Who is Mrs. K?

According to the Boulder, Colo.-based creative agency, the name is open to interpretation.

“It started as one of those silly things, like the Betty Crocker story in which there never was a Betty Crocker,” says Peter Thron, Mrs K’s executive producer and man behind the scenes. “She’s an international woman of mystery. Whatever traits and skills you want to assign to her is up to you.”

Mrs K’s website describes her thus: “She is practical, plain speaking and wildly creative. Her simple desire is to work with good people - from directors, writers, designers, cinematographers, producers and animators, all the way through to those who commission her.”

An extension of that interpretation is that Mrs. K is in fact the agency’s creative director, Jeanne Kopeck, even though neither Kopeck nor Thron will officially cop to that.

“Jeanne is the artist and Peter is the detail man,” says Michael Eisenbaum, vice president of on-air creative and branded entertainment for Animal Planet Media. Eisenbaum has worked with Mrs K since doing a shoot with them for a show called Taking On Tyson, starring Mike Tyson.

Whatever the name, married couple Kopeck and Thron together run Mrs. K, a creative agency that has done work for ABC, Al Jazeera, Animal Planet, Discovery, Lifetime, USA and more.

Mrs K is best known for Kopeck’s signature style: live-action storytelling that feels like it’s all done in camera.

Kopeck not only has a keen eye and a deft hand, she’s also got an empathetic heart and a listening ear.

“Where Jeanne is really strong is in her ability to get to the essence of people’s stories and their passions,” says Patrick Trettenero, vice president of creative content for USA Network. “Her interviewing skills are among the best I’ve ever seen. She gets people to let their guards down and speak from the heart about what matters to them.

“We have a joke that every shoot we ever do with Jeanne makes the interview subject cry. She really reduces them down to their bare essences, why they do what they do and why they care about the things they care about. People trust her enough to speak from the heart and inevitably there are tears.”

It’s a rare combination to find someone who’s technically savvy, artistically inclined and emotionally engaged, but that’s what Kopeck brings to clients.

“We started as artists,” says Kopeck. “My degrees are all in fine arts and I worked for years as a graphics person. But we started to make live action for clients and pretty soon, it became ironic that we were more often being hired to do live action than graphics.”

Kopeck’s also a person with vision.

For example, when Eisenbaum brought in Mrs K to do the next season launch campaign for it’s unscripted series, River Monsters, he said the network was thinking about taking the series star, Jeremy Wade, underwater.

From that simple premise, Kopeck was off and running. She suggested shooting Wade approaching a blue hole off of the Bahamas.

“She found the location, storyboarded it out and told us the story,” says Eisenbaum. “We are very hands on here at Animal Planet. Most of the time when we bring a production company on we say ‘this is what we want to do.’ But we know Jeanne will come up with great ideas and she can tell us what she thinks we can do.

“In the case of River Monsters, we picked up the whole story.”

Shooting the spot took a fair amount of technical finesse. First of all, Wade had to be willing to hang out 45 feet under water without air. Once that part was shot, he had to be wiling to start swimming into a dark blue hole that stretches down 600 feet into the deep.

“He walks under the water in his regular clothes and it looks simple, but to do it technically we had to weigh him down and we had to have free divers and safety divers all around him. It too a lot of work to get a routine down that would be safe and not kill the talent,” says Kopeck. “The bravery on his part was unbelievable. It was a huge trust thing on his part.”

Other spots that Mrs K has shot for River Monsters included one in Costa Rica and one at the Sultan Sea, which is “a disgusting environmental disaster. Literally, we were walking on hundreds of thousands of dead fish,” says Kopeck.

“We come up with a creative solution and then work the brand to make sure they like it,” says Kopeck. “We don’t try to be brand strategists, we’re not trying to be the company that says ‘we are going to figure out your brand for you.’ We know our clients know their brands. We try to work with them to explore that brand.”

To that end, Mrs K has worked closely with USA Network on brand integrations, such as the below for Subaru.

“One of our big strengths is going in, finding out a person’s story and then figuring out how we’re going to tell it,” says Kopeck. “That person then becomes the copy for the spots. I’ll often do an hour-and-a-half interview to get what I need to cut a 30-second spot.”

The above spot was part of USA’s “Changemakers” campaigns, which told stories of brands working on initiatives such as pet adoption or children’s health care. USA also did spots called “My Story,” in which one person told a story of how they worked with a brand to do good, says Trettenero.

Often, Mrs K’s work feels like a documentary, such as the below spot for Al Jazeera Sport.

“Through our work for Al Jazeera we’ve gotten to enter some different cultures,” says Kopeck. “Probably some of the most meaningful work I’ve ever done was traveling through Pakistan and Afghanistan to tell the story of educating girls. It was incredibly intense. Our lives were at risk every minute.”

Sometimes Mrs K’s work is as exotic as shooting footage across mine-strewn Afghanistan, while other times it’s as simple as creating a promo for a popular network show.

But in the end, it’s not just about the work, it’s also about the relationships.

“I’ve hired them at every place I’ve worked,” says Lucas Aragon, on-air design director for ABC Design, the in-house design agency for ABC Entertainment. “It comes down to the relationship and the trust you have with the person. Jeanne is someone I can call on a Friday night at 6 pm who will say yes to my job and have something for me by Monday. She’ll put me at ease, make my life easier and bring a creative brilliance to it.”

While Kopeck and Thron’s talents could probably lead them down any number of creative paths, it’s the art of telling stories in two minutes or less that’s captured their hearts.

“We like people and we like to tell people’s stories,” says Kopeck. “I always feel like if we do that right, we’ve honored someone and it doesn’t matter if they are a celebrity. I think that’s the work we’re most proud of.”

Images courtesy of Mrs K

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