Maria Consuelo Gónima knows who is listening

In December 2006, Creative Commons was turning four, and somebody had to choose the music. The birthday party was at Songbird in San Francisco. The planning notes covered beer, invitations, microphones and donations. Among the DJs was Maria Consuelo Gónima, performing as oonceoonce. In a career now associated with streaming, virtual reality and artificial intelligence, it is a pleasingly concrete early credit: a room, a cause, a set.

There is something useful about beginning there. A professional biography can make a life look like a procession of company logos. A party planning document puts the people back in. Someone books the artists. Someone tells the guests where to go. Someone makes the evening worth attending. Culture, even when it comes with a manifesto, still needs somebody to check the microphone.

Gónima became the founder and CEO of Big Smile Co., a communications studio she started in 2018. Before that, she worked across music, digital entertainment and philanthropy, with career credits including Hulu, Fullscreen, the Annenberg Foundation and Survios. The formats kept changing. Looking across those credits, a recurring practical problem emerges: how do you introduce an experience before people have decided what to call it?

The other name on the bill

Oonceoonce has a history of its own. In October 2018, Gónima joined Alex Pelly for PELLYVISION, a dublab program combining a musical guest with live video. The recording pairs her set with Pelly’s visuals. Its description places Gónima in the Perpetual Dawn crew and traces her background through Tigerbeat6, booking and playing warehouses and dance floors in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin and Europe.

The musical range is broad: techno, IDM, disco and psychedelic rock. Those are useful details because they resist the tidy business biography in which every youthful activity becomes preparation for an eventual job title. Here is an actual musical practice, with collaborators, places and a recording you can play. The executive and the DJ share a person; neither requires the other’s permission to exist.

Her work with unfamiliar experiences reaches back further. From 2000, her arts background included Cinematexas and the Austin Museum of Digital Art, followed by Tigerbeat6 and Asphodel, including Recombinant Media Labs. Film, music, digital art and spatial cinema make an unusual route into corporate communications. They also give that route a particular texture: she has worked around experiences that ask an audience to participate, listen differently or enter an unexpected space.

Big Smile itself has a nightlife connection. Its name previously belonged to a roaming San Francisco party series mixing rock bands and dance music. Gónima later carried the name into her communications practice. A business name can be a small monument to the life its founder had before the business. This one retains an invitation to enjoy yourself.

When the audience grows up with you

At Hulu and Fullscreen, the subject shifted toward screens and the people gathering around them. Streaming and creator media introduced different relationships between entertainment and its audience. A viewer could follow an individual across years of uploads, developing a familiarity quite unlike the relationship produced by a single advertisement. Understanding that familiarity became part of understanding the business.

Gónima has described young creators whose viewers had followed them for eight or nine years by the time the creators were twenty-three. They had effectively grown up together. Her observation directs attention toward the history behind an audience count. A subscriber total records a quantity. It gives a much poorer account of why somebody returns, what they remember or whose recommendation they believe.

That distinction appears again in her recollection of working at Fullscreen. She watched creators compare their subscriber totals while overlooking messages from people describing how much their work meant to them. Her account favors paying attention to those existing relationships. For somebody employed to help ideas travel, it is a revealing choice of emphasis: look closely at the people already listening.

“Cada quien con su cada cual.”

A family phrase Gónima recalls: everyone with their own thing.

She connects that Colombian family expression with her approach to professional comparison. Emerging formats offered few settled precedents. Instead of treating another campaign’s coverage as the deciding measure, she describes asking whether people understood an idea they had struggled to understand before. That is a demanding standard in a quiet way. A large number can be presented on a slide; understanding has to survive a conversation.

A job title with operating instructions

In June 2021, Reely appointed Gónima chief operating officer. The company made AI tools for generating highlights and automating content work in sports and esports. Her remit included strategic growth, studio relationships, marketing and business development. It brought the communications specialist into a role responsible for several of the working relationships around the product.

Reely CEO Daniel Evans had spent the preceding six months getting to know her. In announcing the appointment, he emphasized her industry relationships and ability to make decisions. The announcement also placed her in Los Angeles and identified earlier executive experience across digital entertainment. This was a specific operating assignment, with named responsibilities, rather than a ceremonial association with an emerging technology.

Later that summer, Gónima and Evans appeared together in an ESI Focus video interview about Reely and content creation. The pairing matters: the company’s product and the work of explaining it were being discussed together. A highlight tool has an immediately recognizable output, but persuading a studio, sports organization or gaming community to use it involves understanding how that output fits their existing work.

VideoVerse acquired Reely.ai in 2023. Gónima subsequently described her involvement as a fractional COO supporting its merger and acquisition work. The sequence adds operating experience to the publicity credits. An announcement, a business relationship and a transaction involve different kinds of communication. Her work at Reely extended across those boundaries.

Who gets the microphone?

There is another question running beside the technology: who is invited to explain it? In April 2020, Gónima published an article about building the UpStage Directory under the call to diversify panels. The initiative fits a part of her career concerned with public platforms, speakers and whose experience gets treated as useful knowledge.

She describes herself as Colombian-American and a first-generation US citizen. In discussing her participation on the Women of the Future editorial board, she has written about the difficulty of gaining a place at tables dominated by men. Her account connects representation to the everyday work of communications and technology, where the selection of speakers helps determine which questions receive a public hearing.

Starting Big Smile, bringing in talent and expanding her sense of what a business could be are among the parts of her career she values most. That preference gives the founder title a more personal meaning. After years of working within organizations, she had a practice through which she could choose collaborators and shape the work around them.

Her speaking credits include Harvard, the NATO Youth Summit, SXSW and MIDEM. At the 2026 Texas Media+Entertainment Summit, she was listed as a founder and speaker. She also publicly described co-hosting the San Antonio event after returning to Texas following twenty-one years in California. It brings the career back toward a place already present in her earlier musical and arts history.

The calendar is part of the argument

Big Smile’s current activities include a speaker bureau and S.M.I.L.E.S., short for So Many Immersive & Live Events Simultaneously. The latter is a guide to exhibitions, public art, film festivals, concerts and interactive experiences. For a communications studio, maintaining a calendar is an interesting extension of the job. It offers the reader somewhere to go.

Kiira Benz, founder of Double Eye Studios, contributes to the guide. The studio’s immersive work also includes collaborations with organizations such as Meow Wolf, Tribeca Festival and Wevr. These connections place Gónima among people making and presenting experiences, as well as people discussing how those experiences should be described. The guide lets the work remain tangible: an event has a location and a date.

Her attention to AI has continued, too. In a forecast for 2026, she described using one game to create thousands of highlights for different fan groups, then anticipated comparable personalization in corporate video. The latter was a prediction, an imagined town hall adapted for different departments. Her point concerned usefulness to particular viewers, a familiar concern expressed through newer production tools.

She has also organized a proposed SXSW discussion about AI product placement, with transparency, consent and industry cooperation among its stated topics. The emphasis introduces the negotiations that accompany a new format. Once something becomes technically possible, people still have to decide how to present it, how to explain its presence and what an audience should be told.

For all the changes in vocabulary, the music remains a helpful place to return. The 2006 birthday party needed an invitation and a DJ. PELLYVISION needed a musical guest and a visual collaborator. A communications practice needs people with something to say and people willing to listen. Gónima’s career keeps bringing those groups into contact. Somewhere between booking the room and explaining what happens inside it, she has made a working life.