Aaron Kovan

Since the buzz terms “media-neutral”, “media-agnostic” and “multi-platform” mean that the role of the agency producer is highly varied, it should follow that a producer’s inspirations are diverse too. Take GSD&M Idea City’s Aaron Kovan. One may not see the apparent connections between agency producing and skateboarding but for the El Paso, Texas-native they’re definitely there.

“Skateboarding isn’t just a sport, it’s more like a way of life,” says the 34-year-old senior producer. “It’s an attitude: a non-stop, never-say-no, always-keep-trying type of attitude that I have. With skateboarding, I’d always keep trying tricks and I wouldn’t say no to myself until I got it right, and that has carried through to how I do my work and how I produce.”

His inability to say no must be music to the ears of the creatives at GSD&M. In fact, Kovan prides himself on that very principle – his ability to stay on budget, while never wanting to saying no to the creatives. “Aaron knows how to leverage great creative to work with partners,” says GSD&M VP/director of production Karen Jacobs. “He does not shut down because the budget is tiny, he finds a way.” 

It’s a balancing act that Kovan is uniquely positioned to handle. As an agency producer, he understands the needs on the creative and production side but as someone who used to be on the client side, he’s intimately aware of the latter’s concerns too.

“I began working for a furniture company in El Paso in a project management role,” says Kovan. “I was in charge of doing all of their advertising and print work alongside a local agency. That’s when I started realizing how the process worked.”

Hungry to get on the agency side, Kovan relocated to Austin. He found project management work for another smaller agency before joining GSD&M in 2004. There he started as an account manager on AT&T and moved to the production department in 2006 as associate producer.

“That’s what really opened my eyes to how a big agency production department works and that’s when I basically raised my hand and asked the head of production, ‘What can I do to get in this department? I want to be a producer’. Luckily, there was something open and I took off from there.”

Kovan was promoted to producer in 2008 when he worked on his first job, BMW’s 35-minute mockumentary “The Ramp”, directed by The Vikings via Paranoid US. The project stretched the skills of both Kovan and the creatives at GSD&M, who up until that point had primarily worked on standard length spots and two- to four-minute videos. It was also Kovan’s first VFX job.

Undaunted, he put to use not only that first-hand ability to see the client’s POV but maybe a few never-say-no skateboarding tricks when managing the client through the seven month project.

“When we presented the idea it wasn’t extremely scripted or storyboarded out. We had an idea of what we were going to shoot every day, but when it was all said and done it was definitely something where we were going to tell this story and figure it out in the edit,” explains Kovan. “You usually already know how 30 or 60 seconds is going to play out. Well this was 35 minutes and it was definitely going in with a leap of faith while managing expectations across the board in post-production, with scheduling, with approvals and comments. It was challenging just to keep the process going, keep everyone happy and still deliver a really funny and cool piece for BMW.”

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