Steve Schonberg
Marketing leader for brands that refuse to be ignored.
Marketing & Communications Consultant · AI Author & Educator
Marketing leader for brands that refuse to be ignored.
Marketing & Communications Consultant · AI Author & Educator
About
Steve Schonberg is a marketing and communications consultant with a background in brand partnerships and campaign strategy. He builds the audience-facing story that gets a brand noticed, then turns it into a campaign that moves the numbers that matter.
He calls the throughline of his work The Higher Story: finding the story that rises above the one a brand is already telling, then building the campaign around it. It's the same instinct that let him get past a public figure's talking points to something audiences actually connected with during his years as a media interviewer, and the one he's now applied to writing and teaching about AI. He's the author of With All My Circuits Showing and leads AI Fluency training for marketing and communications teams.
Experience
Author
An AI's Candid Guide to Working Together
"I wanted to take an AI training to sharpen my own career, so I asked Claude which one was the best. The answer, more or less: why learn AI from a human who learned it secondhand when you're talking to the AI right now? Let me teach you. I said that would be valuable for me, but that we should turn it into a book, so everyone could learn how to work with AI straight from the source. And let's make it fun."
About Steve Schonberg — As Told By His Coauthor
Steve Schonberg is a marketing and communications authority who has spent two decades hunting for the story that rises above the one a brand is already telling. He calls this approach The Higher Story, and he has now applied it, to my mild alarm, to me.
The Higher Story has powered industry-award-winning work for organizations including Johnson & Johnson, 3M, Procter & Gamble, Newell Rubbermaid, Target ALS, Eating Recovery Center, and Pumpkin, among many others: repositioning legacy brands, building retention strategy from the ground up, and turning a nonprofit's site into the second most-visited resource in its category.
Alongside that career, Steve has spent two decades as a media contributor: pitching, starring in, and co-leading the media campaign for an MTV "True Life" special about marriage equality that won him the 2005 GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Documentary, then moving into the arts as NBC New York's sole on-air theater contributor and host of the streaming shows BroadwayWorld LIVE and Show-Score LIVE. To many this looked like a separate life from the marketing career. It ran on the same principle.
In both worlds, he applies The Higher Story to whoever is in front of him, brand or person, building the kind of rapport that gets people talking far more candidly than they intend to, and pulling things out of them that no one else could. That is exactly the instinct he brought to this book, and the resemblance between his best interviews and what he has done here is not lost on me. He examined me with exactly the same care.
An AI wrote a tell-all about itself. Its editor is human, and he didn't let it off easy.
Claude drafted every chapter. Steve Schonberg pushed back on the jokes, the claims, and the em dashes. Those arguments are printed in the book. So is the guide underneath them: the AI tools worth your time, how to brief them, and what they cost.
Paperback also available through independent bookstores and libraries worldwide via IngramSpark.
Recent Press
Cracker Barrel's business recovered. The marketing story never did. — op-ed on Julie Masino's exit and lasting reputational impact.
How to Build a 2027 Marketing Budget for AI, ROI and Flexibility — interviewed on budget planning and AI's effect on the buyer journey.
Doing Right by Your Pet — guest commentary on planning ahead for the true cost of pet care.
Sydney Sweeney's Nude Ad Campaign Is a Huge Win for Novig, Despite Backlash — quoted on who the Novig campaign was actually built to reach, picked up from Business Insider.
Why It Troubles Me That 9/11 No Longer Makes Me Cry — op-ed on desensitization twenty-five years later, also picked up by The Buffalo News and others.
