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Cultural Anthropologist Susan Kresnicka Reveals How Her Core Passions Help Hollywood Thrive

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Part of the series “Women, Leadership, and Vision”

In my work as a women’s career consultant and writer, I’m thrilled to have the chance to connect with women around the world who are not only brilliant and accomplished, but also passionate about what they do every day. And I love to explore real-life examples of professionals debunking the prevalent crippling myth “If you follow your passion, you’ll be broke and miserable.” There are role models all around us who are forging thrilling pathways to leverage their passions and make a positive impact on our society. And we can learn from them.

Cultural anthropologist Susan Kresnicka is one of those people. Susan works at Hollywood’s leading integrated branding and marketing agency Troika, spearheading their Research and Insights group. With such clients as AMC, A+E Networks, CW, FOX, PBS, Starz, Amazon, Cirque du Soleil, Sundance Institute, UFC, and MSG Network, Susan’s team studies how and why viewers consume entertainment and sports.

Susan shares with me how she’s tapping her passions to help her clients understand key media changes in the 21st century and how they impact us all.

Kathy Caprino: Susan, how exactly did you arrive at your leadership role in entertainment marketing in Hollywood?

Susan Kresnicka: I was in my early 30s living in NYC and found myself at a professional crossroads. I had an MA in cultural anthropology, had attended culinary school and cooked professionally for several years, and was on the brink of starting a family. I had long-since decided that a professional academic career wasn’t right for me, and I couldn’t envision balancing motherhood with my life as a chef. Just at that moment, a friend introduced me to a qualitative researcher named Michael Scavone. He taught me the ropes of marketing and became a trusted mentor. I learned the intricacies of qualitative market research, analyzed countless focus groups, and conducted all the ethnographic research that came into Michael’s firm – all the while incorporating a uniquely anthropological perspective.

After moving to Los Angeles, I joined Frank N. Magid Associates, a full-service research company. I was hired as a general qualitative analyst but was also charged with building the company’s ethnographic practice. At Magid, I had the opportunity to work on larger-scale projects, often combining qualitative and quantitative methods. I also got my first taste of entertainment research. By that time, I had considerable experience in a range of industries, but entertainment proved particularly intoxicating to me. The product, storytelling, is complex, often deeply meaningful, and central to cultural change. I’ve been hooked ever since.

After seven years at Magid, I joined Troika to lead its new Research & Insights team. I took the job because I really liked the people and found Troika’s CEO, Dan Pappalardo, to have a uniquely admirable vision for navigating the dynamic entertainment marketplace. This vision, summed up as ‘Entertain Change,’ takes an intrinsically optimistic view of the changes facing the entertainment industry, emphasizing the opportunity that arises from disruption. It also accounts for the shift in power that is driving the change, a shift towards empowered consumers. He brought me on to represent those consumers in all the work that Troika does. From day one, my role at Troika has given me a sense of purpose I had never felt in my previous market research roles.

The combination of that sense of purpose and creative license to build the department in whatever way made the most sense for Troika and its clients has made this the most exhilarating and meaningful stage of my career thus far. We interact with smart and interesting clients who give us the opportunity to learn about fascinating topics in creative ways – and who trust us to apply that learning to their brands’ strategic and creative endeavors. I also have the opportunity to share my evolving understanding of culture, brands, and storytelling with the entertainment industry at large. We are currently embarking on a year-long, multi-modal study of fandom, and we have an amazing group of media clients coming together to participate. It’s like teaching a master class to a group of experts and then helping them apply that knowledge to their businesses. I feel honored to have the opportunity.

Caprino: How have you combined your love of ethnography, research, and anthropology to build a career you adore?

Kresnicka: It happened quite organically. I just let my passion for the thinking lead the dance. My fundamental fascination with people makes most projects interesting. Over the years, I’ve been able to feel genuinely interested in even the most tactical of research questions: “Which of these three packaging options gives this toothpaste the strongest sense of quality? Why?” As long as there is a 'why,' I’ll be interested. Because ‘why’ teaches us what things mean to people.

Caprino: What are the key trends today regarding the “meaning” that entertainment holds – for individuals and society?

Kresnicka: Obviously, we need to stay keenly aware of the latest developments on our cultural horizon, but I’m not big on trend chasing. It’s a bit like a cat chasing a laser light – fascinating and amusing but also frenetic and inefficient. I encourage our clients to focus less on trend-chasing and more on understanding the broader cultural forces that give rise to trends. If I can help our clients step back and ask bigger questions about how and why society is changing, they will be better prepared to build strategies for the future.

The shared storytelling we create in the entertainment industry has a unique ability to help us process our most pressing cultural issues. Like a form of cultural therapy, the stories we encounter in shows and movies (and books, video games, theater, etc.) allow us to explore these issues, envision a range of responses, and approach them from an expanded vantage point in our everyday lives.

Caprino: What societal trends is Hollywood capitalizing on right now?

Kresnicka: I often remind clients that all we do in business is transform value. When our products, services, experiences, brands, and stories create value for people, we have the chance to transform that value into our bank accounts, paychecks, stock prices, etc. While seemingly obvious, we often forget that this process begins with people, and fundamentally rests on understanding what value we can create for them.

So I’d ask this question differently. I’d ask, “How can Hollywood create value for people at this moment in time?” I’d answer by encouraging them to understand those broad social and cultural forces that are creating significant changes, things like:

  • Technological change and how it’s reshaping our relationship with time, our experience of surprise and the unknown, and even our understanding of what it means to be human
  • Decreasing religiosity and how it’s giving rise to new ways of meeting spiritual needs, including through our storytelling and the fan communities that emerge around it
  • Negotiation of human difference in all its forms (gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, economic status, geography, life experience, etc.) and how our storytelling helps us explore what those differences mean – and don’t mean.

I’d advise appreciating the complexity of these changes and creating content that reflects that complexity so we can process these issues more effectively.

To offer a simple example, if a client asked me to analyze a pilot of a forthcoming show that was striving to address meaningful themes about identity and self-determination, yet depicting female characters as glossy, perfected, and manipulative, I would recommend re-thinking the representation of women. What may have seemed aspirational in the very recent past can now read as inauthentic and stereotypical in light of our growing conversation about gender equality.

To be relevant at this moment requires depicting all types of people in more nuanced, fully dimensionalized ways.

Caprino: What can we expect next out of Hollywood?

Kresnicka: I hope we can expect:

- Content and experiences that are more fundamentally informed by people’s needs, at both the individual and societal levels

- A greater appreciation for fandom and the value it creates

- Further blurring of lines between genres

- Continued rethinking of stereotypes and more fully-dimensionalized characters

- Ongoing exploration of morality, especially moral ambiguity

- Increasing interest in sci-fi and fantasy themes, as we continue to process our experience of technological change

- Immersive storytelling reaching the next level through virtual and augmented reality technology, which could have implications for the creation of empathy and drive interest in seeing stories from multiple perspectives

- Perhaps, a shift in thinking about the relationship between storytelling and social change, specifically the potential for storytelling to drive social change through the subtle processing it provokes and the fan communities it can give rise to, as well as through overt social themes

For more information, visit Troika.

To build a more rewarding career leveraging your passions, visit KathyCaprino.com and The Amazing Career Project.