We were lucky to catch up with Tara Hallarman recently and have shared our conversation below.

Tara, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s jump right into how you came up with the idea?

Pizza Night is a content studio. We started it as a way to make work that feels meaningful to us while helping brands connect more deeply with their audience through strategic storytelling.

Cody and I met while working together at M&C Saatchi LA where we built a successful in-house studio that expanded the agency offering servicing existing clients and bringing in new ones like Amazon Music. We helped launch their award-winning documentary program with pieces on the Beastie Boys, Mariah Carey, Biggie, ODB, and several others. During this time, outside of work, we were meeting every Friday night with a few neighborhood families for a weekly Pizza Night. A simple ritual of friends connecting over pie.

When the pandemic struck and our agency closed its doors, we were forced out on our own. Something we’d dreamed about down the road but a scary proposition at the time. Inspired by our weekly get-togethers and the nostalgia associated with the name, we decided to call ourselves Pizza Night. The more we thought about it the more the name made sense. While building our company during the pandemic we continued gathering for Pizza Night every Friday over Zoom. It was our glue. Our portal to each other, our sacred place for true human connection. It kept us sane, it kept us grounded and we met like this for 52 straight weeks during the height of lockdown.

Not only did this help us through this difficult time but it also crystalized our thinking on the importance of EMOTIONAL CONNECTION in our lives. We wanted to integrate this thinking into the content we make not only to create lasting bonds between our clients and their audience but also to improve the media landscape we currently find ourselves.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

As our thinking around EMOTIONAL CONNECTION deepened, we connected with Tim Gable, a fellow Ohioan and old friend, who was on a similar journey during the pandemic. He had developed a strategic consultancy rooted in strategy, psychology and storytelling.

He had been at Nike, studied positive psychology at UPenn, created a college course at the University of Akron on the storytelling of LeBron James. The thinking was great and it made sense to join forces because he had the strategic foundation but no creative or production offering and we had a strong creative and production offering but lacked a strategic foundation and the scientific understanding of how to systematically create emotional connection. And that is the current structure of Pizza Night – Tim is the Head of Strategy, Cody is Creative Director and I am the Executive Producer.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

Our goal is to create connection through storytelling. To bring people together.

The great irony is that the initial promise of the internet in general and social media specifically, was to bring people closer together. But that hasn’t been the case and in a lot of ways it’s pushing us further apart. We feel more alone than we ever have. The surgeon general Dr. Vivek Murthy talks about this frequently as a growing mental health crisis. The competition for clicks and likes… our attention, creates a marketplace that devalues nuance and connection and rewards brash, loud, and opinionated content. And it is decaying our ability to not only connect but also focus on the big challenges we face today, as Johann Hari has written about in his book Stolen Focus (a big inspiration for us).

We’ve aligned ourselves with the Slow Content movement and those principles guide what we do. We believe that centering emotional connection rather than attention creates real bonds between our clients and their audience. It’s good for business but it’s also good for the world.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

The biggest thing we’ve realized is that we were participating in this attention economy, this system of perpetual noise and accepting it as the only way. In our agency days we’d often tell clients that they just had to feed the content beast. That in order to get their story across they had to constantly be telling it in any way that captured attention. What this leads to is a constant monitoring of trends, of making things louder, shorter, more brash and less authentic. Ultimately it wasn’t good for our clients and it wasn’t good for the world.

We realized that if you shift that thinking, instead of focusing on fleeting attention and instead focus on emotional connection the lasting value to our clients has been immense.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.pizznight.la
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pizzanight.la/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/pizza-night-la/
• Other: Intro & Capabilities – www.pizzanight.la/intro-capes

Image Credits
Main photo credit – Mathew Scott No credited needed for others