interview by Kaitlin Phillips
photographs by Mike Vitelli
You can pass through many workplaces in New York City without coming across anyone completely suited to their career. Once you find such a person, it’s a quiet inspiration. People like to fight the notion that you are what you do—but in the cases where it’s true, I can’t think of a better scenario. Such is the situation with Marcella Zimmermann, founder and CEO of Digital Counsel. It’s not enough to say she works harder than everyone else. Though she is a workaholic, I think it was something subtler: there wasn’t a situation where she didn’t know what to do. This makes her aptly suited to her profession. Communications is a protean environment. What’s true one day is not true the next. This holds true in everything from the smallest detail (one editor will tell you they’d never cover such a story, while the person one cubicle over will assign it) to the largest (publicity isn’t magazines anymore). More importantly—because being able to do your job, while novel, shouldn’t be the highest bar—Marcella is one of those old school publicists, with the glamor and cultural relevance that it connotes. But I mean this literally, she was trained in the old world, and yet has chosen to pioneer a new lane in marketing. I can’t think of anyone more committed to leveraging new direct means of communicating with audiences, far beyond the printed word.
PHILLIPS: You didn’t go to college, you didn’t study communications, and you didn’t have a traditional route to a career. You do, however, know a lot of interesting people and have always been at the intersection of many cultural conversations. What were some of the first jobs that led to your work in PR, and how did this transition to Digital Counsel happen?
ZIMMERMANN: Thank you for asking because a lot of people don’t realize I’m out of the PR game! Okay, so how it all started: when I moved to New York after high school, I started my first agency, New York Art Department, where I was as much on Tumblr and Reddit as I was in the art world. I became obsessed with Nyan Cat, which I believed could be the next Hello Kitty. I cold-messaged the creator, pitched a group show at The Hole, and convinced artists like Tom Sachs and Virgil Abloh’s [streetwear label and music collective] Been Trill to reimagine it. The show got written up by The New York Times and became my first big client project. From there, I worked at VICE, where I launched Madonna’s first global digital art initiative “Art for Freedom” before moving into PR under one of New York’s most iconic publicists.
PHILLIPS: Nadine Johnson!
ZIMMERMANN: Yup! That role gave me a traditional crash course: pitching stories, managing red carpets, seating galas with sticky notes, planting items in Page Six. It was valuable training, but I realized my passion was working directly with artists and building experiences. So, I launched Foundations magazine with my best friend, the art dealer Sebastian Gladstone, profiling then “emerging” artists like Jamian Juliano-Villani and Jessi Reaves. Carly Mark from Puppets Puppets was an editor, too. In 2015, I helped start the PR firm Cultural Counsel. After nearly a decade there, I spun off Digital Counsel, the independent company I own and run today.
PHILLIPS: Communications is becoming a more niche-y, specialized field as traditional media platforms lose influence and non-traditional platforms expand. To meet this new world, you've rapidly expanded in a direction that I genuinely don't even totally understand. What's your lane? What are you doing that other people aren't doing?
ZIMMERMANN: Yes, the trad media game has been completely maimed. The real gatekeepers now are the platforms and algorithms, not editors. Artists, brands, and institutions don’t just need to get in the door anymore—they need to build trust and context directly with their audiences. That’s my lane.
The difference with Digital Counsel is that my team isn’t made up of communications majors or “social media managers”—we’re practicing artists, extremely online content creators, serious paid media experts, and hardcore engineers. I’m the only “traditional” communications person on staff!
We try to treat social media campaigns the same way a curator approaches exhibition wall-text. We start with core messaging: What is the idea? The thesis? Who’s the intended audience? Then we radiate outward—how does that message get adapted for a website, an Instagram Reel, a TikTok moment, a board report, an ad campaign?
PHILLIPS: So, you're bullish on the importance of being your own media?
ZIMMERMANN: Absolutely. In the future of culture, the competition isn’t just the gallery down the street—it’s the Kardashians, OnlyFans, Labubu, Netflix, AI slop cat videos. That’s the landscape. For the arts sector, it shouldn’t be about chasing a million views; it’s about building trust and having confidence that your voice and vision will find its audience through consistency.
The truth is, cutting through the noise is harder for the arts. Quick hits like when a museum’s plunky social media manager co-opts a meme-y trend like Girl Dinner, it might seem rewarding in the moment but there’s no lasting impact. And it’s cringe. What does last is the relationships you build with your audience. When people return to you because they trust your perspective, that’s the kind of sustained engagement that carries further than random short-term new followers, or a single headline, no matter how meaningful the coverage. That’s real influence.
PHILLIPS: How are you defining influence? Do you have a number in mind? I'll give a dumb example, there was a moment when having 200,000 Instagram followers mattered. It felt like those people were kind of famous, and now I think that number is a million.
ZIMMERMANN: I wish I could give you a number—like, “in 2025, you need 1.4 million followers”—but we all know that game is pretty hollow. You can have hundreds of thousands of followers and still be screaming into the void if nothing actually sticks. Visibility alone doesn’t equal influence.
And I don’t care much about likes or views anymore. The signals that matter are saves and shares. A save means something was valuable enough to hold onto; a share means it became part of someone else’s self-expression. That’s the level of connection we’re chasing—not vanity numbers, but work that people want to carry forward.
PHILLIPS: You’ve always gone back to the same sort of thing where you connect businesses and artists and art, seamlessly, with no effort. I’d love to get a clear picture of what you’re going to accomplish at your company, say, next week. What is going to happen from Monday to Friday?
ZIMMERMANN: Each weekday, my team and I make our way to the Lower East Side, where our studio is on the top floor of the former e-flux building. No two weeks look the same, but the rhythm is a balance: a lot of calls, a million decks, client meetings paired with crits, watching films, keeping an intense media diet, going to openings, and spending time in artists’ studios. That mix of structured work and cultural immersion is what keeps our practice both rigorous and alive to what’s happening around us.
Next week, for instance, we’re developing the annual plan for Hyundai Artlab’s channels, treating it the way a museum might plan an exhibition season: outlining themes, identifying new voices, mapping cultural touchpoints, and then translating those into video, editorial, advertising, web, and social. Meanwhile, I’ll be running around to the Independent and Armory Show. We’re also preparing the launch of Eva Foundation, a new arts space in Bucharest dedicated to women artists that we helped brand. And the release of the new Different Leaf magazine, which will be guest edited by the artist Nick Cave, who just had that great show at Jack Shainman. Just lots happening all the time!
PHILLIPS: I feel like it was really prescient and smart to found a digital-focused company. Was this a natural move skills-wise or was there a bit of a learning curve?
ZIMMERMANN: The move was natural in spirit, but it came with a real crash course. I had the soft skills from PR—intuition, relationships, timing—but suddenly had to master hard skills like paid media, analytics, and the language of engineers and technologists. With AI making many hard skills more accessible, soft skills will matter more than ever—but they can’t stand alone. Taste, empathy, cultural fluency, the ability to anticipate how a story will land—those are the qualities that make work feel alive rather than manufactured.
At the same time, instincts need structure. To make them actionable, you have to understand distribution—how media is bought, how algorithms surface content, how to measure impact. The future lies in the interplay: soft skills provide the “why” and “what,” hard skills ensure the “how” and “where.” Together they let ideas not just travel, but take root in culture.
PHILLIPS: Can you share any more about those numbers, those internal metrics for success today?
ZIMMERMANN: Platforms give you the obvious surface metrics—reach, impressions, likes, comments, follower counts. Those are important, but where we go deeper is in qualitative analysis. Every month, my team literally audits who the new followers are. We’ll click through, screenshot, and map them: is this a random bot, or is it a curator at a museum we’re into? Is it a peer foundation in the same city where a program just launched? Is it an artist or critic whose engagement signals cultural alignment? That kind of context is much more valuable than a vanity follower number.
PHILLIPS: Who do you think is doing a good job shaping the future of culture? When I started my business, I got some advice: Sit down and think about who your ideal client is, and work on pursuing them. So who are your ideal clients?
ZIMMERMANN: My ideal clients approach culture with rigor and openness— people that want to build a more interesting, compassionate future. Miuccia Prada and Fondazione Prada’s programs are a compass point for me. I’d love to help other luxury houses build their own digital versions of something similarly multidisciplinary and intellectual. I’m also watching what Yana Peel is doing at Chanel. I just saw her speak at the Aspen Ideas Festival about how she’s translating heritage into global cultural relevance.
But who are my dream clients? The 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. Or developing Claude’s arts program. Creating a tech conference for Gagosian Quarterly. Launching the Nike Arts Biennial, first online, then worldwide.
PHILLIPS: I think it’s cool you’re adjusting to the times. I’m still stuck in traditional PR. I really do find it glamorous.
ZIMMERMANN: For me, glamour always came with grit. I value the education I got in traditional PR—it was glamorous, yes, but it was also sticky notes at 2 AM, navigating egos, and late night marathons that shaped how I operate today. That old New York media world doesn’t exist anymore, and maybe people like you and me are the last generation who will actually remember it for what it was. Maybe that’s why we’re so good at breaking it down and repurposing it for now.
PHILLIPS: There’s just no trenches now. Like, they got rid of Vogue internships. There are so many workaholic stepping stones now that are just gone in New York, and I think it did change the kind of worker Gen Z is.
ZIMMERMANN: Totally. That absence has changed both the kind of worker you get and the kinds of dreams they bring to the table. But if the old system is gone, maybe that’s the opportunity—to invent something different, something better. A new kind of glamor.