We recently connected with Anastasia Filonenko and have shared our conversation below.

Anastasia, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?

When I was in school, I didn’t know who I wanted to be, not even close. But in one beautiful moment, when I first saw MTV EMA and there were backstage shots, I realized – I want to be not under the stage, but with those cool people backstage. That’s how I chose my field of study at university – journalism and mass communication. But formal education was not enough for me – from the second year of studying, I started “asking” (literally) journalists from the best TV channels for unpaid internships. I didn’t need certificates, papers, official contracts – I just asked to shadow journalists to learn everything they knew firsthand. And it worked! So, I interned at top news resources, on tabloid news, and on TV series sets. And everywhere I went, I asked everyone what to study/read to understand how to work. I read tons of books, begged to write scripts, and journalists would read them in their spare time. I did everything to squeeze out all the useful information from them. Two years passed this way, and by the fourth year of university, I landed a full-time paid job as a reality show producer (which was also very good payed) – because I gained a lot of empirical knowledge: how to conduct interviews, how production of projects works, how to write materials, etc.

The main thing that helps in work is the willingness to learn new things even in your free time. If I realize that I don’t understand something, I won’t rest until I figure it out. Because it’s necessary for me, not the employer/client, it’s my value as a person and as a professional. If I struggle and suffer more than I learn something new, then I understand that it’s not for me. Thanks to this approach, I quickly grew in my career, first in terms of the “quality” and ratings of projects, later – in terms of career verticals. Now, I’m a creative producer with 10 years of experience in TV and 3 years of experience in IT and marketing. And I feel how truly big this world is, how your brain and your desires can help you achieve exactly what you want.

Key skills:

– Understand the production process from all angles. I had experience writing timings, even though I was a creative producer, not a Line one, budgeting, selecting props, etc. This gives you a comprehensive understanding of the process when you are creative not in general, but in reality. From the outside, it may seem limiting, but I think it’s the opposite – it allows you to squeeze the maximum out of the real state of affairs. Because I hate expectation/reality when it’s not meme, but in my life :))))

– Learn modern social networks and their algorithms. If you promote content elsewhere – their algorithms. Who is your target audience, what do they like, what don’t they, who you work for. You should always have a specific person, the ideal consumer of your content in mind. This will help minimize “idle” content that looks good but doesn’t meet the interests of the target audience and has poor numbers/ratings.

– Don’t be afraid to cut your material. Don’t be afraid to shorten it. In the era of clip thinking, people (customers/audience) lose concentration very easily. So, value every frame/word. If you can cut something, and the essence remains unchanged – throw it away and that’s it.

– Don’t be lazy to learn and master new things. This is your investment in yourself.

Anastasia, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Now I’m a creative marketing producer specializing in performance marketing. I help promote various applications on social media and specialized networks (Meta, Snapchat, TikTok, AppStores, etc.). I work with both short forms (static creatives, UGC, short video creatives) and long forms (15+ minute videos that engage, captivate in a story, intrigue, and motivate people to visit and download the application).

My task is to create content that will stop a person from scrolling their feed, make them watch and interact with this content – to click on the link, download the application, and so on. The content I’m most proud of is if we talk about my work on TV, it’s my own developed horizontal reality show, with a project bible written for it for selling it abroad. Its main message is not toxic “Cinderella-like love stories,” but to convey the right psychological messages to people: you can’t force someone to change, you shouldn’t demand it from your partner, a person will either want it themselves or not. You can only accept a person as they are, or not torture yourself or your partner. We broke stereotypes like “he’s a man, he should…” or “she’s a woman, she should…” etc before it was a mainstream :)

If we talk about marketing, my approach is fully data-driven. I’m proud of projects that have surpassed the “ideal-almost-unreachable goal” ($0.9 CPI, 300%+ ROI, etc.).

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

Essentially, you immortalize yourself in what you do. Of course, there are routine projects that you simply do with quality professionalism, but when something ignites you, you invest a part of yourself there: a selected track that stuck with you from a music festival, an Easter egg to a favorite game, and so on. Or simply something you came up with, laughed about with your team, and then transferred that internal meme into a creative that went out to the masses. And when you look back on your projects over time, you note these moments and realize that it’s you, it’s your idea, it’s a piece of you. And that’s really cool. Understanding that without you, it wouldn’t have been, because another person would have created it differently. But this unique unity is fixed precisely on you.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

I am from Ukraine. I was Producer-in-chief of one of the most successful reality shows in Ukraine (some episodes of my projects were watched by 1/4 of all viewers in Ukraine). But on February 24, 2022, my life changed. All reality shows stopped filming, obviously because when tanks are advancing on the capital of the country, when the military occupies a lot of territory – it’s not the time for reality show shootings :) I spent three weeks without water, electricity, without any communication and almost cut off food provision (I remind you, it’s winter when the temperature can be -20), I had a 2-year-old child, and I was pregnant. Russian troops were stopped just 3 km away from us. For you to understand, I hung a pile of blankets on the baby’s crib so that if something exploded nearby at night, it would at least partially stop the fragments. Because if it hits the house – then nothing will help. At that time, it seemed to me that life was over. But no, Kyiv region was de-occupied, I found a job in an international video production company and started making videos on Facebook that gathered 12-15 million views (Tier-1 maket). It was unusual, of course, to do such a switch, but what else?) And then it went on – from videos on FB, I switched to performance marketing and now I work in the US market promoting different apps (dating, audio novels etc.). BTW, now Ukraine produces content, both scripted (for international audience) and non-scripted, even during the war. After that, you understand that everything is possible, no matter how difficult it may seem. So if you want to change something but are afraid, don’t worry, believe me, it’s not the worst thing that can happen in this life :)