When Max Fallenius, now a senior on the golf team, first arrived at SCAD, he didn't imagine he'd be leaving four years later with awards and recognition from prestigious advertising federations; Max hadn't even planned on perusing advertising. In Sweden he began doing freelance photography and videography. Without interference from his parents, Max may not have attended college at all. "I'll do it for one year," he promised them. "If I don't like it, I'll just go back."

Max came to SCAD hoping to continue his career in videography but realized after taking an introductory course that he was out of place.  "It was all about having 300 people on set, starting as running guy and working your way up," he says. Looking for a change of pace, he consulted a teammate who majored in advertising and branding. "I thought I'd try it out" Max says. "It was like film and photo and everything in between."

As an advertising and branding major, Max found his swing. He has completed multiple assignments that have transcended classroom expectations and found success at on-campus and national competitions. One project he created, Spotify Transitions, is currently on the path to National recognition with the American Advertising Awards.
"I was in my car, and I just caught myself skipping songs a lot." Max says. His preferred music streaming platform, Spotify, has tried a lot of techniques to personalize user experience. Even after their efforts, Max was still skimming through playlists, only playing the best parts of songs. "My assignment was to come up with something a brand is missing, so I thought Spotify could do something with this."

So, Max begun sketching his ideas for a new interface that would fit within Spotify's app. Through collaboration and feedback from professors and peers he created his final product. "The feature uses AI to analyze what sections of a song people listen to most and plays that snippet, almost like a DJ," Max says. "Users can also make their own snippets to make transitions between songs seamless."
Visualizing an auditory product requires creativity, but Max has plenty of practice with that. "As golfers we're very visual. We have to visualize our shots, I think that's affected my creative process," he says. He leaned into his background in film and photography when creating the ad campaign for this feature. "I found sound waves really interesting, how the waveform bounces," Max says. "So, I took that as one aspect that I wanted to have in my official identity."

Spotify Transitions wasn't the first audio-based project that Max tackled. In 2024 he won a SCADDY Award for a campaign he worked on called Put a Pause to Your Day that focused on Bose's noise-cancelling technology. Max highlighted how Bose headphones could be used to "bring calm to noisy, busy environments, helping users find peace and focus in their day." He submitted it to SCAD's in-house advertising awards program and won a Gold award for Branded Content. "When you're working on a project, you almost know if it's award worthy," Max says. "Especially with Bose, I knew that it could go far."
Max doesn't set out to create award-winning campaigns, it's just a part of his world. "I usually see that something's missing, an ad or service, and I pick a brand to implement this idea with," he says. For a recent project he and a group of classmates were given free rein: create your dream brand. Max reflected on a problem he had noticed since moving to the US from Sweden: recycling is complicated and has little to no incentive. "Here we don't recycle as much, and to me it kind of hurts," Max says. To resolve this, he and his group created Returnem, a recycling program that takes influence from successful initiatives across Europe but is re-branded to appeal to the American consumer.

The success Max has had in SCAD's advertising and branding program boils down to one lesson. "Golf has taught me, you have to have patience," Max says. "You're not going to fix a problem overnight."  He hopes to keep golf in his work as he enters the professional world. "It's such a big passion of mine, even outside of competing," Max says. "I love everything around it. I don't want to give that away."