What’s the Story? With Lauren Zoltick

Welcome to our interview series What’s the Story?, where we will be sharing conversations with some of the most fascinating, thoughtful and refreshing marketers, brand leaders, creatives and storytellers we’ve come across. Join us as they reveal what drives them in their personal lives, the greatest lessons they’ve learned, and what they predict for the future of the industry.

We spoke to Lauren Zoltick, Director of Performance Marketing at Storyblocks, a stock media subscription service. Not only does Lauren have a cool job, but she’s also making a name for herself as an influential queer voice on social media and on her new podcast, Happy Queer Adults. Read on to discover her thoughts on personal LinkedIn posts, what she’s learned about productivity, and her passion for representation of the LGBTQIA+ community in media.

Tell us about your current company and what you do there.

Storyblocks is a stock media company. It’s a competitor with Shutterstock or Adobe Stock. The differentiator is it’s based on an unlimited model. So instead of paying per clip, you pay for a subscription, and you have access to the entire library. 

How did you start out in your career?

I started my career with the intention of being a video director and producer, writer - in the film industry - I really love comedy. I've always loved sitcoms, or comedy movies - anything that makes people laugh. After college, I took a video producer position at a comedy club. I was the person sitting in the booth during the live shows and controlling the big cameras that were on either side of the stage, and then I would make cutdowns of those videos. After a while, I was putting all of them on YouTube. There was not a marketing person at the company. 

We were struggling a little with ticket sales. So we started posting the videos with more of a strategy, like titling them and reposting them on different social channels. And very quickly, I started selling out shows just through YouTube clips. Then it turned into finding two hours with the visiting comedians during the day and making a sketch or something funny. Those started going a bit viral locally. 

That ignited something in me: there's something with social media, there's something with video, there's something with comedy that I really want to get into. 

Speaking of social media: you are very active and engaging on LinkedIn. What made you want to start focusing your efforts there?

There’s always a hard balance to strike when you work in social media. You want to engage in the channels that you specialize in, but also you spend a lot of your day on them. It’s hard to have energy to focus on your own stuff when you've got to represent the brands that you're working on. 

I've been a people manager for about three years now. I really love working with people and helping them with their careers. I love networking, connecting with people, and having honest career conversations. LinkedIn felt like the right fit for me in terms of where I wanted to spend my time and share some of those stories. 

Well we think you’ve truly mastered the current landscape of LinkedIn…notably, we saw that this post made it onto the front page of LinkedIn’s own newsletter! How did that happen?

One thing I'm really passionate about is more LGBTQIA+ people in leadership positions, and I follow a lot of them on LinkedIn. For the post you’re talking about, I started getting really frustrated because whenever someone queer in a leadership position would share something, not even totally personal, but just talking about their significant other in the context of something that's relevant to their life and work, I started seeing all these comments that were like, “this belongs on another social media channel.” I was like, “Who are these people that are gatekeeping LinkedIn? 

So I wrote this post that basically said, “this [type of content] belongs here.” And I posted a picture of me and my wife and talked about why I bring my queerness into job interviews and into my work, because I think it ensures that I'm in a safe space, if people react to it the way that I want to see people react to it. I thought it sucked that people were trying to gatekeep this huge part of people's lives that does impact their work and their life. It seemed to spark something. 

Have you made any cool connections from your LinkedIn activity?

There are a lot of queer influencers who I've met through posting, and we've had these great conversations offline. One guy I met through LinkedIn and I have been talking about starting up a queer professional network. We want to build a community to help queer people network and support each others’ career growth. So, that’s in the works! 

We heard that you launched a podcast recently?! Tell us more!

My wife and I started a podcast last year called Happy Queer Adults. The idea was to talk to queer people that we admired. And, my wife and I have been taking all these major life steps, like buying a house, getting married, having kids, and we don’t really have a lot of queer friends or family that have taken these steps ahead of us to give us advice. We had the internet and TV, but we didn't have the people to talk to. When we went through the IVF process, we were like, “this is really hard to navigate.” I wish there was someone else having conversations around this to guide us. 

On the other side, when I was growing up, I didn't know that you could just be a happy queer adult person and not have it be a big deal. It was this combination of: let's tell some of those stories. It’ll work in two functions for people who are maybe not out yet, and who just want to hear happy queer people talk about being happy and queer. 

It also covers the adult part of how to navigate having kids, how to navigate being a queer person on the internet, and how to navigate balancing being queer at work. We just did season 1, and we're going to do another season this year, hopefully…it's very hard to balance it with work and being a parent!

Congratulations on becoming a parent! As a new working mom, have you found that you’re generally more efficient?

There have been four moments in my life that have totally shifted my priorities. For me, it was: coming out, meeting my wife, having cancer, and then having a kid. And in each of those moments, it's been this worldview shift for me. It’s not anything super dramatic, where I'm like, “I have to quit my job and save the world,” it's this slight rearrangement of how I want to spend my time and how I think about things and frame things for myself. 

When you have these shifts, and you're prioritizing your health, or your wife, or your kids over work, you would think you would see your work start to slip. But for me, it's always been the opposite. In those moments, my work gets better. I find more efficiency, I'm more objective, and less emotionally attached. And so as a performance marketer, where you really need to make those tough decisions, it's good to have a balance. Big life moments help that come out for me. 

It’s hard to be honest and vulnerable on LinkedIn and other social media sites. What tips do you have for us who find that difficult?

The line that really good leaders walk (and I’m not saying I walk this well), but I’ve found that they’re able to be open and transparent, and have those moments of vulnerability, while not dragging people down with them. There are all these big things that can happen at work ranging from small to big that can knock you off track. 

I don’t think the expectation is to not act like you don’t have feelings. But it’s about how you find your moment of turning things around, reframing things, and trying to do that for the people around you, as well. For LinkedIn, I ask myself how I can take this moment of vulnerability, process it, and figure out how I'm reframing it before I put it out there. It’s always a little bit of a Band-Aid rip - you’re just never going to feel 100% confident. 

What advice would you give your younger self?

I know the answer, but I also wouldn’t want anything to change. I wish that I had been out and queer in high school and college and not have to have had that stress, and lie to people (myself included). But I’m also so grateful because I probably wouldn’t have met my wife, and a lot would’ve changed for me. 

I don’t have any regrets, but I do wish I had given myself a little more grace. I was so afraid of that side of me that I put everything into work. So I didn’t have a good balance between those things, because I didn’t want to think about that part of my life. I focused all of that energy into work, which was a disservice to my work. I was sometimes working 80 hours per week when I didn’t need to. It doesn’t mean you’re doing a better job, you’re just taking more time to do it. 

Go easier on yourself. People are going to like you when you like yourself.

That solid piece of life advice is the perfect high note to end our interview on. Thank you so much, Lauren, for being vulnerable and inspirational here and in your online presences, and for talking to us today!