Meet Shep

El Sheppo
Artist, Musician, Creative Renegade

Shep Bryan
Entrepreneur, Growth Strategy, Creative Tech

Growth, Partnerships and Tech

Team: UMG for Brands

Summary: $Ms sold in novel AI and XR projects to F500 brands. I am a strategic growth and special projects consultant bringing disruptive solutions and campaigns to market for iconic clients. I help brands address key innovation & emerging tech challenges under demanding timelines and resource constraints.

WHAT I DO AT WORK:

  • Balancing a transformative vision of the future with deep practical knowledge of the tech & social systems shaping megatrends in culture and consumer behavior.

  • Leading business development, partnerships, and consulting on extended reality / blockchain transformation for enterprise CX strategy.

  • Leading and supporting digital transformation efforts, including the creation of go-to-market campaigns,  Web3 operating models, and new venture design.

At my core I'm an artist, a strategist, an inventor, and a leader. Helping iconic brands shape their business strategies with new and emerging technology is an exciting challenge that pushes all the right buttons in my brain.

We're in a new era of human centered experience design, and what worked before is not guaranteed to work tomorrow!

This is especially true in the AI era. After 8ish years of experience in immersive innovation and digital transformation, I have now spent the past 2 years going full-tilt in the AI world to prepare myself for the future.

I’ve power-leveled myself from a complete AI/ML noob to someone who has:

  • Successfully pitched and sold million dollar AI builds to F100 clients

  • Been first to market with multi-modal Generative AI ad campaigns

  • Written millions of words with AI

  • Become a Top 1% AI Voice on LinkedIn

  • Built my own software for democratizing advanced AI use

The future is now and I'm excited to continue building it with amazing teams and collaborators.

Awards & Accolades

A few select highlights from recent years.

2022 Gold CLIO, Music Marketing
Music In Color, Behr Paints for TBWA/Chiat/Day

Technical account lead for most advanced audio-reactive AR effect on Instagram. Produced by Subvrsive for TBWA/Chiat/Day as part of Behr Paint’s Music in Color campaign.

2022 Shorty Awards – Winner, HASHTAG / Bronze, TIKTOK
Coca Cola #ShareTheMagic

Early stage contributor on rapidly evolving project that became Coca Cola’s successful GTM campaign on TikTok with >12B impressions across the platform and 1.7M videos created.

2018 Cohort, Creative Startups Accelerator
Founder & Creative Director of Beaumonde

Accepted into the same venture accelerator that launched MeowWolf. Unlocked access to additional funding and executive mentors in the immersive and emerging technology space.

2017 Acquisition, Don Lawver Collection
Brokered sale of world’s largest concert photo collection

Signed 360 management deal with photographer of world’s largest collection of concert photos (400,000+ negatives). Sold rights to sale & reproduction of collection as package deal to group of private investors.

2015 Short Film Corner, Cannes Film Festival
Award-winning mini-doc on freestyle rap

Co-produced and featured in a short film that won 1st place at NC State’s film festival. Selected for screening at the Short Film Corner in 2015 Cannes Film Festival’s Marche Du Film.

2015 Designer, London Fashion Week
Creative Director for Bolos by Shep

Specially requested to design a custom set of high fashion bolo ties for charity fashion show in London. The designs were modeled on the runway alongside garments by Michael Kors, Chanel.

Dream. Imagine. Build.

Heads up – behind all that cool professional stuff, I’m an award-winning creative & entrepreneur with an unstoppable drive to:

  1. Build novel work and bring it to market

  2. Write and record a LOT of music

For as long as I can remember, I have tinkered, designed, and iterated until I came up with something new. Heck, the first time I asked my lawyer parents how to file a patent, I was in 3rd grade and had drawn a technical diagram of a soda can that could pour two flavors at once.

And music? Well, it’s always been around me, but 6th grade is when I got hooked on music production with a cracked version of Fruity Loops. I ended up releasing 8 albums of electronic music in high school! To date I’ve written/produced more than 1,000 tracks and netted a few million plays, though I’ve been pretty quiet in the streaming era.

What has my attention today?

WHAT I DO FOR FUN: