Gisele Navarro – Creating content people want to share
Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and more
About Gisele
Gisele Navarro is the CEO of NeoMam Studios, an agency that’s well known for creating content people want to share – something that’s actually become the driving vision of the company, which we discuss early in the show.
Gisele started off in the agency as Head of Outreach in 2014, before moving to Operations Director in 2016. Throughout this time she has played a pivotal role in transforming the way the agency works and the content they produce.
And she’s still happy to roll up her sleeves and get involved – in ideation, outreach, copywriting, and more.
Gisele says that openness and honesty is a value they’ve embraced within the company, and that also shone through in this conversation – I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
What we cover in this episode…
In this very candid conversation, Gisele and I discuss…
- How they almost lost the agency a number of years back
- How their vision and values transformed the content they create
- How they try to “destroy their ideas”
- How they always try to add that little bit extra to their ideas
- How to avoid “the campaign sausage machine”
- How they use Reddit to test projects, gather feedback, and generate ideas
Before the show, Gisele shared with me this incredibly impressive list…
Images, links and other references
The following notes will give you greater context to the conversation…
If Wes Anderson designed the Simpsons
As Gisele mentions in the show and this blog post…
“Yes, we gave the Simpsons’ House yet another makeover after this and this and this.”
But they always try to do things differently each time, a point we come back to later.
The highest-paid Twitch streamers
Gisele followed up after the call to mention this idea came from an article Hannah Smith found. And also that the idea took inspiration from Verve’s Insta Wealth piece.
The piece was linked to twice by the New York Times, something Gisele is very proud of – and quite right too!
Take me back
Returning to the point about doing things differently each time, I mention that Shannon McGuirk from Aira and I both think NeoMam has done this very well.
I noticed the way they’ve done this with the ‘reconstructed’ style campaigns. For example…
What Central Park could have looked like
Ancient Ruins, Reconstructed
Seven Wonders of the World, Reconstructed
We then go on to discuss a campaign Gisele felt was risky at the time, but it worked out well – and later became a series…
500 years of living room design
Gisele mentions how a scene in Ratatouille inspired an idea about visualising flavours.
Visualising Flavours
Unfortunately though, this idea didn’t really do that well. Gisele says maybe they should have worked with someone with synaesthesia – that’s an overlapping of the senses.
They later worked with people with chromesthesia, who can see the colour of sounds, to create the piece below.
Living room colours inspired by 10 music genres
We then go on to discuss how they use Reddit to gather feedback, at which point Gisele mentions how they did this with…
The oldest company in almost every country
Gisele then discusses how she feeds back on ideas with the other two directors, Danny and Amy, and James Barnes, Creative Lead and former guest on this show.
And finally, I mention that I really appreciate the openness of NeoMam’s external communication as well as within the company.
Specifically, I make reference to the following two posts…
- Why NeoMam is not an award-winning agency
- NeoMam’s Jealousy List 2020: The 28 best campaigns we didn’t produce
And that just about covers it.
I hope you enjoy the show!
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