Today we’d like to introduce you to Elliot V. Kotek.
Hi Elliot, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
Thanks for the question! I got started in entertainment through some sort of combination of sheer hustle and commitment – as a kid growing up in Melbourne, Australia, I was always a writer who needed to write – short stories, short plays, screenplays, etc., even when I wasn’t sharing any of it with anyone. In Australia, that pursuit didn’t ever seem like a legitimate career option, so I studied other things and just kept moving forward. But just because it wasn’t my profession yet, that didn’t stop me from spending mornings and late nights scribbling away with a notepad and pen.
It took a move to New York in 2000 to break me from that pattern. I loved NYC and wanted to live there for ‘a couple of years,’ to write in the Village like so many characters I’d seen on screens. I didn’t anticipate New York embracing me back the way it did – actors responded to the stuff I now felt safe to share now that I was away from home, and they invited me to audition for The Lee Strasberg Theater Institute off Union Square. That place transformed me – over the next two years, I poured myself further into writing as a discipline, shared my screenplays with people interested in optioning my words, and started to dig in deeper by pitching articles about people I admired to all sorts of print publications.
One interview led to another, and the hustle eventually led me into running various sites and magazines while also learning more and more about the world of documentary filmmaking. When press formats embraced video interviewing, I was lucky to be at the forefront of that and racked up interviews with about 1,000 of the world’s most accomplished artists, activists and other high achievers ranging from Elmo to Elon Musk. It was a great springboard for working in documentaries and for working on brand-funded documentary content with sponsors and brands.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Other than my business tag-line of “Ideas + Empathy = Impact,” I’ve also got a personal motto, which is “More. Bigger. With good people.” Because the reality is that not everyone has the same intentions you do, not everyone is as inclusive or easy-going as you, and not everyone sees the same opportunities to be kind.
Of course, budgets can always be better – your freedom to be creative could always be less restrained – your impact could always be more – you could always have an easier path to getting an idea off the ground or a project distributed – and you could always use more hours in the day.
Breathe. Be kinder to yourself. Move forward. Stay good.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
My company – The Nation of Artists – is known as a leader in creating purposeful content and campaigns. We’re ‘asset agnostic,’ which means we create the best asset to reach the intended audience where they are or produce an eco-system of assets to ensure we reach a range of people in a range of places so that the content can have the opportunity to generate awareness and/or behavioral change around an issue or cause.
I’ve been super fortunate to create messaging, commercials, anthem videos, docu-series, documentaries, animation and VR for some incredibly purposeful and well-intentioned people at Accenture, Aflac, Campbell’s Soup Company, CDC Foundation, Hyundai & the UNDP, Intel, McKinsey & Company, New Balance, Qualcomm, Quest Diagnostics, Sony, Whirlpool & Habitat for Humanity. And then we’ve collaborated on documentaries like “Little Miss Sumo,” “Black Boys,” “Queen Mimi,” “Unzipped” and “for Tomorrow” that have made their way out into the world as Netflix and Peacock Original films, and on Amazon, National Geographic, UpWorthy, Fast Company, Facebook Watch, Waterbear and all the usual VOD platforms.
I’ve been proudest of the innovative work that has meant being part of creating and distributing the My Special Aflac Duck social robot to kids going through cancer treatment (and it being amplified via recognition as one of TIME’s Best Inventions of the Year and picking up multiple SxSW Innovation Awards); I’m proud of collaborating with Frank Kelly on the world’s first user-generated feature documentary because it stood for providing access to storytelling tools to everybody with a recording device at their disposal; I’m proud of the inspiration served up by producing projects like “Don’s Voice,” “The Brainwriter” and “Project Daniel,” the last of which created the world’s first 3D Printed Prosthetics Lab for the children of war-torn Sudan; and I’m super proud of the way “Queen Mimi” shone a light on an un-housed lady in her 90s and seemed to add a new chapter to her already distinctive life.
I didn’t want to stop there! I guess I’m super fortunate that almost everything I’ve done has had some tangible measure of goodness – not everything was perfect – but sheesh, the intention behind almost all of it is consistently pretty special. And I love how that’s been embraced by others – the five awards from SxSW is ridiculous and might be unprecedented, the Cannes Lions recognition from peers in the creative world, and the other trinkets and shiny reminders on my shelves that bring back memories of working with people like Kareem Abdul Jabbar and the supportive clients, collaborators and crews that have worked together to share the worlds of real people and real problem-solvers in a constant well of duty and inspiration.
What sort of changes are you expecting over the next 5-10 years?
The words for what we do keeps changing – being “storytellers” and engaging in “branded content” and collaborating on “ecosystem building” all gets pretty funny at some point. Words like ‘purpose’ and ‘impact’ are eventually watered down to messy versions of their original selves so we just have to stay the path and ‘do what’s right.’ As an organization in this environment, it’s no longer enough to SAY you’re committed to a cause, and not enough to merely SHOW or display something about what you believe in, you’re going to want to ACT, and you’re going to need to PROVE that what you did had the right process and intention behind it.
To me, the one truth is that it doesn’t matter what format stories take if they’re well told within the time they have, to the people who are willing to watch and listen, and are appropriate for the interface on which they’re being served up, then they’ll resonate. And when they resonate, they’ll gain respect and get the attention they deserve.
AI is the big elephant in creative rooms – it will take away some jobs by being able to deliver serviceable versions of the most commodified content, the everyday sort of stuff that doesn’t need to be novel – but it will also be able to work with us to ensure we can serve up our projects in different ways for different people in different places in order to help us be relevant and effective, and will be able to help us iterate and make us think about ways to differentiate our offerings, which will be incredibly liberating.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nationofartists/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elliotkotek/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/ElliotKotek
- Other: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1923131
