How Risk-Taking and Pushing Boundaries Shaped Ellen Kim's Dynamic Creative Production Career

A conversation with Lovevery's Ellen Kim about her career in creative production, embracing technology, taking risks, and how to make it as a freelancer.

Creativity meets strategy in the world of production, and Ellen Kim knows how to strike the perfect balance. Ellen's career in creative production has been a dynamic journey, from the early days of digital advertising to her current role as Director of Creative Operations and Resource Management at Lovevery .

We caught up with Ellen to hear about her career and more. She shares insights on how to navigate in-house and freelance production, break creative boundaries, and manage the demands of the industry. Plus, she offers valuable tips on how to nurture creativity and maintain a work-life balance in this ever-evolving field.

The Luupe: You've built quite an epic and diverse career in production, from your extensive agency experience (Publicis, Razorfish, Ogilvy, WPP, DDB, and R/GA) to roles at Timex and a premium beauty brand, to your current role at Lovevery — what inspired you to pursue this path?

Ellen Kim: I’ve always been interested in the “making” and working in a creative environment — in whatever medium they came in. When I first started my career, digital advertising and marketing were in the early days and traditional creative types would not touch a website, a banner, or a wireframe, etc. It was seen as something that was going to go away.

I guess coming from a place where technology was embraced rather than shunned, I wanted to show how easy these things were and why they were important to improving our lives, etc. So that is how I started my career in digital production and as I grew in my career and started to oversee other emerging platforms like social media — I was eager to also leverage my management training in creative and marketing-focused environments to grow large teams for start-up businesses as well as established brands.

The Luupe: Having successfully navigated both in-house and freelance production roles, can you share some insights into the unique aspects of the two, and how you tailor your strategies for each?

Kim: I've met a number of freelancers and consultants and have been a long-time freelancer in both a permalance setting as well as month-to-month with a minimum set of hours guaranteed; while also having a lot of experience in-house.

Freelancing can be great for mental separation of working from personal life as you are your own boss or CEO. What I think is very important for freelancing to be successful is to always work on your network as they will be your community (for both future and current projects) — whereas in-house your community is often your teams and coworkers that are automatically part of the company that you work for.

Also as a freelancer (and sometimes less so as an in-house employee) you really need to be able to succinctly know and promote your value proposition — that's how you can choose the projects that you want vs just looking for projects. I've seen too many times where freelancing messaging is all about "being able to work from the beach" and that does not give the right message nor does that show one's success per se.

The Luupe: What advice would you give to freelancers who are trying to establish themselves in the production industry?

Kim: Know your craft; own yourself and what you bring to the table. The production industry is needed in everything — so make sure that you advocate for that even in something that you’d think does not typically have a “producer-like object” it's likely called something else — maybe creative operations. Also, everyone will expect you to know project management basics — so you should make sure you know what that means — having a good understanding of scope, timings, budgets, and resources will go a long way.

The Luupe: Are there any specific project management or workflow tools and tips you've found indispensable for creative professionals throughout your career?

Kim: The tooling landscape is always changing.?What’s in one company is out in another.?My last two organizations used combos of Slack, Monday.com , Asana, and Notion. I am really liking Notion these days — but also think when the tools are integrated with each other it can be very cool and create a lot of efficiencies. As long as you understand how the tools work with each other and your teams get it (and use the tools in the same ways) — that means it’s somewhat working.

No tool is perfect.?I have found the organizational functionality in Slack added in the past 3 years or so has been very helpful, especially with remote teams. But no Slack channel should have more than 10 pins.

The Luupe: What emerging industry trends are you excited about? How do you stay ahead of the curve in an ever-evolving field?

Kim: I’m currently embracing AI-based tools — it’s not just ChatGPT or the AI image generators — but thinking about what sort of commands really work to get the exact kind of thing that we need or are trying to communicate either visually or verbally.

The Luupe: What types of projects bring you the most joy?

Kim: I’m always interested in knowing what rules we can break that will also be very effective in pushing a brand's boundaries.

The Luupe: How do you strike a balance between nurturing creativity and meeting the demands of project management and resource allocation?

Kim: Give something that people/teams can look forward to. Perhaps it's an end date (quick milestones to get to a goal), or maybe it’s something fun for the team — morale plays a huge part in pushing creativity while also making folks feel empowered that they are working hard.

The Luupe: In a demanding and often time-intensive field, how do you manage work-life balance?

Kim: I’m writing this at 11PM — not sure I’m really managing this.?But weekends are sacred to me.

The Luupe: Finally, what’s the #1 thing you wish you knew when you started your career?

Kim: Take bigger risks early on; it will seem less risky later.

Always set boundaries and prioritize — production/project managers/ops folks naturally put the team ahead of themselves because we strive to deliver and we end up putting the burden on ourselves.?If you set boundaries and prioritize, it will help your workload in the long run.