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FOCUS ON AGENCIES
SUNDAY / JUNE 17 / 2018 LIONS DAILY NEWS
ANOTHER LINE BLURS Whether they’re working with brands, hiring creatives or developing ideas, production companies are seeing their proportion of direct-to-brand work balloon. What’s more, writes Laura Swinton, global editor of LBBonline, they’re no longer shy about it
W
HEN is a creative
agency not a creative agency? When it’s a production company. Just a year or two ago, production companies doing creative work directly with brands tended to avoid going on record about such work lest they piss of their agency clients. Go on, I’d urge, it’s kind of interesting. But in 2018, these companies are having very different conversations. Gifted Youth, the Los Angeles-based commercial sister company of Funny or Die, even states on its website: “We’re not an ad agency, but we could be if we wanted to.” It gathers together collaborators from all sorts of art forms, many from beyond advertising, to work on all sorts of brand content — from TVCs to long-form and six-sec social videos. Working directly with brands and creative development has always been part of what Gifted Youth does, notes managing director Dal Wolf, but the appetite for those services has grown noticeably. “Creative has always been at least 15% of what we do,” he adds. “In the last 18 months, we’ve seen an uptick in interest and we’re coming to terms with the idea that we really have to embrace this unique service. We’re a
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platypus in an infinite raft of ducks.” The reasons for these changes are manifold. The growth of the freelance economy has seen even highly experienced, much-awarded creative directors become much more available to production companies. In fact, production companies have been going after fairly juicy agency hires. In 2016, for example, Stink took on James Morris, former global head of Mediacom Beyond Advertising, as global CEO and, in early 2018, its digital offering, Stink Studios, hired Havas London’s LA Ronayne as a creative director. Disruptive, techy brands tend to prefer working more flexibly and having direct relationships with makers and producers. Then the fact that holding companies are muscling in on
Deliveroo’s first-ever global TV campaign, from Heads Up
production means that the production community is less inclined to worry about biting the hand that feeds. In an era when holding companies are focused on volume, sewing up whopping deals with multinationals, high-end production companies have also spotted a gap in the market for a more bespoke, project-based offering. That is something that Constantin Bjerke, founder and CEO of editorial platform Crane.tv and hybrid production-creative company Cult Global, is keenly aware of. “I agree there’s a split,” he says. “Creatively, the basis should be the same everywhere — a great idea that fits with an insight and the brand, alongside the drive to entertain/inspire/inform your audience. We just go about achieving that in different ways. At Cult, we have low overheads, little bureaucracy and hierarchy, few favours to return and approach everything with an entrepreneurial, can-do attitude.” As these companies move further upstream, the way they talk about themselves and their talent is
CONSTANTIN BJERKE: “AT CULT, WE HAVE LOW OVERHEADS, LITTLE BUREAUCRACY AND HIERARCHY, FEW FAVOURS TO RETURN AND APPROACH EVERYTHING WITH AN ENTREPRENEURIAL, CAN-DO ATTITUDE”
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