M+E Daily

Island Pitch: Do Cool Things the Right Way

To start the year, Jonathan de Armas, former partner at digital media solutions firm Diamond, former director of architecture and enterprise media frameworks at Fox Filmed Entertainment, and current commissioner for the Technology and Innovation Commission for the City of Long Beach, had a choice: join the booming job-seeker’s market, or start his own consulting firm, helping others in media and entertainment to “Do Cool Things the Right Way.”

He chose the latter, and Long Beach-based Island Pitch was born.

de Armas spoke with MESA about why he’s following his industry passion, how his experience in the industry informs Island Pitch’s computer software services, brand development and IT consulting, and what it means to “Do Cool Things the Right Way.”

MESA: What was the impetus for Island Pitch, how did the company first come about?

de Armas: Think of your current reality: You have a full-time job. Maybe you even have multiple roles. And you have to make that can’t-miss 7 a.m. meeting with Bob, you know, the one where nothing ever gets decided or done. Of course, you were working till midnight with a (everyone knows it was preventable) project delay or system failure. You’re not confident this plan you’re driving toward is going to work, and you don’t think you’re really supported anyway.

Wouldn’t it be nicer to be on your favorite island, relaxed and focused on personally enriching activities (reaching high as you can into Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs), interrupted politely by drones only when the system requires human intervention?

Maybe that sounds too optimistic, even for a far-future scenario. How about this — more realistic but just as hard to visualize — how about simply redirecting your precious time and focused attention back to your core business, fueling the passion that got you into it all in the first place?

Imagine a way of approaching the new stuff: avoiding the possibility that a lack of experience in the craft of innovation results in a series of unfortunate events that reach beyond the bottom line and into the personal lives of you and your team members. Let’s be real: disorganized projects put a strain on mental health, contribute to unhappy teams, and promote an unhealthy balance between work and wellness.

Island Pitch LLC (Island Pitch) was formed in January 2022 as I found myself at the rare intersection of inspiration and fresh opportunity. I had the choice to take advantage of a booming job-seeker’s market and likely find a very cozy place to be with rewarding, but routine work. Or I could decide to keep pursuing my passion on my own terms, helping others to “Do Cool Things the Right Way,” which is a phrase I’ve said for some time and finally trademarked as the driving philosophy behind Island Pitch.

With a philosophy, mindset, and dedication with me, I chose the latter.

MESA: How has your previous experience in the industry informed Island Pitch’s computer software services, brand development and IT consulting?

de Armas: Island Pitch was born out of my passion for bringing the right people together as a team to research and design solutions to novel problems in collaborative and creative ways. We pair with our clients to go wide and research their problem statement so we can narrow in and document a clear problem definition to support prototyping and the pursuit of viable solutions. We call this journey “Reaching your Pitch” (#ReachYourPitch).

I’ve had the opportunity in the roles of a leader, team member, and advisor at various times across more than two decades of software development projects large and small. One of the lessons that I take to heart is that smart solutions require more than a few bright minds from the dev team; rather, they necessitate engagement across the organization. We are honing our craft of bringing together cross-functional groups of experts and stakeholders together to build the future with repeatable processes.

I’m so passionate about process optimization I think it actually hurts me on a deeply emotional level to observe a team bogged down with inefficiencies. Witnessing disappointment on the faces of talented people who have worked together tirelessly is one of the worst feelings I’ve ever had the misfortune of experiencing. In so many cases, advanced investment in research and planning can avoid these three familiar foes: 1) lack of user adoption 2) poorly designed software, and 3) non-resilient infrastructure. Island Pitch exists to overcome those foes and more. Hindsight is 20/20, but why can’t foresight be sharpened at the same time?

It’s common to find that, after digging deeper into an exciting “new” idea or challenge, stripping away company-specific jargon surrounding an industry-specific subject, every new idea can be represented as an interconnected set of previously existing inventions along with new, unsolved puzzle pieces. These unknowns present as novel challenges, ripe and ready for real innovation. This is where we lean in to help you.

MESA: What does Island Pitch offer that others don’t? In short, what would you say gives Island Pitch the edge against the competition?

de Armas: There’s really a focus here on the pursuit of a clearly documented problem definition ahead of tinkering in the lab to formulate viable solutions designed to fit your business. We do the research and prototyping to produce the blueprints for your innovation.

Through a repeatable process inspired by historically successful practices used across industries, we map out your new experience in terms of solutions available in the market alongside the identification of the unsolved components required for success. Such a definition serves to inform estimates for investment in true, and often patentable, inventions.

In short, we offer an opportunity for future savings by not reinventing the wheel but rather by embracing automation and refocusing human effort & financial investment toward identifiable inventions that enable your business to ‘Reach Your Pitch.’

MESA: With the advent of the metaverse, augmented and virtual reality services are in higher demand. Where do you see this corner of the industry going, and what can Island Pitch help provide to further this “reality”?

de Armas: This corner of the industry, much like the World Wide Web of the mid-1990s, will evolve similarly, yet we expect it to do so even faster somehow.

Ultimately, whatever the Metaverse becomes will become part of the underlying fabric supporting an unlimited number of interconnected devices, services, and experiences offering unprecedented levels of data immersion stored on a blockchain to take advantage of capabilities such as the verifiable, transferable ownership we see in NFTs.

We expect to be experimenting on our own, and enthusiastically trying, buying, and testing every new experience we can get our hands on as we all go on. Whatever it becomes, we’ll be there, ready to support our clients.

As a remote-first organization, our first true shared office space will be in the Metaverse. We’re looking forward to the future interconnectedness of systems that allows all our clients and friends to pop by our office and say hello.

MESA: How has the pandemic changed your outlook on where media and entertainment is headed, and how has Island Pitch responded to the changes of the last couple years?

de Armas: The pandemic propelled innovation within media and entertainment and just about every other industry that survived. Production is increasingly virtual. The audience experience is increasingly interactive. The only constant is change, and Island Pitch was born within this ever-shifting landscape.

We’ve seen a radical shift in the way workers seek employment and what they value in their choice of employer. It’s even more important to nurture teams that work well together and take pride in delivering value regularly.

At Island Pitch, the product of our service may be technical in nature, but our approach is as human as they come.

MESA: What’s next for Island Pitch, what advances or added services can we expect from the company on the horizon?

de Armas: To be honest, the answer to that question is limited only by our clients’ imaginations and challenges. Web3 and the Metaverse are the future, but we serve to be your partner in innovation. Since our founding early this year, we have contributed to an exciting project within the XR space and are proud to announce the launch of a cornerstone modernization project with EIDR, the Entertainment ID Registry.

We are currently interviewing new clients and filling our project calendar for 2023. The kinds of projects we seek to take on are the kind that helps bring a company or whole industry forward, doing something new to them, or new to their niche. You’re the expert on your business, so keep that focus and bring us in to engineer your imagination into reality.

The ideal project matches for our experience fall into two general areas:

No. 1: Solutions that enable brands to reach into the future and improve upon existing experiences for your audience, customer, internal teams, or the world at large. (We build the future)

No. 2 Automation that relieves the pressure of existing process bottlenecks and ultimately refocuses your team’s human efforts on more meaningful work we can’t delegate to the robots, yet. (We do ‘bots)

Island Pitch has a staggering amount of experience in high-profile problem-solving. The cumulative knowledge and experience of our growing team serve to inspire us to search for the next problem — and craft an elegant solution, again and again.

Reach Your Pitch here.