What I build. Generative AI rolled out across a 40+ person department – and five live tools built alone during a sabbatical.
/ Martin Biela · Chief Creative Officer
Twenty-eight years of brand and campaign craft, the last three as CCO and a member of the managing board. Then a sabbatical spent building instead of resting: five live AI tools, shipped weekly, in public. Available now – brand side or agency.
/ Why this page
The names on my CV – McCann, Mastercard, Cannes – tell you where I have been. This page shows what I do with that: the systems I build, the record behind them, and what shipped last week.
What I build. Generative AI rolled out across a 40+ person department – and five live tools built alone during a sabbatical.
What I built before. Twenty-eight years compressed into six rows, from the first online car configurator to five pitch wins in 2025.
What happened last week. Shipped, published, learned – each one dated. An empty week would be impossible to hide.
If you only have a minute: read the log. It is the part a CV cannot fake.
/ The system
Before the sabbatical I rolled generative AI out across a 40+ person creative department. During it I built five live tools – each with a scrape, a score and a publish step – on a seven-day cadence, with the stack below. None of this is a business. It is how I spent a sabbatical, and what I bring into the next role.
Introducing AI into a creative department is a change project, not a tool purchase. I ran it for 40+ creatives across three offices – tools, workflows, training – and took the same conversation into boardrooms.
A trailrunning data platform. World rankings, performance scores and pre-race field-strength forecasts – scraped, scored, QA-gated and published on a fixed cadence. Started in April 2026; in less than half a year it has become one of the most trusted data sources in the trailrunning community.
I connected Strava to Claude through a read-only MCP connector and asked what eight years of my own training data actually says. Five prototypes came out of it – each one a working page, not a slide.
A fantasy game on the same ranking data. Per-race multipliers, DNF handling, a leaderboard that settles itself.
Grocery data turned into a nutrition signal. What I actually buy, scored against what I say I want.
Designed, written and built with the same stack as everything above. The proof is the thing you are reading.
/ Track record
Creative leadership across UX, social, campaign and innovation for Mastercard, Microsoft, L'Oréal, Samsung, Opel and BMW. Teams of 40+ people across three offices – and the pitches that paid for them.
international awards for creativity, design and innovation – including Cannes Lions in Titanium and Creative Use of Data, and a D&AD Pencil.
Germany has Europe's lowest organ donation rate. 86% of Germans carry a bank card every day; only 26% carry a donor card. So we turned the bank card into a legally valid donor registration – a payment product doing a public-health job. Today 36.6 million bank cards carry the Life Donor feature.
The first machine-learning tool that let deaf people talk to voice assistants in sign language. Built inside Lab13, the innovation unit I founded – the first of its kind in the McCann Worldgroup network.
Social activation of Mastercard's UCL sponsorship around the Munich final: the Mastercard FanZone and the brand's first Social Content Studio, with a creator squad reaching 4.7 million followers combined. Part of the same programme: Mastercard's first AI-generated commercial, worldwide.
The most successful vehicle launch in Opel's history: 150,000 pre-orders taken before the car went on sale.
Concept and UX for the first online car configurator anywhere, launched for Opel – followed by the relaunch of opel.de and opel.com. Being early to new technology is not a claim on this page. It is a pattern.
In the last full year before the sabbatical, the department I led won five pitches: McDonald's Germany and McDonald's Netherlands, BMW Motorrad, Alphabet and apoBank. Creative leadership is also a P&L job. This is what that looked like.
Jury member · LIA, Webby Awards, DDA – Global Creative Excellence Board, McCann Worldgroup
/ The log
A CV tells you where someone has been. A log tells you what they did last week. An empty week here would be visible – that is the point.
A forecast of how strong the start field is at four weekend trail races – plus a check afterwards that corrects the prediction against who actually started. (The Friday Forecast on uphill notes.)
The weekly world-ranking update for trailrunning: who moved up, who dropped out of the top 100, and the biggest jumps of the week. (The Ascent, this week's edition.)
A ranking is only as good as the checks in front of it. Moved the validation step before publishing instead of after – and the weekly correction posts stopped.
A new scoring engine for a fantasy game built on real race results: per-race multipliers, a rule for runners who drop out, and a leaderboard that settles itself. (TrailBase Fantasy, v2.)
Cadence beats scope. Four small releases taught me more than any planned quarter did in twenty years of agency roadmaps.
The roundup of the best performances in the sport, rebuilt on the new ranking pipeline. (The Summit.)
Full log on uphillnotes.com
/ Learning in public
Not certificates on a shelf. Each one feeds something in the log above.
/ Standing
uphill notes started as a side project with a scraper and an opinion. Five months later it draws 100,000 visits a month across its platforms and is read inside the sport – by elite athletes, coaches and brands – and the questions it raises get argued about on the podcasts that shape trailrunning in German-speaking Europe.
Subscribers and followers of uphill notes. Nobody was asked to be there – they found the rankings, and stayed for the argument about how the sport measures itself.
The German-language trailrunning podcast, powered by Salomon. On world rankings, field strength, and why the sport still has no independent scoring system.
On building a data platform as one person, and what running data can say that a race result cannot.
“Quote slot – a line from a podcast host, an athlete or a brand lead.”
/ About
I spent 28 years making brands say something. Now I spend my weeks making systems do something.
I led creative departments of 40+ people across Frankfurt, Berlin and Düsseldorf, most recently as Chief Creative Officer and a member of the managing board at MRM/McCann. I founded Lab13, the network's first innovation unit, introduced generative AI across the whole department, and ran digital transformation workshops at board level – including with Opel's CEO and his board.
The craft did not change when AI arrived. What changed is the distance between an idea and a working thing. So I spent a sabbatical closing it: I design it, I build it, I ship it, and I publish the log. Most of what I build lives in trailrunning, because that is where my own data is. The method travels – and it comes with me into the next role.
Selected clients
/ Two doors
Creative and marketing leadership on the brand side or in an agency: CCO, ECD, Head of Marketing or AI transformation. Permanent, interim or fractional. DACH or remote.
start a conversation → Door 02 · studio Work with meAI consulting, workshops and mentoring for creative and marketing teams. From first prototype to a weekly shipping cadence that holds.
book a session →/ For recruiters
No form, no follow-up needed. Anything missing here, I send within one working day.
Reference letter from MRM/McCann and certificates are on file and go out with the CV. This page reads in German too – switch top right.