The throughline.

Origin story

Some of the first things I ever wrote were programs, in BASIC, on a TRS-80. One of them was a text adventure. The thrill was specific: type the right words and the machine does the thing. I've been chasing a version of that ever since.

Then human language won, for a while. Latin, French, Spanish, Italian. Latin is where movēre comes from: to move, the root of emotion and motivation, and eventually the name of the method this studio was built on. A dead language turned out to be one of the most useful things I studied.

Disney

During college I spent summers in the Magic Kingdom, working the Davy Crockett Explorer Canoes. No motor, no track. The guests paddled, and from the bow I delivered scripted, corny jokes while a colleague steered from the stern; we rotated through the day. After college, Disney was one of the first accounts I worked on at my first agency job, and the writing turned professional: copy for exhibits, rides and restaurants across the parks and hotels, and the full-color international newsletter for the Disney Vacation Club, which I wrote and edited. It's where I learned that the voice has to hold from a ride sign to a newsletter to a menu to a canoe.

Hard Rock

Hard Rock Cafe International was my other key account at that agency, until they hired me away. For several years I ran a department at the international headquarters, and the work was the whole brand at once: I produced and launched the first Hard Rock Cafe International website; I conceived, produced, launched and managed the Hard Rock Mystery Tour, a global sweepstakes promotion whose materials and music video featured in every restaurant, and whose video won a Telly Award; and I edited, designed and directed The Hard Rocker, the full-color international newsletter, then launched a smaller magazine, Rock Hard News, alongside it. In-store traffic rose 15% year over year during the Mystery Tour. The newsletters went out in 30 languages to more than 65 countries, which is where I learned that a brand's voice has to survive translation or it isn't done right.

The agency years

Fantasy Interactive, Organic, and Razorfish, and launch work for Google, Intel, Sony, Nickelodeon and others. Google's Project Re:Brief rebuilt four classic campaigns for the modern web and won a Cannes Cyber Lion. The Intel work drove a 25% lift in sales and online conversions. The Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards app lifted engagement 20% year over year. Every one of those is a card in the work. It's work I led and produced.

Accenture Interactive: the pitch rooms

The win rate went from 54% to 88% across more than 20 enterprise pitches, with over $1B in attributed revenue. Every pitch ran like a startup brand: a three-hour session with the senior stakeholders in the room, then a fully formed identity, lexicon and narrative within weeks, and one unarguable metric at the end. Win or lose.

Same problem as a founder's, at a different scale: a room that has to believe a story the person who knows it best won't be there to tell. That three-hour session is where the Rumble started. It's the second step of every engagement now, right after Unlock.

CRC: the studio

ChrisRubinCreativ is the house. For founder-led companies, the studio extracts the story the founder carries around in their head and builds it into the identity, the positioning and the words the company actually uses: Apto Solutions (+41% revenue), Remark Growth Marketing (+36% revenue), Tria Beauty (+63% website revenue), Ledger (+20% monthly sales through its industry's worst downturn), BetterCloud (25% market share regained, and a move from Gartner Visionary to Gartner Leader). The case studies carry the detail.

The method, three generations

The method has been rebuilt twice, each time to travel further from me, maturing in depth and resolution.

1. Movere (CRC): Brand Clarity, to know thyself. Brand Positioning, to know your audience. Brand Resonance, to move people. Brand Extension, to keep moving them. Four steps, run by hand, one company at a time.
2. The Storyline Method: Anchor, Insight, Shift, Unification, Realization. The shape a story has to take before a team can tell it faithfully, with or without the founder.
3. The Narrative Operating System (BrandMultiplier): Unlock, Rumble, Architect, Install, Tune. Extraction, then installation into how the whole company sells, then software that keeps it current. This is the current practice, and it's what BrandMultiplier does.

Off the clock

Roots

Tiburon, Marin County, on the bay. The mountain came later.

Where

Aspen, Colorado. A water person living on a mountain.

Water

Wing-foiling, for the past few years. Most days I fly. Some days I swim.

Music

Indie rock. I sing, fairly well, and play bass, badly.

Coaching

Coached my son's flag football team to four championships in five years.

Mornings

A cold plunge at 39 degrees and a meditation practice, daily, for more than ten years.

Writing

At least 1,000 words a day for more than ten years. Most of it unpublished. All of it is why the rest reads the way it does.

Home

I help raise boy/girl twins. They supply most of my best material, none of which goes on this website.

Languages

Latin, French, Spanish, Italian. And BASIC, originally. Since 2022, vibe code.

The bookshelf

Ten books that have earned a permanent spot.

On the nightstand right now: Good Inside (Becky Kennedy), Notes on Being a Man (Scott Galloway) and The Hard Thing About Hard Things (Ben Horowitz). A few hundred more, rated, on Goodreads.