s A-List in 2017. R/GA hired him as US chief technology officer. Barbarian, a Cheil Worldwide company, made him global CEO in 2019. The titles tell only part of the story. Moy repeatedly found himself in situations where growth had to be built, not simply managed. At Sapient, he moved into full P&L leadership and helped scale the digital business and major client relationships. At Isobar, he helped build commerce into a global growth capability while integrating acquired businesses. At R/GA, he connected technology leadership more directly to clients and growth. And at Barbarian, he led the agency through transformation and the disruption of COVID while continuing to expand its capabilities and client base. At Sapient, that included helping drive digital growth to approximately $100 million in fee revenue. At Isobar, he helped build global commerce capabilities and led more than $40 million in acquisitions. At Barbarian, he doubled revenue over two years while navigating the disruption of the pandemic.
Each move added the same thing: proof that the wall between the technologists and the storytellers was costing everyone money. That may be what makes Moy’s career unusual. He has repeatedly occupied both sides of that wall. As a CTO, he learned how systems, platforms and emerging technologies create, or constrain, possibility. As a CEO and P&L leader, he learned that possibility means little unless it produces growth, customer value and economic return. That combination allows him to move between engineers and creatives, CIOs and CMOs, boardrooms and delivery teams.
It has become even more relevant in the AI era. Companies can no longer treat technology strategy, customer experience, marketing and business strategy as separate conversations. AI is collapsing those boundaries; which is precisely where Moy has spent much of his career operating.
At Barbarian he ran a group he described as “fearless, inventive, ambitious and entrepreneurial,” with the stated goal of using technology to remove friction from the customer experience. That is not agency poetry. It produced Mucinex Sickwear, a social commerce project Fast Company named a World Changing Idea in 2021 and D&AD recognized for craft and technical innovation. Fast Company invited him onto its Executive Board the same year. Campaign had already put him on its 40 Over 40 list in 2020.
He operates on a stated philosophy: “Speed is the New Black.” For a man who spent his first decade testing operating systems, the line is less about urgency than about the cost of hesitation, which he has watched large brands pay repeatedly.
The Firm That Building for What Comes Next
Moy’s current ventures are different expressions of the same thesis: companies don’t need more technology, marketing or AI for its own sake. They need greater clarity about what creates value—and the ability to act on it faster.
Digital Fix works with C-suite leaders, boards and senior operators on AI adoption and transformation without beginning with a technology to sell. “Digital Fix is not a software company. We don’t sell tools.” What it sells instead is judgment from practitioners who have had to make transformation work inside real organizations.
Only Pretty People applies the same thinking to brands and modern marketing. Its deliberately provocative premise—“Most marketing is noise. We will remove it.”—is less an attack on advertising than a demand for greater intention. “Pretty” in Moy’s definition isn’t aesthetics. Pretty is intention: clarity of purpose, customer experience, technology, content and execution working together.
The rest of his week is spread across boards and advisory seats, at least five of them. He served as a public board director at Vertiqal Studios, a content company reaching more than 300 million millennial and Gen Z viewers across social, live streaming, and live shopping. He is chief client officer, chief technology officer, and advisor at G&Co., chief marketing officer at Chartis.io, chief board advisor at Wrecking Ball, and a board advisor to 1MAGE.ai. He was chief advisor to the CEO of HSAD North America, LG’s in-house agency, on new offerings and M&A.
Two of those seats pay nothing. He sits on the board of Art Bath, a non-profit immersive performance salon in New York, and chairs the advisory board of La Miiel, a startup in intimate care founded by a woman entering a market that has largely ignored one.
Thirty-Nine Years of Looking for the Break
Moy has been named an icon by the people who run his industry and honored by the magazines that cover it. He could have spent this decade collecting speaking fees. Instead, he is building businesses around a conviction that the industries he helped shape now need to evolve again.
His criticism of marketing isn’t a rejection of it. It comes from the opposite place: a belief that creativity, technology and marketing matter too much to become noise. The opportunity presented by AI isn’t simply to make the existing system faster. It is to rethink the system itself—how companies understand customers, create experiences, produce content, make decisions and ultimately grow.
Thirty-nine years after he started hunting for bugs in an operating system, he looks at a system everyone else calls finished, finds what no longer works, and starts imagining what should replace it.
That may be the thread connecting the engineer, the CTO and the three-time CEO: he has spent his career finding the next version and building toward it.
Steven Moy is the founder and CEO of Only Pretty People, Digital Fix, and MoY, based in New York City. He advises C-suite leaders, boards, and senior operators on AI adoption, growth strategy, and digital transformation, and serves on boards including Art Bath, 1Mage.ai, Wrecking Ball, and Early Studies. To connect with Steven or learn more, visit his LinkedIn Profile.
