@jordancarrant
Jordan (Coon) Arrant was born in Glendale, CA, but was raised partly in the Northridge and Santa Clarita parts of Los Angeles County. From a young age, he always knew he wanted to go into a creative profession and started early with full blown narratives between G.I. Joes and his sister’s Barbies that would rival any Hollywood picture, at least in his mind. He attended Village Christian High School near Burbank and while there, he started a rock band as a creative outlet that got very popular in the San Fernando Valley. After high school they even started touring nationally. While pursuing a potential career as a touring musician, he also wanted to get an education, so he decided to study advertising since he loved it’s creative storytelling nature. It presented a thrilling challenge to be given parameters to communicate a message within a finite amount of time (usually corresponding to attention spans), and getting an audience engaged enough to pay attention. He chose to go to San Diego State to earn his Bachelor’s Degree since it was one of the only colleges in the state to offer an advertising focus at the time. He decided to go the management route since not only did he not want to be behind a computer designing all day, he wanted to work with clients. Though his degree wasn’t geared toward the design side of advertising, he wanted to learn the programs that his eventual team would be using, so he could not only speak their language but also jump in if needed. He ended up finding free local community college courses and took as many as he could alongside his university workload. After he graduated, he moved back up to LA for more job opportunities. While working at a small entertainment agency in Van Nuys, he decided to earn his Master’s Degree in Communication Management from the University of Southern California. The focus of the program was entertainment and marketing, with many of the classes and guest lecturers revolving around the film industry which he loved, and going back to his musical roots, he completed his master’s thesis on “the future profit structure of the music industry.” Even on the management side of advertising, he continually sought opportunities to contribute creatively; making designs, writing taglines, building pitch decks, developing brand names, working on set, and concepting scripts. It turned out that he had a unique ability to distill large amounts of information in an elegant and digestible manner. Not only that, the agency at which he was working loved his look and started to put him in spec shoots for client pitches. This started to become more frequent, and his images started to be used in public facing creative, including packaging, ads, social videos, commercials, and even on the side of a NASCAR. Being comfortable performing in front of large audiences in a band certainly came in handy. After working with clients in gaming, sports, and consumer products, he wanted to shift focus to TV and film, and landed at an agency in Hollywood that focused specifically on that. During his time there he helped build integrated launch strategies, produce video shoots, write scripts, and direct a creative team for brands like Disney, Netflix, Lionsgate, CBS, and FX. As a result of doing some business development outreach, he landed work with the nonprofit, Stand Up To Cancer, who were partnering with Marvel and American Airlines for a national campaign to raise money for cancer research. The campaign included print and a broadcast commercial and though he sent options from the writing team he managed; they picked his scripts to produce. Through his 15+ year career through various visual mediums and brands, it became more and more clear that he was a storyteller. After a successful campaign, his relationship grew with American Airlines and led to being offered paid work from the world’s largest airline. The agency at which he was working wasn’t looking to add a brand like that to their roster, however, so Jordan was faced with a difficult decision. When anyone would ask Jordan if he would ever want to start his own agency, his answer was always “no,” but he told himself if he ever started a business, it would it would have to include creating original narrative content. American Airlines was going to help this decision however, by giving him a massive project to start his own agency, and in mid 2019, Serendipity Works was born. He purposely did not name the company “agency” or “productions,” but rather “works” because he wanted his company to be a creative workshop. Alongside the advertising work, he stayed true to his goal and over the past few years he focused and honed this passion and skill. Not only did he develop multiple pitch decks and bibles for unscripted shows, scripted sitcoms and animated series, feature film treatments, and a unique multi-media music project, but also began writing, directing, filming, acting, and producing his own shorts. He is continuing to build momentum down these paths simultaneously, taking advantage of his eclectic skillsets in management, branding, advertising, storytelling , music, and production, and with his broad range of skills, the future looks interesting.