Susan Nation is founder and president of Hop To It Productions Inc. and a pioneer in cross-platform production. Susan has over twenty years of experience in sales, marketing, project management and content creation, across various continents.
Susan started her career marketing and advertising brands for Unilever, Campbell’s, 7UP and Gillette around the world. She then worked as a producer and marketer for clients like The Economist Group, Fantom Technologies and D G Medios, one of the largest music promoters in Latin America.
2002 to 2005 Working in marketing and development with Lenz Entertainment in Canada allowed her to hone her television producing skills on projects like award winning pre-school series Nanalan’ (CBC), pre-school puppet show Michael’s Island (Nickelodeon US) and tween animated series Weird Years (YTV). She also produced her first Bell Fund Development project for Weird Years.
In 2006, she founded Hop To It Productions with Nina Beveridge and Paul Hart of Beevision Productions. With Hop To It, Susan has co-created and co-produced several notable cross-media projects with a focus on kids, pets, dance and romance. They include the award-winning multi-platform Cupid’s Café www.cupidscafe.ca, 2 seasons of the ACT Award and Gemini nominated Pop It! Kids dance-along project www.popittv.com for TVO, SCN, ACCESS, Knowledge and Nickelodeon Australia/N Z, the award-winning documentary Suck It Up Princess for OMNI, the Hip Hop in the T-Dot half-hour cult hit TV and digital series and www.hip-hoptv.com for Rogers and Pizza Pizza, and the interactive pre-school project www.biggrinshouse.com. She has also consulted on award winning scripted tween web series Ruby Skye P.I. and GoGos Crazy Bones website for Giant Step, and mobile usage trends research for Yield Branding.
Hop To It has several exciting projects in development including Talent Hounds with The Pet Network, Puppy Pals pre-school series with Judi Handleman and Jade & the Jaguar’s Eye tween MOW with Jill Golick.
Susan won “Deal Makers Live” at the Banff 2011 Festival. Create-A-Date, a video game concept for women, was a finalist in Telefilm Great Canadian Video Game Contest, Fusion Forum and Banff 07 iPitch and won a Telus Innovation Award.
Susan is on the Advisory Board of nextMEDIA. She also serves on the OMDC Digital Finance Committee. Susan has a BA from Sydney University and speaks fluent Spanish as well as rusty French and Portuguese. She serves on several volunteer boards, mainly in support of children.