About Me
Matt Creamer is editor-at-large at Advertising Age and a content strategist whose decade as a journalist has taken him to farflung places like Cuba and Alabama, inside an incinerator built to destroy chemical weapons and, perhaps most dangerously, inside some of America’s biggest PR and advertising agencies.
As a journalist, he is currently focused on how social media is changing the marketing and media businesses. As a consultant, he works with companies who want to understand and act on those changes. Recent examples of consulting work include a consumer magazine brand looking to launch a business-to-business extension and a digital media company interested in launching a website aimed at affluent consumers.
But that’s pretty far from where he began. In his first full-time reporting job after graduating from journalism school, he covered life in rural Alabama at The Anniston (Ala.) Star.
There he pulled the covers off an old local legend in an account that was remade by The Daily Show (back when they did sketches.) He also covered a vicious patricide and any number of social ills, with a focus on massive environmental pollution. One of his beats was the political and public health saga of an Army-funded incinerator project designed to destroy a local stockpile of chemical weapons. His biggest scoop was the Army’s decision to issue gas masks to local residents as part of the program’s first time that had ever happened on American soil.
From there, he moved to PRWeek magazine, where he edited the media coverage and wrote feature stories, including an article on on what the business climate would look like in post-Castro Cuba, a story that took him to Havana itself.
In 2005, Matt joined Advertising Age magazine as a reporter. A theme in his coverage there was corporate corruption, which he chronicled in two award-winning stories. One was the trial of two executives from Ogilvy and Mather, eventually convicted of defrauding the federal antidrug program. The other was the firing of a high-flying Walmart marketing executive, who was canned very publicly after a number of alleged improprieties, including an affair with a subordinate, came to light. Matt was eventually promoted to editor-at-large, giving him a bit of free reign that took him to France to profile corporate raider Vincente Bollore and to Tampa, Florida to profile a founding father of the late-night infomerical business.
He also performed a weeklong experiment in which he abandoned TV for online video a package that was featured on NPR’s Morning Edition.
In 2008, he was promoted to senior editor in charge of growing Ad Age’s international operation. The promotion resulted in Ad Age’s first ever Global Issue, a new Global News channel on the website and increasing recognition of the Ad Age brand around the world. In addition to picking up a few awards from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers and American Business Media, Matt achieved this distinction: His name was the fifth frequently most searched term on Ad Age for a time, right after Kodak.
In January 2010, he joined Breaking Media, a digital publishing company that owns the popular blogs Above the Law, Fashionista, Dealbreaker, and Going Concern, where he was responsible for day-to-day editorial operations and strategy, social media development, and content partnerships. He left six months later to work as a freelance writer, including taking up his old editor-at-large role at Ad Age, and as a consultant.
Matt’s a graduate of New York University, from which he received a bachelor’s degree in English and a master’s in journalism. He’s written for several other publications including The New York Observer and the New York Daily News.
He lives in Manhattan and he recently lost on Jeopardy!.