LaTecia Johnson, Visionary Rising
💭 Thoughts on Beyonce’s new music, what it takes to build your own agency, and the art of balance & mindful productivity.
LaTecia Johnson is a senior entertainment & technology executive and entrepreneur at the intersection of culture, community, and creativity focused on doing innovative work for global creators and the organizations that support them as Founder & CEO of consultancy and agency, Visionary Rising (VSNRY). Prior to launching her agency, her career has included stints at Apple, Microsoft, Nielsen Media, as well as high-growth startups like Decent Labs, Royal and Formless, spearheading strategies to drive artist-aligned incentives, educating artists, managers, distributors, and label teams on engagement and leading the charge on agency partnerships.
🎯 Current focus: reshaping how tools work within media
Ahhh, what's taking up most of my time these days is Ingenius Studio, "Ingenius" for short, an end-to-end operating system designed to help brands and agencies work better with the creators running and launching campaigns for them. The reason I'm excited about it is because it's something that I've been thinking about launching for a while - having been around the industry for so long, and seen so many different iterations of what media means, it always stuck me that everyone was trying to solve the problem of running better campaigns but always looking at it from the lens of the creator.
I decided to tackle this from the lens of agencies and brands, the ones who are making the investment, and create a product that's also intuitive for how creative businesses need it to work because most of the tools that exist now were created as supplemental for creative businesses, not the primary focus. There's a big opportunity to reshape how tools work within media and I'm excited to be working at the forefront of this.
🎉 Women's Final Four championship
Something that has me really excited right now: the Women's Final Four championship games that aired the other night. As we're talking, I'm thinking about how much the women's basketball game has grown and how much it will grow in the coming years and it has me extremely excited about the opportunities that will exist in the future.
🎶 Beyonce’s new album
My favorite song right now is “II Most Wanted” by Beyonce and Miley Cyrus because the way their voices dance together is just a masterful example of harmonizing and artistry. Also, Cowboy Carter is simply a masterpiece.
💪 The art of balance and mindful productivity
I’ve been thinking a lot about this idea of “the job's not finished” (made famous by Kobe Bryant,) which is really around the idea that as you are working for things, you have a job to do and execute, and it might be great to celebrate before the job's done… but it will be even better to celebrate once the job is truly complete.
On the other end of that, I've really been exploring philosophies around the art of balance and mindful productivity: do small things every day because they compound.
🗺️ What it takes to build your own agency
I definitely look up to Gary Williams of Creative Theory Agency. I've been studying his career for a long time and also been able to watch him build his agency - it kind of became a blueprint for what was possible for me. I had the chance to meet him recently and he was even nicer than I could've imagined – which is rare in the industry we're in.
📺 Netflix & chill
I love a good netflix and chill or really just any solid show to zone out to for a bit. My favorite way to watch shows is finding ones that I can share with my partner and get to experience them together and build commentary around it.
🛫 The best time of year for traveling to LA, Nashville & NYC
I’m looking forward to traveling to LA & Nashville over the next few weeks, then hitting NYC in early May. I love all of these cities for different reasons: can't wait to take in the beach in between meetings in LA; hear live music in Nashville and visit NYC before it gets too hot. Nothing better than these 3 cities in the spring time just before summer hits and thanks to music I've also collected nice groups of friends on each stop so business trips always turn into fun catch ups, dinners and great conversations.
🥤 Poppi’s “the future of soda is now” campaign
I think that lots of advertising has become an echo chamber, but I've been really loving the Poppi campaign from a few months ago introducing this generation's version of the Coke or Pepsi commercial.
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