“Absorb Everything” — with Nathalie Con, VP, Strategy Director Giant Spoon

Today, we’re speaking with Nathalie Con, VP & Strategy Director Giant Spoon . We discuss the creation of Oh Laud, her love of physics, and her standout projects at Giant Spoon.

Today’s episode of Journey Map is brought to you by MindManager.

Journey Map listeners know that with the right map you can take your career anywhere you set your mind to. MindManager work management software puts your ideas, plans and projects on the path to success by transforming them into dynamic digital maps, charts, diagrams and more. Mind Managers flexible visual format makes it easy to capture, organize, understand and evolve critical business information and with powerful collaboration sharing features it’s the perfect tool for keeping remote teams aligned, on track and headed in the right direction.You can take a free thirty day no commitment trial today by visiting www.mindmanager.com/journeymap.

Welcome to Journey Map, the audio experience that deconstructs the career paths taken by some of the world’s most interesting people. Today’s guest graduated from Chapman University with a Bachelor’s degree in Public Relations and Advertising. She began working as an Earth Researcher for the National Film Festival for Talented Youth, which I’m very excited to learn more about. She moves on to work in communications for the Tiger Woods Foundation. Next, she begins work with ad agency RPA, moving through the ranks from Strategic Planning Intern to Strategic Planner. In 2014 she left RPA and joined the company which she is now at: Giant Spoon. Giant Spoon is a modern full-service agency which, In 2019, was listed as one of Linkedin’s top startups. Today’s guest is its VP Strategy Director, Nathalie Con. She is a Forbes 30 under 30, in 2017 she was Adweeks Rising Star, and she’s Business Insider’s Madison Avenue Advertising Rising Star 2020.

Today’s episode of Journey Map is brought to you by MindManager. Journey Map listeners know that with the right map you can take your career anywhere you set your mind to. MindManager work management software puts your ideas, plans and projects on the path to success by transforming them into dynamic digital maps, charts, diagrams and more. Mind Managers flexible visual format makes it easy to capture, organize, understand and evolve critical business information and with powerful collaboration sharing features it’s the perfect tool for keeping remote teams aligned, on track and headed in the right direction.You can take a free thirty day no commitment trial today by visiting www.mindmanager.com/journeymap.

DH: I love agencies, I can’t wait for this conversation and I love agency people.Natalie thank you for joining us today and welcome to Journey Map!

NC: Thank you for having me. I’m very excited for this conversation.

DH: Let’s start it! Like I said I just have this love and fascination for advertising agencies and marketing agencies, really services companies in general. It’s a weird obsession, thank god that’s what I do for a living myself. I want to go back to when in your life did you first think that maybe this is the career path that I could go down?

NC: Probably when I was very young. I knew I wanted to do something in media or something with storytelling or broadcasting. At one point I thought I wanted to be the token Asian news anchor, and then I realized I didn’t have the face for it so I was like what other things can I do? As a kid I made my own magazines, I had my hot or not list, what’s in and what’s out. I observed people maybe a little bit too much, but I knew that I wanted to do something creative. So yeah from a very young age, my dad was in marketing so I learned a lot from him growing up I always saw it as a career path. I just wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, so I dabbled in PR, I dabbled in film festivals, then I somehow made my way to advertising.

DH: So I’ll tell you very quickly my origin story because it says it’s very pathetic and I’d love to get your take on it.

NC: Yeah.

DH: So I was actually going to university for pre — law and it turned out that not everyone gets to just become Harvey Specter. Not to date myself but I was in university before Suits came out. Anyway but it turns out not everyone can be Harvey Specter and once I realized my odds of becoming Harvey Specter were very small I just stopped attending that university all together. It was over the Christmas break of that year and I had just started binge watching Mad Men and I think at that time only the first two seasons were out , and I just decided that’s it that’s for me. So I enrolled at our local college here in Ottawa in business marketing thinking I was enrolling in an advertising program and turns out no that’s a totally different program altogether. So it took me about a month to actually realize that I was in the wrong program and by that point I was too lazy to switch. That’s what got me into more of a general marketing program, so I always say that my true advertising career is the one that got away through my own stupidity. But I still every year re-watch Mad Men episode one through completion over the holiday break in tribute to my founding story. Anyways it’s a real thing about my life, that I just wanted to document publicly. Where I’m going with it is like what do you think is a big difference working in an agency environment in 2020 versus the depiction of the 1960’s and especially as you self identify as a female person of colour?

NC: Yeah I mean I probably wouldn’t have even gotten a job back then, if anything maybe I’d be a secretary. I feel like there’s lots of you know “Heros” the person who just walks in around and just everyone stares at them and they can just sell it. I think there’s a lot more collaboration between teams, it’s a lot more of a team that sells something then you know just the Don Draper type. I’m going to be honest I watched all of the seasons except for the last one so who knows maybe Peggy had her way at the end. But I do feel like a lot of times you know we celebrate kind of the big guys at the top and they’re mainly men but a lot of the ideas start from someone usually a junior or someone who watched a weird documentary and brought it up to the group on slack, and then someone connected the dots and that dot led to someone on the media team who had a connection with someone and magic happened. I feel like there’s so many more opportunities than just the one hero creatives and I think that you get a lot cooler of ideas when you have a team, where you have a social person, you have a media person, a strategy person, a 3D artist. Who are working together everyday to figure out how can we solve business problems for our clients? It’s not necessarily a man in a fedora drinking a scotch and then has a flashback and all of the sudden he has a tagline for Heinz. But people can dream I guess.

DH: I want to go back to this first publicly available reference to your career as an earth researcher for the national film festival for talented youth. What is the job of an earth researcher?

NC: Yeah I’m actually confused where earth researcher has come from, but I’m checking my linkedin. The role that I had at the national film festival for talented youth is actually because of one of my good friends from college she founded this film festival for youth, and she needed help getting partners and so I joined on with another friend of ours. Ah here it is the film festival is nifty earth, earth meaning environmental and social awareness and research and development was figuring out partnerships. So this was way before even Tom’s was big but we somehow managed to get a partnership with them to get some sort of promo code. It was so scrappy but so interesting and it was my first foray into wheeling and dealing. I was eighteen at the time trying to figure out how do we talk to these corporate sponsors, and Tom’s was happy to do it. I think they even let us do a concert in their parking lot during one of their sample sales to raise money. They were great. But that’s what is was, it wasn’t actual earth research I wasn’t digging into dirt to find out how old it was.

DH: It’s still a cool story and we’ll come back to it after. So I feel like agency people often have that one project that because they got to work on it or be involved in it or whatever it was a bit of a career turning point and sometimes it’s not even a huge thing. But if you can think of your time working with agencies, what’s the client, the project, or opportunity that you might define the rest of your career by?

NC: There have been so many. I think the one that always comes to mind which feels very backwards was for our client uber surprisingly enough. We were working with a team that was trying to create a program that connected riders and drivers, and it’s tough to get people to care about small things like thanking your driver, being a decent human being, and also letting drivers know that people do care even if they’re quiet in the backseat in center. We ended up doing a program called “Beyond 5 stars”, where we looked at all the compliments that people left their drivers in the app, and we found some of the most complimented drivers in the U.S. So we were just reading through the compliments and all of them had similar themes. So there was one person who was just a great storyteller and had the most interesting life story, I think she was the wedding singer at Elvis’s wedding, he was friends with Pat Boone, he worked in Las Vegas for a while and then on a cruise ship. Then another guy he rapped in the car, another lady sung jazz and broadway. So what we ended up doing was we surprised these drivers, saying “Hey you’re a really loved driver, we just want to get a video of you giving other drivers tips on how you get compliments and five stars etc.” and we went to their houses, took them on a little ride along and then surprise them with an experience that had to do with the compliments they got from the riders. It was something so small, but you could see the appreciation in their eyes that a company would do something like that. For example the woman who loved to sing broadway, we found out through sleuthing that she had seen the Lion King on Broadway seven times and we found out it was going international for the first time I believe in the Phillipines, and so we did the ridealong and took her to a giant theatre in San Francisco then when she got into the theatre it was completely empty and there was a spot for her right in front. The curtains open up and it’s Simba from the Broadway show in New York telling her that we’re giving her an all inclusive trip for her and a friend to go see the Lion King internationally. It’s one of those things where you package it, you turn it into content and what not, but to be there in the moment and you get that emotion, you see the clients so happy because they could do something nice for people. Our client actually said on set on our last one she said “this is the highlight of my career” and as an agency person you’re like “Yes that feels amazing” that you made your clients day as well. But what’s great when we put it online, and as you can imagine uber has a tough time anytime they put anything online, they always get a ton of negative comments about “My uber driver did this, and this etc.” and then to see people writing really positive comments because it wasn’t about uber it was about these people, these drivers who are helping us out, helping us get from place to place safely and they do it with a smile, they do it with gratitude. It was really cool for even a moment to see a brand that has a really hard time creating an emotional connection with people, do it in a really authentic way. For me as a strategist that’s bveen something that I’ve carried with me to other brands, like what is an authentic way that we can give back? That shows our values, that shows we care and is really an action. It’s not just saying “Hey we appreciate our drivers’’, but actually doing something nice for them. So long story short I think that although that was a couple years ago, it really made me feel that marketing could make a difference at least in a small fractional way.

DH: Yeah but you know I think that’s like a lot of things in life. Look at relationships in general I think there’s lots of good data that comes out and talks about how whether it’s marriages, business partnerships,or parenting it’s then tens of thousands of small moments that build relationships not one big grand romantic gesture , or act of kindness or whatever. In the case of uber it’s too bad we don’t hear those stories coming out everyday, but very cool thanks for sharing that. Okay so when you were in high school what was your least favourite subject and why?

NC: Hmmm what was my least favorite subject… I really enjoyed school to be honest. It’s very stereotypical of me but I loved math, I loved physics. You’ve completely stumped me. I feel like I really liked all my classes, is that awful?

DH: Hey that’s fine lets go there. Lets go to you in physics, if you could go back and tell that person that you would pursue a career in not physics and kind of explain to them the kinds of things that you would do later on in life do you think that person believes you or calls bulls**t?

NC: I think they’d believe me because surprisingly I feel like there’s a lot of stories in physics. Because every time you get a problem because something is happening, you always have that story about throwing a rock off a cliff or something does something and it equals something else. I just feel like every time you tackle those problems it’s like putting yourself in that story and you kind of have to have a bit of an imagination to do it. So it’s like a weird take because I think a lot of people think physics, math, and calculus it’s all just numbers and it’s very objective. But oftentimes the problems are set up in a way where you can kind of be yourself in that scenario. So I don’t know I think she’d be more surprised if I didn’t pursue creativity, but I wouldn’t discount math and science as not being creative. I guess, does that make sense?

DH: It makes sense to me. You have another creative hobby. I’ll include the link in the show notes as well. But nathaliecon.com is your website where you recommend stuff: books, movies, podcasts (maybe we’ll make it on who knows?). You have a focus on female creators, asian creators. What inspired you to start this project? And how much of your time does this actually take up?

NC: Yeah it’s funny, so the reason why I got on Ford’s 30 under 30 I mean in addition to like the work stuff, is that I actually created a site called Oh Laud which is no longer in business. It was a recommendation site that was like if a social network platform meets like a goodreads. But I really enjoyed understanding what people consume because I feel like it makes them who they are. Like the books they read, the articles they read, what they watch etc. it forms their opinions, how they view the world, and how they engage in the world. I’ve always enjoyed getting recommendations from people, so I thought it would be nice to have it all in one place where I could follow people who I’m interested in their taste. I was dreaming like what if you could get Tina Fey’s profile and always know what book is she reading right now? What TV show is she into? So I did that for a couple years, we only really had a couple hundred people on it, but it was hard to upkeep and doing that plus work was really difficult. So I ended up closing it down, but I still like when people in the industry ask what books do you read? What podcasts do you listen to? Where do I get started? I figured it to be easier for me rather than just show a bunch of strategy case studies whatever people have in their portfolio, nobody cares about that stuff at least not for me. However if I was job searching I’d probably want to be set up a bit. I figured for now I can have it set up like this where I can do all the things I love like rating books, watching tv (really bad tv), and I also like drawing and tracing on my ipad, so it was a nice way to fuse all three together. I’m really fascinated by the infatuation, are you familiar with that site?

DH: No I’m not.

NC: Oh it’s great. I think it’s like a better yelp, basically they have restaurant recommendations but the way that they have their lists it’s very contextual, for example “ The best restaurants to take a friend you haven’t seen in a while but you don’t have much to say” or “Best places to take your parents when they’re visiting in town” or “ Best places to have lunch in the middle of the week when work is slow”. I love the idea of recommending things based on mood and context not necessarily “science fiction” but like what do you watch when you miss your grandma? So I was like I should make bookshelves or like “smart but exhausting”, or really propping up female creators, or chinese / asian creators. Who knows maybe I’ll create more lists, but it’s something that’s fun for me. I’m always tinkering with it. I find it really fun and fascinating. So yeah, that’s how nathaliecon.com was bred.

DH: Very cool, I’m not going to go into more detail because we could do a whole episode on the cool stuff in there, but people should definitely check it out. So on your career timeline there are highs and lows. If you were to take the lowest low and then tell that story how would it go?

NC: The lowest low…it low because it was one of those projects where you’re so excited about it, and then you just get mad disappointment about it just because something happens that’s out of your control. It was a project for a show that I was working on with one of our clients, it was a show about the Manson Murders and this is during the time Serial just came out, like true crime was bubbling in podcasting. So we decided we wanted to do a podcast that was a companion piece where we would talk about the non-fiction side of the Manson Murders because the show was based on it. We actually had Vincent Bugliosi who was the author of “Helter Skelter” on because who knows the Manson Murders better than anyone else this guy! So we were going to have him basically go through Helter Skelter in podcast form and talk about it with one of the podcasts executive producers. I was a strategist at the time and this was one of my first projects at Giant Spoon, I was one of a handful of people hired in L.A., so there weren’t a ton of us so I had to put my account hat on, my producer hat on, and put my writer hat on, I wrote the episode synopsis, and everything. I was so excited, and a week before we were about to sit down and record everything treatment center hi there you’re not skiing and everything and I was so excited and a week or and we’re about to take down and record everything he gets news that a cancerous tumor came back and they get to the hospital and they found that he only had a couple more days left.

DH: Oh my god.

NC: He was an older man, and apparently he really wanted to do it from his hospital room. But his wife was like “No you’re not going to spend your last days re-hashing the Manson Murders” because that’s not how you want to spend your time. But apparently him and Charles Manson even after the trials, apparently Manson said “I don’t care about death as long as I outlive Vincent Bugliosi” so it was just crazy.

DH: Last question before we let you go. What do you think is the Nathalie superpower?

NC: It probably doesn’t seem like a super power on this interview since I rambled, but at work I would say I’m very good at taking disparate thoughts because I’m constantly absorbing things in culture, reading, listening, tweeting, and simplifying, and coming up with ideas. I think that constant churning and restlessness I think is what has gotten me into the position that I’m in. It’s what I encourage young talent to do: absorb everything highs and lows, and make sense of it. It’s not just about watching the Bachelor but why is it interesting? What do you like about it? Why is it this phenomenon? So I think that restlessness has turned into something productive in the forms of insights, strategy, and being able to do that fast is probably my superpower.

DH: Okay I said it was a last question, I apologies I know we’re over time. But now I’m gonna put you to the test, because you said you could do it fast and it’s a legitimate thing I’m wondering and I think you’re uniquely qualified to answer for me: why is Love is Blind so popular compared to other very similar format, very similar premise romantic reality TV shows that exist?

NC: I mean I think one it’s just bonkers, the fact that you have these people in pods, revealing their lives and crying in the first episode I think is just different from any other Bachelor type dating type scenario. Then secondly I think what’s so interesting about that show is that it doesn’t end when they meet each other but it actually follows through watching them as they try to learn to love each other. I think it’s so interesting and so real, so it’s almost like you take something that’s so unreal it’s like the Masked Singer effect where you’re just like “ What am I watching? like this is so weird” but I’m fascinated. People are crying and telling each other they love them, and getting down on one knee, dressing up for each other and then never seeing eachother again. Then it goes to oh my gosh race, it all becomes very real very fast. Also, of course it’s like gossiping the whole Jessica drinking wine and feeding her dog wine, everybody loves a villain.Yeah, I don’t know I think we love we love a train wreck but I also think there was a little bit of earnestness in it as well that really came in the second half of the series.

DH: I think those are some great insights. I think why I wanted to ask the question and what it signals to me is this shift in culture, which you seem to know quite a lot about but it’s a shift in true culture. It’s almost like from when Survivor started until Love is Blind started was an era and not to dedicate time in our podcast to talk about Love is Blind, but I look at it as as Survivor to Love is Blind and now from here on out is the format changed, because I think the key thing about Love is Blind is that the stories continued online. I think more than ever people are actually following the couples on social media because there’s a whole bunch of them that are still together even though they chose not to get married in the show, and you can actually see how the relationship develops. I’m gonna be very interested to see if there are actually more couples that remain together in the long term compared to the percentage from the Bachelor, or the Bachelorette. Thank you so much for doing this, and thank you so much for going overtime, and thank you for embracing my love of agency people and nerding out with me a little bit.

NC: Thank you so much for having me.