Meet Brian Santa Maria

We had the good fortune of connecting with Brian Santa Maria and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Brian, why did you decide to pursue a creative path?
Great question. As it turns out I pursued a lot of them. I always thought I’d be an animator but I started in theater. I was acting, writing, and just making stuff. I went into concept development. Did a project with Disney Imagineering and then Ray Bradbury. I wrote satire and won a Peabody for The Onion. But I considered any field creative, if the person doing it approached it creatively, right? Like Albert Einstein was a physicist. But he came at the work from angles others weren’t, developed new methodologies. It’s almost about approaching every problem like it’s entirely new, no matter how many people have made other approached routine. You trian yourself in a bunch of toolsets, be they writing, coloring, camera work, or even math, law, medicine, and then a creative career is one in which you apply those tool sets from new angles and make new methodologies.

I went into agency advertising after I got sick, and I won Effies and Addies and Shorties and whatever, and when I was internalizing the work for a big ol’ corporation, I believed that the corporate roles around me weren’t inherently uncreative careers, but they were often filled or executed by uncreative people in uncreative ways.

So I went to business school at Stanford and Brown and IE. And now launching brands, I still write, I still design, but I also get to look at, let’s say, “go-to-market” as its own problem in need of creativity, right?

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
I’m lucky. I get to use my creative curiosity, every day, and see the results.

I bring brands to the next level. Some really huge brands, and, pretty proudly, some really really tiny ones. I’ve met all sorts of creatives along the way, in all sorts of mediums, and I know there’s this stigma sometimes, or attitude that you work for the corporation or the business and that you’re leaving the creative world behind. You’re selling it out. That mind set is a problem. I don’t buy it. Maybe when it’s done badly, right? I can level up brand’s because of my ecclectic creative background. Because I get to use it all.

The variety of brands and clients actually speaks to that. (And now, even, launching my own.) If you’re an apparel company and you’re hiring people who’ve only worked in other apparel companies, then yeah, you probably are rehashing old sell-out ideas from cubicle creatives. But if I can take an electronics company, a film studio, a coffee start-up, a 150 year old railroad, whatever, and get at the heart of who each of them are, then strategically how to lead a team around executing on that, I’m doing work that’s closer to my CalArts art school days than anything else. Industry isn’t the common thread there, creativity and sincerity is.

I get to do a lot because I’ve done a lot. Before brand-building I workshopped with Ray Bradbury, did a stint with Imagineering, I was an actor at both Michael Kahn’s Shakespeare Theater and the UCB, I won a Peabody doing satire with the Onion. All of that stuff gets used in what I do now. I couldn’t lead a team without that background. It’s the kind of toolset that makes me ready for anything. That’s my brand, I guess. I level you up by deeping your identity. I do it with the widest creative arsenal around. And then the business education let’s me apply it to brand ops in a way that other artists maybe don’t see I guess.

I’m lucky. Great teams, great brands. Next level. I’m “the luckiest man on the face of the earth,” says the tattoo on my arm anyway.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
LA’s incredible. I’ve lived all over America. Omaha, Little Rock, NYC, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh… all over. LA’s my favorite. This is a tough question though because I always tell people that NYC is a great place to visit and a hard place to live. LA’s the opposite. You visit and you go to the Walk of Fame and think “I want more than heroin and Dave & Buster’s in my vacations.” First, stay away from the fancy restaurants. Some are great! Most aren’t. That’s not what LA does well. We do cultural food and take out like nobody else. I’m in the valley off Ventura, so a good old fashioned sushi crawl from Katsuya to Umigami to Yen. And I’d want to make the drive down to Little Tokyo too. Get some noodles. I used to do a lot of comedy, and still seem to have a handful shows that I should be going to see at any given time, so I’d drag them out to my friends’ stuff. The wonderful Jackie Johnson is running How to Get A Second Husband at the Lyric right now. If it’s sold out, head over to UCB. I’m not in love with the Sunset comedy clubs, but any excuse I have to get to the UCB on Franklin I’ll take.

And, since you asked about my tourist friends… we’ll go to Saddle Ranch and ride the bull. I bartended there for years when I was younger. That insanely goofy place was very good to me. I mean it’s right off on strip, the whole place is tipsy, DMX used to be stacking quarters at the pool table on weeknights, and, when I started there, they were literally filming a reality show with my coworkers. It’s a cartoon of L.A.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
So Mom, Dad, Bette, kiddos, I see you, I love you, for sure. But I also want to call out the wizards at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. I talked earlier about all careers being creative careers if you approach them that way, but I didn’t think that way until I spent time under the microscopes at the Clinic. I went in there as an adult with a terminal diagnosis. I’d spent the years up until then looking at the traditionally creative fields and taking shot after shot in theater, comedy, art. But I left finding creativity in more traditional fields after I saw the way the architects of that building built the waiting rooms in new creative ways to help more people. The way the machines they used were mind-bogglingly developed to find the data other doctors were missing. And I saw the way the doctors, to a one, looked at my problem as a unique issue to be creatively approached. Creativity can work inside a box. And you don’t need an art degree to exercise it. My children wouldn’t be painting their own lives right now if it weren’t for the creativity that’s fostered at Mayo Clinic. So a big hell yeah, to everyone up there.

Website: SantaMariaCreative.com

Instagram: @briansantamaria

Linkedin: Linkedin.com/in/santa-maria/

Other: Skimpies.com

Image Credits
Best Buy commercial still: Brian Billow, Film Director; Best Buy Internal Agency Union Pacific 150 Years Newspaper Wrap: Bailey Lauerman Agency