MAKOTO STUDIO TEAM

Graduated in Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, Gianluca Bernardini has always cultivated a passion for Art, Comics, and Painting. Left-handed, Buddhist, and a lover of other cultures, as soon as he finished his academic studies, he moved to his beloved Berlin, a city he left in 1989, the night before the fall of the wall! Back in Italy, he devoted himself to restoration work and consolidation of frescoes, cartoonist, and full-time artist.

The advent of the first personal computer Mac, opened the world of digital graphics, mainly as applied to nightlife that will see him among the best-known interpreters of the communication of the national clubbing.

In the 90s, he collaborated with Studio A.G.O. s.r.l. in Bologna as Art Director for realities linked to the world of clothing and youth communication, including Avirex (Ateca group), Vans (W.P. Work in progress), and Meltin 'Pot (Romano SpA). In 1999 he co-founded the studio Latveria Design Srl with President and Art Director.

The studio is involved in strategic and communication activities mainly for companies in the textile and clothing sector. The areas of expertise of the studio expand from graphic Design to communication strategies, multimedia platforms, web design. Since 2006 he has been teaching the course of Publishing for Fashion Design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna.

In 2010 he approached the methodologies of design thinking, design management, strategic & concept Design as a partner of D.M.C., Design Management Center, an association that deals with designing and applying tools to manage innovation within organizations, public or private.

Thanks to Massimiliano Geraci's suggestions, among the most recent interests are Neuromarketing and behavioral sciences applied to Design, together with new motion graphic software and digital animation techniques aimed at content creation.

Training and background Graduated in Business Strategies at the University of Bologna, Marcello Briguglio has acquired more than ten years of experience within advertising agencies and dealers in selling communication activities, branding, advertising, and digital making. After an initial collaboration with the consulting company Newton Spa (now part of the 24 Ore Group), which led him to work for several months within the Internal Communication staff of the Personnel Department of Enel holding, he began his professional career with the role of account in advertising agencies (Consorzio Creativo Library, Latveria) and advertising agencies (initially in SPE-Monrif and after a few years in Banzai Advertising).

Starting from 2006, he began an entrepreneurial path that led him to found Studio Massimo Paganini (SMP). This communication agency stood out for being among the first in Italy to carry out street Marketing activities, working with important companies such as P&G, Vodafone, Pirelli. Then, with the contribution of Massimiliano Geraci, he led the digital evolution of SMP, focusing the planning and production activities on design, content Mktg and digital adv.

In recent years, besides managing relationships with clients, he has been involved in the design development of activities requested by companies, digital marketing consulting, and realization of communication campaigns.

He also started a collaboration with Nexus, the cultural association founded by the artist Simona Bertozzi, to realize shows and training projects in the field of contemporary dance. In 2021 he co-founded Makoto, an agency that acquired the heritage of SMP to embark on a path of growth to broaden and deepen skills, techniques, and tools necessary for the realization of new generation digital projects.

Pugliese by birth but Bolognese by adoption, Alessia Contessa graduated in Cinema, Television and Multimedia Production at the University of Bologna. During her years of study, she has deepened her knowledge of cyberpsychology, analyzing the link between reality and virtuality through the filter of media products. This study led to her master's thesis, "Digital Technologies and Deviance. The look of contemporary seriality". His interest in transmedia storytelling, cross-media, and narrative ecosystems has been constantly fed through his training and his attitude to the analysis of video game, serial, film, literary, and comics narratives.

For some years, she has been working as a copywriter, content curator, editor, and graphic designer with several blogs and webzines dedicated to cinema, comics, and video games. In Makoto, she has gradually specialized in social media marketing, particularly Facebook and Instagram. For the elaboration of editorial activities of brands and the creation of content suitable for content marketing activities, she supervises the work done by designers and creatives.

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Currently, she is refining the techniques of Social Media Adv and Copywriting, applying methodologies of Neuromarketing. In the last period, he has also developed an original approach for realizing reports and benchmarks that put together the data extrapolated from the various platforms for measuring the digital performance of brands, with a qualitative analysis based on the so-called "micro-data."

Massimiliano Geraci is a specialist in Strategic Content Marketing, SEO, and Semantic Search. He holds a degree in Communication Sciences and an MBA. His passion for semiotics, writing, and information organization led him to focus on Strategic Content Marketing. His interests widened more and more towards Semantic Search, Structured Data expressed through schema.org, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and in general technologies for knowledge representation and Machine Readability, including Knowledge Graphs. After graduation, Massimiliano Geraci researched for many years in academia or within research projects funded by MIUR or the EU.

He deals with Urban Sociology, Sociology of Technologies, and Research Methodology. He collaborates for five years with the interdisciplinary research group Mappe Urbane born within the Istituto Gramsci of Bologna. He directs and collaborates with several journals: Cyberzone, Studi Culturali (il Mulino editore), Inchiesta (Dedalo Editore), Quality&Quantity (Springer Nature). Massimiliano Geraci writes, with Franco Berardi, the novel Morte ai Vecchi (Killing Swarm) for Baldini&Castoldi Editore and, as a lover of contemporary arts and new visual cultures, he edited art anthologies dedicated to visionary art and pop surrealism in collaboration with LastGasp, the historical underground publisher in Los Angeles.

Massimiliano Geraci begins his entrepreneurial career as co-founder of ROManza Composizioni Multimediali, a company dedicated to realizing CD-ROMs in the early '90s (yeah, he has white hair). During his collaboration with the research group Mappe Urbane, he met Marcello Briguglio and, together with Studio Massimo Paganini, created Percorsi Emotive, one of the first Italian geoblogs open to the publication of anyone.

Massimiliano Geraci is co-founder of Makoto Studio. He supports the company's growth along the lines of technological development, particularly in Semantic Search, Machine learning applied to Natural Language Processing, and Natural Language Generation (NLG), such as product descriptions in e-commerce and marketing automation.