This week on Five Rules for the Good Life, I sit down with Julianne Fraser, founder and CEO of Dialogue New York, to talk about what it actually takes to protect your creativity in a world that’s trying to flatten it. We get into the tension between algorithms and originality, why setting boundaries with social media isn’t optional anymore, and how carving out real time for yourself can unlock better ideas than any scroll ever will. Julianne shares her Five Rules for Cultivating Creativity, from building guardrails around your digital life to creating space for “creative mornings” to trusting your own taste instead of chasing trends. It’s a conversation about getting back to yourself, doing the work offline, and making sure your ideas still feel like yours.
What I appreciate most about this conversation is how practical it is. There’s no fantasy version of creativity here. It’s about being intentional with your time, attention, and input. It’s about knowing when to step away, when to go outside, when to talk to people, and when to sit alone with a notebook to actually think. That balance is hard to find, especially when everything online is designed to pull you back in, but it’s the difference between reacting to the world and shaping your own point of view. Once you start to feel that shift, even in small ways, it changes how you show up in your work and in your life.
My latest profile for Fine Dining Lovers is on Chef Brad Alan Mathews, the chef and co-owner of Bar Le Cotê in Los Olivos, CA. He shares his lifelong love of food and music, and his journey to sobriety. Thank you to Paul Feinstein for his guidance and support with this piece. For anyone in the industry struggling with substances or looking for options for a different approach to a work/life balance, Ben’s Friends is a good place to start.
INTRODUCTION
Hello, and welcome to Five Rules for the Good Life. I’m your host, Darin Bresnitz. Today, I sit down with Julianne Fraser, the founder and CEO of Dialogue New York, a digital media agency. She shares her Five Rules for Cultivating Creativity.
She talks about the irony of her process in setting social media guardrails, carving out time in anyone’s busy schedule for creative mornings, and that by following feelings and not trends will lead you to your best ideas. It’s a great conversation for anyone who’s looking to add more creativity into their life and to ground themselves with daily practices of making space to allow for new ideas. So let’s get into the rules.
OPENING CONVERSATION
Julianne, it is so nice to meet you. So great to see someone coming all the way to Brooklyn. I miss my hometown. Welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me. Excited to chat. I’m a child of the 80s and 90s. I still remember the DIY punk era of the hard line between creativity and brands. Today’s generation seems not to care about that. Why has creativity come to be such a commodity? Why do you think that shift happened?
I think it’s been a slow erosion of creativity over time. I’ve been in my career for 15 years in the digital space. Little by little, the way that social media has grown and the power of the algorithm has just kind of shrunk original creativity over time. This year, in the last five years with AI, it’s compounding a really frightening degree. It’s just the nature of technology and innovation.
What’s interesting is as we’re seeing it shrivel away in many facets of social media, I think people are really championing it. Such desire to get back to nostalgic, old ways of analog. I’m hoping for like a renaissance. I’m hopeful that people will go back to kind of old-fashioned ways of sparking their creativity.
IAN SCHRAGER & HOSPITALITY INSPIRATION
Looking backwards at people who might be inspirations for that spark, you worked with Ian Schrager, someone who turned the idea of going to a hotel into a story and experience. What did you take away from your time with him?
That was my most inspiring brand I’ve ever worked with in my career. What he did with the hospitality industry in the 80s, first with Morgan’s Hotel Group, really just kind of revolutionized the notion of a lobby as a space of socialization and inspiration.
Not only did he flip the way that people interacted with hotels, every single minute detail of his hotels brought to life this spirit. He has these guardian angels in the hallways at Hudson Hotel that look over his guests, or every single pen on every single property was black. Just like really old school rules of brand identity that led to these experiences that you cannot replicate, and so many hotel brands try.
From a marketer, I joined really early on in my career. It was just unbelievable gold to work with, to be able to leverage all of that storytelling.
BUILDING DIALOGUE
Storytelling and learning how to work with brands and to present them to people led you to being the founder of Dialogue, your digital brand marketing consulting agency. What unique offering did you want to bring to the marketplace that you weren’t seeing or that you felt there was a space to make a new name for yourself?
When I started my company, I had this core belief of what it takes to build community and a network of creative people. The word influencer can have so many different facets. The way we approach it can be a viral TikTok sensation, but also someone who has 10,000.
What I found really interesting is that our strategy and our approach has never shifted from day one. I think that’s the fundamentals of building relationships and human connection at scale, but never impacting the real human connection with these partners and also the creative campaigns that we’re concepting.
What I find most exciting this year specifically of what I’m working on with Dialogue is just how to strike that balance between being able to touch with more brands while still doing the most authentic, real relationship building, really creative narrative driving, and never sacrificing that.
Preaching to the choir. I absolutely love it. And I love that approach. The fact that you’re offering a take that both understands that we are dealing with the absolute shift in the way that we are creating, but also staying true to the core tenant, which is storytelling, which is why I’m so excited for you to be sharing your five rules for cultivating creativity.
RULE #1: ESTABLISH SOCIAL MEDIA GUARDRAILS
And in a world where we are in this post slop never ending stream of content, it’s easy for your brain to just go absolutely on the fritz while you doom scroll. Your first rule talks about the importance of setting up some boundaries when you go hunting for inspiration across different social channels. What’s your rule number one?
It’s not lost to me the irony that I own a digital marketing agency and my first rule is establish social media guardrails. I love it. I bring this to my team. I believe in this wholeheartedly.
Social media is beautiful and inspiring and incredible. And I even think from my personal creative, when I’m really into interior design or cooking, I’m finding the most incredible artisans in Rotterdam to build custom shelves that I never would have discovered if not through Pinterest or Instagram or whatnot. There are these really beautiful platforms to find inspiration, but if you’re not conscious in how you’re engaging with them, it just completely numbs your brains.
I have two young daughters. When I get home, I put my phone in this container. I have to be so physical to put it behind two physical doors. I’m so intentional because if that doesn’t happen, these devices are designed for addictions. At night, I’m putting my phone on airplane mode at nine o’clock. I’m plugging it in outside of my bedroom so I’m not shifting to that. I’ve found over the years I have to be really strict.
So creating whatever those guardrails are that best suit you, that’s rule number one in my mind. Once you create those guardrails and you get off your phone, you’ll start to realize that you have an extra 15, 30, 40 minutes of the day that you thought you were so busy that you cut things out like leaving your desk or, as someone like me, leaving your home.
RULE #2: FOSTER YOUR “WEAK TIES”
Your second rule talks about the importance of reestablishing those routines that get you out into the world. What’s your rule number two?
As convenience has, and you know this as a New Yorker, you literally can get anything at any time in the city. Uber Eats, you no longer are going to pick up your Indian takeout down the street. We’re skipping past the cashier at Whole Foods and we’re going straight to the checkout computers. We’re texting friends instead of calling and speaking to them.
And so I think the more and more and more convenience is prioritized, we’re cutting out this notion of weak ties. Weak ties aren’t friends. They’re not coworkers. They’re not even acquaintances. They’re just people that you’ll bump into in a day, like the barista at your cafe or like the front desk at your gym, whatever it might be.
And it’s really the fabric of a lot of our creativity and inspiration and speaking to people. And I really try to slow down and chit chat with the woman who drops off our mail. She’s wonderful, and it’s those little mini interactions that are really getting us outside of our bubble and off our phones and sparking things that we might not think of or know.
RULE #3: CREATE SPACE WITH CREATIVE MORNINGS
Setting up your day for success is such an important part of really getting things done. Creating the space to actually create is a core tenet of rule number three.
I’ve instilled what I call creative mornings for my team of 10. I love it. We’ve done this for five, six years. And I really, really believe in the power of it, not only for my team’s creative output, but from all of our personal satisfaction.
It’s a full morning out of the month where all of us take three hours on a Tuesday morning. They can do whatever will inspire them creatively as long as they’re off their phones and their computers. They can go to a morning matinee movie, they can browse shops in West Village. That is the point.
Because I’ve found the most creative impactful business decisions have come out of those mornings by myself with a piece of paper just working through something I’ve been blocked on that I haven’t had the mental space to actually think about.
More emphasis on the importance of all of my team fostering our offline influence, our offline lifestyles, creating that work-life balance so that we have the space to be doing creative work. Because if not, everything will become the exact same in the digital marketing world. How we differentiate ourselves is through our creative minds and our personal experiences offline.
Those experiences offline cannot be underestimated from the importance of fueling your own creativity.
RULE #4: CURATE YOUR CULTURAL PALETTE
I many times have tried to go outside the things that I know that I like and then feel that I’ve wasted time in hunting for new inspiration. But I know that I still need to look for new things that are going to inspire me.
Your fourth rule talks about how understanding what you like and what’s on your radar is a good way to find something new to inspire you.
It’s about curating your cultural palette. And I read this in Rick Rubin’s book a couple years ago. Everybody’s palette is going to be different. We don’t all need to be doing the same.
And I think that also is such a trap in social media where people are showcasing how they’re getting inspired and just someone copies another influencer’s exact date. I think it has to be so personalized to find what it is that makes your heart sing.
I’m obsessed with cooking and food. It just makes me so happy. Making sure that I’m carving out time offline where I’m testing recipes or I’m going to a market or I’m going to a new restaurant. The more that I’m expanding that cultural palette of mine, not only from a business perspective, it makes me tenfold a better consultant to a food brand, to a fashion brand. All of that taste and experience funnels into our work.
But also just from a personal satisfaction standpoint, I really can feel these moments where I’m in my creative flow and I’m learning. I really find moments where I’m learning still. There’s curiosity behind creativity. We have to continue to learn and discover new things as part of this.
RULE #5: FOLLOW FEELINGS, NOT TRENDS
Discovering those new things and knowing what to follow, your fifth and final rule talks about, for lack of a better word, your gut, refining that and knowing when to listen to it when something piques your interest. What’s your rule number five?
It’s following your feelings and not trends. The power of these algorithms, it’s becoming so homogenous, it’s starting to freak me out. Everyone’s hair and makeup looks the same. Everyone’s plating their food the same way. Everyone is dressing like Carolyn Bessette because of Love Story the TV show and backward hats and polos for all the boys.
Everyone’s homes are identical with boucle. I love all those styles, of course. The trends are amplified tenfold because of social media. And so I’m really trying to spark ways to follow what makes my heart sing rather than what I’m seeing.
When I was designing my daughter’s room, I made a conscious effort to 100% pull inspiration from analog sources. So I purposely did not be on social media. It’s led to this really funky, weird universe of fuchsia pink and cherry red that is so unique that I’ve never seen anywhere. And I’m so excited for her to live in that universe of inspiration and creativity.
But I never would have thought of that because if you go in Pinterest and you do Arch Digest, Child’s Nursery, you’re going to get a standard rulebook to follow and it’ll be beautiful, but it won’t make your heart sing. So I really look for those moments and carve out ways to really feel the feelings of creativity beyond just the trend.
CLOSING
I deeply appreciate you sharing those feelings and the approach. If people want to see what you’re up to or what Dialogue is up to, where can they go, how can they follow along?
Best to follow along Julianne Fraser on Instagram, Dialogue NYC on Instagram as well. We’re going to be going through a full brand universe refresh. Those would be the best spots, I’d say.
Congratulations on everything. I look forward to seeing what comes next, and hopefully next time I’m back in Brooklyn, we can grab a coffee.
I would love that. Thank you. This is so fun.
