What’s the impact of the pandemic on you, your company, your approach to doing business in the future? What practices emerged that you will continue even as restrictions are loosening?
I’m sure all agencies have learned more efficient ways to approach certain elements of production but Mojo is nothing close to traditional so our approach has never been so and I don’t imagine that will change. We were more or less born in the pandemic. We work faster and more focused which allows us to get more done than a small agency should.
How has the call for equity, racial and social justice affected, honed or influenced your sense of responsibility as a company in terms of the content you create and/or your commitment to opening up opportunities for filmmaking talent from underrepresented backgrounds?
As a Black LGBTQIA woman, this call to action for social and racial justice isn’t something new to me — nor something I just became aware of. To be transparent, this question itself comes from a place of privilege. The reality is that people of different backgrounds have been fighting to get into this space and these opportunities for an incredibly long time.
Our work as creators, as marketers, and as advertisers has suffered for it. There are no new stories — there are only new ways of telling them. So if we keep hiring from the same existing pool of talent with the same social, economic, and racial backgrounds, we will continue to tell the same story and creative will not evolve and continue to not speak intersectional of any community. This isn’t new for our agency either. Our Creative Director and Founder, Mo Said, is an immigrant from Pakistan. He has built a team and roster of clients who share his mission of pushing culture out of its comfort zone and championing diverse perspectives.
While gazing into the crystal ball is a tricky proposition, we nonetheless ask you for any forecast you have relative to content creation and/or the creative and/or business climate for the second half of 2021 and beyond.
I believe that stories about navigating a post-COVID world will start to finally become interesting. We’ve all seen the videos of how brands have approached creativity during the pandemic by referring to the world as being separated and alone.
As the world opens up and possibly shuts down again because of COVID variants, we’ll see brands start thinking more about what this means outside of being isolated. And I’m so excited to see this happen.
What are your goals, creatively speaking and/or from a business standpoint, for your company, division, studio or network in 2021?
I believe that stories about navigating a post-COVID world will start to finally become interesting. We’ve all seen the videos of how brands have approached creativity during the pandemic by referring to the world as being separated and alone.
As the world opens up and possibly shuts down again because of COVID variants, we’ll see brands start thinking more about what this means outside of being isolated. And I’m so excited to see this happen.
What trends, developments or issues would you point to thus far in 2021 as being most significant, perhaps carrying implications for the rest of the year and beyond?
The rise of racism and discrimination towards Asian people because of COVID-19. As more variants of the virus arise, there’s going to be a rise in this and we in this industry have to figure out ways to combat it. COVID has become a part of our lives and there’s no going back. We can’t expect this growing sentiment to disappear overnight — we have to end it ourselves.
What work (advertising, entertainment)–your own or others–struck a responsive chord with you and/or was the most effective creatively and/or strategically so far this year? Does any work stand out to you in terms of meshing advertising and entertainment?
A Parkland father managed to trick the Ex-NRA president David Keene into speaking at a graduation ceremony full of empty chairs. They represented victims of gun violence in school shootings. This powerful move choked me when I first read about it, and it’s the perfect representation of the power of creative thought. It’s storytelling at its greatest, involving the very human element of someone reckoning with their beliefs and choices.
