Julia is a Cultural Strategist in the Synthesis Americas team, with roots in both advertising and the art world. She believes the best strategy is rooted in deep understanding of data, told with the passion and care of a creative mind.
“I don’t know anything about music. My job is to listen - to feel whether it’s alive.”
This is a quote by Rick Rubin, a famous record producer with no technical music ability or skills. His whole thing is just being good at knowing what feels good - a tastemaker, if you will. I love this because it’s exactly how I feel as a strategist - it’s not about being an expert in a topic, it’s about knowing why it matters to people in the first place and how that can be applied.
Industry on HBO - imagine Succession and Severance meet Game of Thrones, but set in the world of twenty-something investment bankers in London. Everyone’s unlikeable, which to me makes it great; the best shows are the ones where the villains don’t realize they’re villains.
Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe. This schooled me on the history of Northern Ireland from the perspective of a few key players in the Irish Republican Army. Growing up in America, there’s very little education about the fight for Irish independence, but so much celebration of Irish heritage - and this book fills that information gap so well. I’d also recommend the show adaptation on Hulu!
Mini figurines - my roommate and I work tirelessly to build out a little world on our living room shelf that we take every lucky visitor on a thorough tour of.
A sketchbook - my favorite one fits in my pocket and has an exclusively brown and yellow color palette, for no particular reason. I don’t always use it, but I love to know that it’s there in case inspiration strikes.
Madrid - I did a year of teaching ESL here in 2022, and it remains my favorite city in the world (which is saying a lot because Spanish food is objectively mediocre at best). The walkability, amazing transportation system, slow pace of life and overall friendliness made it so easy to feel at home.
There’s nothing like a good walk to get a good beverage (preferably a thai iced tea with brown sugar boba) with a good friend.
I was taught that the more hours you spend working on something, the more you will get out of it. While I believe in working hard to achieve a certain outcome, I don’t believe that the quantity of time spent on a project is a good measurement of success. Many of my best ideas have happened in the space away from the work - talking to interesting people, or just taking a break to remember the world is bigger than the problem I’m trying to solve.
Always K.I.S.S. - Keep It Simple, Stupid. Whether in marketing or creative work, clarity always wins. If the idea takes more than 10 slides to explain, is it really worth saying?
Horse hoof socks for my birthday - I am a proud horse girl through and through.
Living outside of the U.S. one day - I love New York and all its chaos, but I would love to move closer to my family who live in Mexico and England, or maybe start another adventure of my own somewhere new.
