Scott Thomas - Hybrid and crowdsourced creative production - S5 Ep11

I had a conversation with somebody about two years ago with a brand manager in Singapore. I said, how much are you spending now and what channels online offline? He said it used to be about 20% digital and about 80% on TV. And this was about two years ago. Now it's 80, 20 the other way. About 80% of our media spend goes onto online channels. Okay, great. How do you create the content for those? Well, we do a TVC and that costs about 300k. And what do you do for the digital channels? Oh, we used a stock image because we don't have any money left.

Hello. Bonjour Nihau Comestas. Welcome to Champagne Strategy. Listen to this episode if you dare. But you've been warned. There's no going back. Welcome to the show. Scott, how's it going today?

Good, thanks. Yourself?

Nice. Look, I've been following your company for a while and actually in, in Brisbane as well. It seems be something in the water there. What's. What's happening?

Oh really? Normally I have to explain to people where Brisbane is. It's not Sydney or Melbourne.

Hopefully not too much longer with the Olympics in a couple years. So maybe it will be put on the map.

That's a very good point. As long as we don't do a Victoria and lose the Games like the Commonwealth Games and make a name for ourselves that way.

But yes, that's it. You know what was really funny? I was down at south by Southwest last year and I met a lot of people down there that were from pockets of like down south Gold coast and Sunshine coast and also Brisbane City who were like world experts. Like they're just decided to live there and it was like some mushroom guy that worked for CSIRO is doing crazy stuff with fungi and electric currents and stuff like that. It was just like one of the smartest people I ever met and I was like, oh, where do you live? Oh, in, in Noosa or something. So there, there are pockets. I think it has a bad rep the city, but there are pockets of very, very switched on people.

There are pockets. I think when anyone says they're coming to Australia, I say you should go visit Sydney or Melbourne. It's fantastic. Yep. And try to keep people out of here. It's a bit of a hidden secret. It's quite nice living here. I think people are clicking on.

So. So can you give me a bit of your story because you think you started this company that you're currently doing a couple years back now is Traktor. I think part of you, I think I've seen you on Tractor.

Yeah, we were, we were, I think the first or second company that Tractor worked with back in the day when they were kicking off. I knew Matt previously and it made sense for us at the time.

So yeah, yeah, because I saw you in some of the materials, I was like, okay, so. And for anyone who's listening, Tractor are doing revenue based financing options. So instead of debt based on revenue maintaining, instead of like as a payday.

I'd describe it as debt for companies that shouldn't be given debt. That's kind of in between a payday loan and what a bank will do. Like there's a business there, but it's not a fish and chip shop, so we don't know how to value it, therefore somebody else has to step in.

Yeah. Which is interesting because I think that sits between two well known sort of categories where people think, oh, I have a binary sort of choice between going to traditional debt funding or VC or bootstrap. And these guys are kind of a bit of a hybrid approach almost between all three, which I found really interesting. So, yeah, coming back to what you do, can you just explain what the company is that you founded or co founded and we'll go from there?

Yeah, definitely. Co founded. I could say it was my idea, but it was actually my wife's. So she's the creative person. I was doing strategy consulting with Ernst and Young, specifically business model innovation. So helping big companies create new business models, new products, new services. For a couple of years. I was actually just selling PowerPoint decks. I was typical consultant. My partner had this idea. She was working on social media at the time and had just done a master's of creative advertising. I thought, there's all these really talented people like her out there that like creating content. They're not influencers. They're not doing it for followers necessarily. They just like being creative. I thought, well, there's all these marketers that are probably struggling to create the content they need and there's all these people that are being overlooked because they're not professionals necessarily. They don't work in the industry, they just know how to use a camera and they like being creative. So it just kind of stemmed out of that idea. Why don't we just match the two? And that was where Creatively Squared came from. And the name at the time was only 2018, I think we started Instagram was Square Photos still, so hence Creatively Squared.

Okay, this makes sense. I love it because I come across this paper recently and I put it into a Meme. Actually it's pretty funny, but there's this research paper done by Byron Sharp Kennedy and a few others and the results were actually quite interesting. I think this back in like 2019 or 16, they gave groups of different people in the industry two ads and ask them which one earned more revenue. And they've done this on stage as well at many presentations. Right. With. With marketers and agency folk in the crowd. Yeah. And what their study found, and then also the live tests of it with the audiences, is that marketers didn't know which one was better above random chance. So it's within the margin of error. So basically 52% of experienced marketers could choose which one was superior. Right. Agencies, it was even worse. It was 47%, which means it's like worse than flipping a coin. So I found that kind of funny. But the whole industry is built on this predication that to do really good creative, you need to outsource it to an agency. I think that's something that perhaps your business model is challenging or adding to. What would you say to all that?

Where to start? I'm not surprised by those numbers. I think at the end of the day, that's the Mike Tyson quote. Everyone's got a plan until they get punched in the face. So whether you spend a year and have 500 people working on your ad idea or you spend a day, you still don't know if it's going to work until you put it in front of someone. But that used to take. If I was doing a TV ad in a Super bowl campaign, it should take a long time. You should do pre testing and try to increase the chances from the 48% to maybe 49%. But that's not the world that we live in anymore. So the faster you can test something and see if it's going to work, the better. And that's kind of the idea behind Alpine process with how we use our creators and what we do now.

Interesting. So I mean, I'm definitely on board with that. I mean, from my experience as well, this is just something that no agency is going to admit to off camera. Some people I've interviewed that have creative agencies or in the agency game have admitted as much. Right. That they. A lot of what they do is we're basically wrong or doesn't work. But of course, like sometimes the trust is put in them. There's a process around that production process that the client is ultimately kind of buying into because they don't have in house capability. I just found your model like it was a bit of a different way go almost like democratizing who's the best at creating creative as opposed to having this binary choice between in house or agency. Where is this blurring and where are people finding success?

I think and again, not coming from the industry. When we started this, I've been learning as I go for six years. But my understanding of it, my view is when it was that TV centric world and it was big, the campaign idea for the year or for two years, it made a lot of sense to do that and spend a lot of time on it and get it right. All of a sudden all these digital channels have popped up. Whether it's TikTok or social media or retail media. There's every week there's a new channel you have to be on. And in the rush to not change the business model before from when it was take a lot of time to get one thing right. Whether it's right or not to now we need lots of stuff. The business model that that was built around doesn't work as well anymore. So coming up with that cut through and that campaign idea and that still makes sense. But how do you execute that across so many different channels? And in the rush to do that, that's where there's been okay, we need more content for less, so we'll set up an internal team. The internal team generally doesn't create anything in most of the companies that they adapt what was shot previously using the 300k production or they're a bunch of designers. Because I can't go out and shoot in 20 locations. That's cost prohibitive. So we're going to have a lot of design assets and hence all of a sudden you open meta and you've got the big companies are showing nothing but a pack shot with of render behind it. So kind of like we need to do more with less without changing that model. Whereas the other thing that's changed is I think it's more influencer. Marketing and creators has kind of become one. They've rebranded themselves.

Yep.

But the big driver in my view is mobile phones. Everyone can create something. Everyone's a photographer. Whether or not they're good at it is a different question. But everyone's got the skills and the, you know, something in their pocket. So some people have gone down the path of I want to create an audience and I want to sell something to them and that's a valid way to go about that. Other people just there's more photos and videos being created these days.

Yeah.

So if we tap into that network of that scale of people that are focused on creating something that looks good because that's what they enjoy doing. How do you overlay that? With what a brand needs, which is not just a random shot. They need some kind of strategy behind it. They need to make sure their brand codes and their distinctive assets are put into. There's some kind of story that fits with it. So how do you take almost the strategy of what agencies were doing, but in a scalable, faster way? Because you don't need to spend 12 months on each Instagram ad. How do you marry that with the production that's out there that is kind of being overlooked? Because it's not about social followers. Like, I see our network as if there was no social media, they'd be creating something else. They just enjoy being creative.

Wow.

Okay, so how do you marry those two to then produce the actual creative that people engage with at scale? That's the spot that we're kind of trying to target.

Yeah. I think there's like two things that come up here. One for me was 2019, 2020, TikTok sort of boom, really, I think, changed the game around the quality filters. So if people don't understand what it is like, social media success used to be based on number of followers you had. And then there was some kind of linear test between the number of followers and how much your post would reach out based on your following. And then TikTok really sort of changed the game going. Let's democratize it. Let's see which content wins the best. It doesn't matter if you've got like 10 followers or zero or like a million. Whoever has the most entertaining content that most people respond to kind of wins the game. And that really upended a lot of the models, I think. So I just want to come back to what you said about you've got content people that aren't influencers creating content. Like, what exactly do you mean by that? And is this an opportunity people aren't missing out on?

It could be. I think our network sort of ranges from it could be. It could be a stay at home mom who knows how to use a camera. It doesn't mean she's sitting there posting 10 times a day trying to grow a follow account. She just knows how to use a camera. Or it could be a hobbyist. We've got the accountants and lawyers that maybe their job isn't as creative as they would like. So they get into photography on the weekends or nights or something like that. So you've got to contact that skill where you don't have to be, you don't have to have $20,000 a gear in a studio to create a good photo, but you have to be interested in how photography works and all videography. And that sort of ranges from that up to now. We have more professionals. Maybe it's somebody works day in, day out, but they've got a home studio. We're not trying to tap into the production agency network, we're not trying to replace that. There's a time and a place for that. But it's everything in between that, where as long as you know how to use a camera, you can follow a brief, which is the other key thing that we look for. Because there's no point being able to create something that's got nothing to do with what the brand wants. But there's millions of people out there that are interested in creating camera content, but not necessarily all the 90% of an influencer kind of thing, which is all about how the algorithms work and gaming, all that, like the actual creating of the content. I had a CEO of another company, kind of of an influencer marketing company, who likened it. He said that it's the difference between a restaurateur and a chef. So a chef cares about their craft, they don't care about running the restaurant and everything else. A restaurateur knows how to cook, but 90% of their business ends up being the rest of the business. So if you look at creators these days, 90% of what they do, or photographers for that matter, who are running their own business, 90% of what they do is not creating content. It's all the stuff that goes around it. So we try to focus on people that just enjoy creating content and then bring opportunities to them.

Yeah, interesting. Because the way I look at creative content, correct me if I'm wrong here, but there is in house versus outhouse, right? So outhouse, the agency traditionally was very good at taking a brief or getting the brief out of the client, or creative brief, we call it, right? Which is like, what exactly do you want? And then they come back with some kind of big idea or sort of like a macro creative idea that has lots of different permeations or iterations that they can kind of go in and then, you know, they, they kind of create some mock ups of that, get approval with a client, go back, do the finished art, get all approval, sign off, and then, you know, it gets published and distributed. Right. So for me, like when you go to an influencer, they are taking Your brief, hopefully you can brief them, but you are leveraging the two things, creation and distribution of it. Right. So you're kind of hijacking some of their reach through the following that they've created as well as getting the content right. So you're saying then you can tap into your network just to get the creative done and you help make sure that's on brand by creating a bit of the technology around the briefing process, is that right?

Exactly. So, yeah, our software is around the briefing process and matching with the right creators and being almost quality assurance in between. So it's a mix of people and process. So somebody checks off and is overseeing the process. But the platform's doing a lot of heavy lifting to make it scalable globally. But exactly as you put with an influencer, you're tapping into the content and distribution now, whether you want both of them, you're paying for the audience no matter what. And so if you look at most influencer platforms and a lot of them add, you know, content projects or content you know, only to apply to beyond there, you need a minimum of 5,000, 10,000 followers. I can tell you there's a lot of people out there that are great at creating photos and videos that don't have that many followers.

That's it. It's kind of like, it's very true of lots of things actually. It's very rare to find people that are good at all those skills. It's kind of like running a business, right? Like the salesman versus the operations person versus the executor. Often different people, all the visionary strategists laying on top of that. You can't generally be good at all of. Yeah, it's going to be a weakness. Okay.

I think coming back to your point earlier on TikTok too was, I think that was a major shift and it was more around changing from social graph to interest graph, which makes sense. I was following all my friends beforehand. Maybe the content your friends post is not the most engaging. So if you think it from the business point of view, they want people to be on the platform longer, it makes sense to orient it towards interest. So the best content wins. And now you see a mix of both. And I think Instagram's a good example where sort of reels is a lot of interest based stuff and trying to keep you on the platform. But then stories is still mainly the people you follow. So you can have one or both. But it's definitely changed the game in terms of the value of influencer marketing or whatever we call it we're doing. We call it creator production, but we're not studio production and we're not influencer marketing. So we need some marketing as well to solidify. What is this category?

Yeah, well, it is kind of new, isn't it? And it's like how you describe it. I kind of use analogies between existing tech or ways of doing things out there. And it's like, oh, what kind of bit of that? A little bit of that. And then people get confused and like, what are you. But, like, can people use this for the bigger picture kind of core creative idea? Or do you work with the client before that? Or how does that sort of work? Because. Or does the agency do that and then they come to you?

Or I think it varies. So we can work with customers where they don't have a big creative idea. So I think you find particular of the, you know, small or medium brands, maybe there's not one idea. They just are putting lots of ideas.

Do you need one big creative idea? Anyway, I think that's a bit of a fallacy sometimes, right?

But I think it probably is in some situations. It still makes sense. I think tying. What. Tying everything you do together under one common idea makes sense. So making sure there's some kind of consistency with that big idea across, you know, multiple markets makes sense, but how you execute on that should be completely different. So, yeah, I think there's a time and a place for it, but maybe it goes the other way around. So instead of starting with, let's spend a year on what the big idea is and shoot our shot once. What if we were testing a dozen ideas every week, and then after six months, hey, these ones are really resonating with people. Maybe we should take this and workshop it to the big idea. And when it's time to run the super bowl ad, we know this works well, Exactly.

And I think it's like there's a bit of that exploratory process. I know when I was doing this for a couple of clients as well, it was amazing how some of the creatives you would use would work. And you thought, oh, that will never work. It's like, it looks bizarre or it looks crappy or it's like lo fi or whatever, and for whatever reason, it just works. And you're like, oh, I was wrong. And then you're like, okay, there's something here. Let's take that. And why did it work? And you kind of figure out why it worked. And then you get to iterate on that theme and then suddenly You've got like a themed campaign working kind of reverse almost, you know what I mean? And then you're like, okay, let's own this core theme and keep iterating and something I. Ideas can stretch really, really far. Like the Snickers sort of campaign. You know, only you when you're hungry. Like, that creative idea has lots of permutations that you can create into lots of executions in many different ways, video stills, whatever. And I think that is what a good creative idea is all about. So that's why I'm like kind of agreeing with the whole big idea thing, but also against it. I think where did the big idea premise come from is the more important thing? Like, how valid is it? Is it just some agency creative strategist idea that just popped out of nowhere or is there some validity to it in the market? You know, I think that's the kind of question that gets skipped sometimes.

Yeah, I think coming back to know I said before, if you have. You were just doing tv, tv, radio, print, but yeah, you only had one idea. So you can call it a big idea or small idea. You had one idea for the year because that's all you could do. So now you can have lots of different ideas, but using. What was the Snickers one example, you're.

Not only you when you're hungry or, you know, the KFC Australia one's very good as well. Like, you can see all the different sort of situations that they've paid.

Let's take the Snickers one. You're not you when you're hungry. We could either do one TV ad in the States and we could adapt that for every market around the world, or we could do 10 different stories in each market around the world with each different demographic around that idea. So you're still having a unifying idea. But what's relevant to me taking a break in the Philippines with my family could be very different from somebody in Canada.

Actually. Let's talk about that. Because if you are a vendor and you've sold this great idea, let's just say we're an agency. One of the ways you limit the costs, right. Is you scale down the creative complexity. So you get one idea. And I've been on these ads where we've had to dub like a Johnson, Johnson and Shoulders. I was in Sydney and we had to double it from like Singaporean because it was all formed with like this kind of not Caucasian, but not Asian. It was kind of like someone in the middle, so they kind of Pan Asian.

Yeah, we need one talent that can kind of do okay.

Both. Yeah. And you're just like, I kind of get it. But then it was like we had to dub that into Australian and I was there in the studio and you know, charging heaps of money to the client and it's just like you just dub it and like hang on, why don't you just reshoot that? And back in the day that was really expensive thing to do. But now and Meta just announced this today, you could use AI to completely change and translate on the fly on reels, I think it was. They announced today and I was like, wow. So I think technology has kind of maybe lowered the barriers to that and then perhaps with your distributed network that's even like more cost effective than it was before and coordinatable. So do you have examples of companies that have done that with you into multi markets?

I think we've got examples of companies where we're doing work in multi markets. We have the capability and a few companies have done that. So we could have a brand director in New York and say instead of shooting in the internal agency here in New York and giving it to India and Brazil and the uk, why don't we just tick a box in real platform and shoot in each market and we'll just use creators in each one. And we've done that. And you don't have to guess as to how the performance looks when you compare it to the adapted asset versus the local one. But that is all pinned from that underlying assumption from years ago that production is expensive and a cost to be minimized. Because if I can minimize that one, it's expensive and I can minimize that cost. I can put money, more money into media. But obviously paid social on these platforms have changed the game where their auction processes and bad creative cost you more. So the companies are still largely structured that way. I have a global team, I produce once I give it to local markets, I have a content budget and then the local market has media budgets. So if you want to change how that works in large companies, that requires pretty much top down change to prove out the benefits of that agency relationships. There's lots of things that need to shift to do that. So we've done that on occasion. Obviously works. But doing it on a large scale, that's kind of what we're working hard towards now and just proving it out case after case so we can build that up. You're on the tech side of things. The focus has been more on scalability of adaptations. So we see tools like DCO like Dynamic Content Optimization. You'll see where you've got a template, you put in two or three images, a couple of different variations of text, and all of a sudden, bang, you've got a hundred ads. You've really got one ad that looks kind of the same a hundred times. Instead of just shooting maybe 20 videos, which probably cost a lot less than doing the one big shoot, and then scaling that up. So there's a middle ground between when do you shoot with a production agency and do the expensive shoot, because there's a time and a place for that. When do you shoot using creators or some other kind of model to sort of do a more scalable, faster, more cost effective way. And when do you just adapt what you've got to your point using do language adaptations, That's a great way of using AI to make that faster.

So I just want to go through some of the different mentions because we touched on these before, but when you're doing creative production and we're talking like all size companies here, right. So you might be a very small brand that you're owning yourself and growing up as a founder, you could be someone medium size or a large business. Right. I think there's this sort of false binary choice between outsourcing and in housing and obviously there's trade offs that happen there. But let's just go with the in house option. What are the pros and cons you've noticed when people do things all in house that they should be aware of?

I think in house, when somebody's there day to day working in house, they understand the brand better than anyone else and they're going to move faster if you can tap somebody in the office next to you. Nobody's in offices these days, but you get the idea. Obviously they're going to understand how things work and they're going to know the brand and be able to do things quickly. So quick adaptations, I need a quick language change or legal set to change the copy. That stuff's always going to happen faster in house and I don't think you can get away from in house teams. There's a lot of benefits to doing that over outsourcing that to agencies where they need markup and to make money themselves. So some of that stuff should be brought in house and I think a lot of companies have gone down that path. The downside is that in house teams can't create the type of content that performs the best, particularly on social channels. They're not shooting photo and video content. If you have A studio, there's only so many things you can do in one little white box with the same person at a camera. Like you're going to run out of content or ideas and normally end up being product shots. So. Yeah, yeah, product shot, product shot, product.

Flat lays, that kind of stuff.

Exactly. You can do that. And even that, you've got to go, I've got to get new props every week or I've got to. You know, you're singing out to the brand manager, hey, can you be a hand model today? I can't shoot this. So. And I've seen that. I've seen multinational companies that have set up. We've now got two or three internal content studios and you look at it and it looks like the size of a toilet and it's like some grad with a camera.

Oh, another thing I've noticed as well, because I was doing this recently, is that no one wants to be the face of the brand. So no one wants to be the spokesperson person. No one wants to be, like, pictured in shot. And like, obviously there's legal gratifications around that, employment contracts, but like, everyone's afraid of being on camera, so it becomes this very, very impersonable. All the creative ideas.

Exactly. So, I mean, that makes that in house. It makes a lot of sense if you're doing, you know, quick adaptations and design assets and, you know, somebody jumps on Canva or, you know, that kind of stuff makes a lot more sense to have a team doing that in house.

Okay.

But they can't do the production part of it. And that's the bit that's sort of missing there.

And sometimes strategy side of things as well. I've noticed somehow they kind of need a bit of hand holding sometimes there or reformaling the thoughts or an independent perspective because they're so sort of unidirectional and affected by their own internal machinations and ideas of how things actually work, that they kind of need that external force that I think agencies provide really well.

That's the appeal in an agency. You get to work on different ideas and different. Like that's kind of what's the appealing aspect of being in that world versus just a single brand. So bringing those external perspectives.

They call it the curse of knowledge, if you want to use a term. It's like the more you know about it, the more you stop thinking like your actual customers and you start assuming things that actually wasn't the case because you know so much more. You. You forget how to create content for that person when they're at that very early stage of knowing who you are.

And what you do. Yep, exactly. So I completely understand that makes sense to me.

Yeah. Okay. So then agencies, like, they do the strategy sort of interpretation side of things. Well, because they're doing this day in, day out with so many different clients, they don't suffer from that curse of knowledge. They've got generally a pretty solid network of productions, whether they do it in house or outsource it to an affiliate or a very close relationship production facility. They have that sort of briefing process, I've noticed, between the three or however many jumps go. So it does work. Takes a bit longer, but you'll get kind of quality back because they do all the checks and balances. But what are the cons?

Careful what I say here. You've hit on all the pros. I mean, they can pretty much do anything. The cons are because of that quality and the scale and all the different processes happen internally to get that right. Moving quickly is not something they're good at. So if you want to shoot in 20 locations in a week, that's not going to happen. Could they do it? Of course they could, but they're not going to be able to do it efficiently. So you either have to be slow and methodical, because understanding how creative people work a bit more the last few years, they need time as well. You don't just. I need the great creative idea this week because of a deadline. They need to go on, I don't know, walk around the block for a week and do nothing. And then the idea pops into their head. I don't know how it works. I'm always amazed by it because I'm a logical thinker and it just doesn't.

Make sense to me.

But you're going to get that quality and you're going to get the big ideas and you're going to get all that stuff that they can do. But it's that speed of, like, how do we execute this on really quickly across multiple channels. That's going to be harder to do because you can't do both. You can't be set up for speed and efficiency, but also quality and quality assurance.

And obviously the costs comes associated with that because there's markups along the way. Right?

Exactly. You want the best creative director in the world and there's only, you know, five in their league. You're going to pay for that, as you should.

Yeah. And sometimes I found with agencies, well, because they're a third party and this is just true of any outsourcing to a vendor, there's going to suffer from that sort of like that inherent principal agent problem. So sometimes they have their own interests at heart, you have your own interests at heart as a client and there's going to be like, sometimes you'll meet and sometimes there'll be different sort of incentives at play there.

Yep. And I think the business models around those are interesting too. Sort of, you know, fixed fee or trying to align incentives. So, you know, one does well and you do, you know, both parties do well. Some interesting things happening in that space, I think. But you're right, you're always going to come across that because at the end of the day, you're both running independent businesses that have different objectives. It should be a partnership and you should be aligned on what you're trying to do. But they are two different entities.

Okay, so what about then? There's some other things in between these two sort of binary choices. Right. So obviously, you know, you sit somewhere in there, there's influencer platforms. We mentioned there are freelancers like Upwork or whatever. It doesn't really matter. What are your thoughts on those sort of other kind of substitutes?

Yeah, I think they're the four we've sort of come across. You've either got the agencies, you've got in house teams, influencers, and the content they produce is really valuable. I mean, you should repurpose that. If you've paid for it anyway for their audience, you should repurpose that and use it as much as you can. So that's a third option. And then there's always the tech side of things too. How do you scale, whether it's dco, it's AI now or, or anything else, how to use tech to scale what you've got or do things faster than before. So I think they're the four main ones. I think we see this is a bit of a different category that sort of takes a little bit of each.

Obviously, when people think AGI, they're thinking of immediately. I tend to find anyway, in the marketing advertising niche, they think immediately of creative production. Obviously there's many other ways to do it, but that's the thing that comes to mind because it's what concerns most of their lives, professional lives. Are you threatened by that or where do you see that being useful and.

Less useful or certainly threatened by it? I think it's a tool to use. I think because it's new. The creative industry is kind of a bit wary about it. But I mean, the core concept's been around for quite a while around how AI works. And I don't know if you've tried to hire a data scientist lately, but they're not out of work and AI can certainly analyze data pretty easily these days. So accountants, lawyers, they still have jobs that hasn't been put out of business yet. So even if it was going to happen, it's not going to happen anytime soon. I think where we see it as being really useful one for our creator community. So some of the things you would see posted online, when you know some of the OpenAI stuff, you know, here's an ad somebody created. What they didn't tell you was this person spent a week and went through about 50 different tools to get that right. And then they had to Photoshop at the end to get all the brand to look right. So it would have been faster to pick up the camera and do it in the first place. But the fact that it can create something is pretty cool. So there's that aspect. So rather than building anything into our platform, we've taken the approach of a lot of our creators. As I said, they're creative people, they like being creative and it's a tool they can be creative with. So rather than putting the tool in the front end and asking a brand manager, who's got about two minutes to work on this to go and prompt this for the next hour, just say, I want this AI project and we'll funnel that out to a creator who specializes in doing that and they'll create something and maybe get it back a day later. So that's kind of the approach we've taken. But I think the more useful area is like adaptations and editing, changing things. So yeah, language and voiceovers. So you've got an ad that works really well and you want to do it in 20 languages. That's a really cool use case of that. Sometimes when you, you've got a photography project or we've created something and maybe there's something in the background because it's somebody shot this at home that you don't quite like the color of the cushion they had on the couch or something, it doesn't fit with the brand. Or how do we quickly change the color of that, which before took a lot of time in Photoshop and now is becoming easier. So it's a time saver, makes people more efficient. I think there is an aspect of being creative with it, but I don't think it replaces that creative eye or idea for creating something in the first place or picking up a camera. There's just Gonna be different times to use one or both.

I was speaking to Branka, your colleague, earlier in the week and she mentioned some very, very famous large brands use your platform. Right, right. Which I kind of found curious because I was like, hang on, if they're really, really large, wouldn't they just rely on the agency to do everything? Because my experience with large brands is that they're very hands off. Right. And they got their networks in place, they got their RFPs in process, you know, all kinds of stuff. Why would they go out and approach you? What's your answer to that and can you give us any examples of what's happened?

Yeah. So we work with most of the big CPG companies, Nestle and Coke, Unilever, PNG and varying degrees around the world, and it's all directly with them. You're right. They've all got agencies. They've got hundreds, thousands of agencies in some cases it seems. So they've got plenty of people that can do a lot of content for them. Do they have people that can do it at the speed scale and the type of content that actually works online now? No. So it's not replacing them, it's just using a different tool for the right job. So I think that's why they're sort of coming to us. In a lot of cases, they're looking for something that's native to the platform rather than adapting the kv, which is not the sweet spot of the agency because the agency either shoots using an expensive production studio or an internal team to adapt it, or they've used influencers. And the big problem there is I've used them for content, but it's not on brand, it's inconsistent. Managing them payments, all these kind of headaches gets messy. It gets messy. So there's sort of a gap there. How do I create the content for my brand for our channels but do it quickly, efficiently and have it work better? And I think that's the other thing that's also pushing them is just budget pressure. Everyone needs to do more with less. So if I'm spending a million now on Meta ads, actually I had a conversation with somebody about two years ago that kind of ran this out for me with a brand manager in Singapore. I said, how much are you spending now and what channels online offline? He said it used to be about 20% digital and about 80% on TV. And this was about two years ago. Now it's 80, 20 the other way. About 80% of our media spend goes onto online channels. Okay, great. How do you Create the content for those. Well, we do a TVC and that cost about 300k. And what do you do for the digital channels? We used a stock image because we didn't have any money left. Hang on, 80% of your spend goes on these channels because that's where your consumers are. Used a stock image. Yeah, because we had to do the tbc.

Right.

I thought this is going to be a long time to get this business to work.

That's hilarious. And I think that's the legacy thinking. And most of our budgets going to this big sort of expensive 60 second TVC and then scraps can kind of go to the digital programmatic or whatever team, you know what I mean? Whereas I think there's changing around. Well, you know your 14 year old TikToker could create more engaging content than you know, that's what you've already producing. Why don't you leverage like a hundred of them and create something really cool? You know there's going to be more suited to the platform and I think I've seen this happen a lot. I was talking to one of Europe's, well, Europe's biggest advertiser. His show remained nameless and he was getting some quotes like the agency was up for review. It was a very famous agency in the UK which I can't mention, who has written some very famous books very much inside that agency or ad land sort of network. And he came up for review and their pitch was just like a 3 or 4 million pound 60 second television commercial as the crux of the Honkai Man. He's like no, no, no, we, you know, we've, we've got all these different channels. Like you can't just take that and cut it down. And this is what happens. They take that 60 second TVC, they try and cut it down to like 6 second shorts or like 15 second reels and it just doesn't work because it's not made for that platform, for that kind of audience in that environment of engagement. And it's very much on the mind that no, we have one creative idea, right? Then we'll farm it off to different people who specialize in each of those kind of media channels. They'll create content based on that sort of core theme and then everything's going to work and we'll put media spend to everything to boost it all up. And it was a very much of a changing of the process of what used to happen. And I just feel like, okay, that's the way I do it, right? This seems obvious to any sort of modern business. But there's a lot of other people sort of trapped in that. I think that that old way of doing things. Do you see so these big brands now changing a bit or being more receptive to that newer way of working.

I think people in these big brands are changing but as a company that's kind of different. You have some people that get it so they're trying to move everyone. That's really challenging. So it's not really surprising. That's taking a while. I mean but using what you just said then it's akin to putting radio ads on tv.

Yeah.

Well it just doesn't make any sense. And as soon as you see those recut TV ads on social media.

I've seen them, I've seen them like I've seen them take like a you know, 16:9 landscape and then they've put it on like. Like a 9 by 16 phone so portrait and. And it's just a black bar like it's mostly black and got this really thin little strip of the video and you're like what?

It's got the logo at the bottom and it's got the learn more button over the top of it because they haven't taken into account aren't the aspects.

And you're like can't you just crop that? And I was like hang on. And like this is for a billion dollar like mining firm. And I was like okay, this is kind of embarrassing.

Yeah. The crux of it I think a lot of marketers create content for other marketers.

Yeah.

You can say you're consumer focused but it's what looks high quality is what I'm proud of to share because it looks aspirational and I put a lot of work into it and I've tagged 20 people that were involved with it. Not this actually drove through brand lift or sales because that's not as exciting. Like what do I get awards for? I get awards for campaigns that other marketers like and that's how you get promoted. It doesn't matter if sales went up 20%. That's not my job. That doesn't get me the next job. So I mean they're all the intricacies of the coming into this industry. You can solve the problem. That's relatively simple.

Actually I just heard about this story today. I can't mention who wants to say it's one of the country's largest. How would I say this? They're in insurance. Okay. Very large insurance firm. Everyone would know them. I can't mention it they were losing market share. There was a big top CMO awards night and they had to enter their submissions for like being the top cmo. Yeah. What happened to be in the audience was their direct competitor who was stealing all this incumbent insurance company's market share steadily over the years. So the CMO from this legacy insurance company submits all the data showing this person took the brand from here to here. But in the audience the competitor had the opposite info because they knew exactly how much market share they were gaining off this competitor and just going I know this person lied on the submission as doctoring the results. Right. And just recently this, this brand has kind of reached out to me to like help solve the situation which I found really funny. So I know no one really cares about how well the company does or they'll care as much as they have to but the rest is just about self promotion and leveraging this for aw.

Is I think coming from a so before I was in consulting I was in science. Worked in like laboratories and you don't doctor numbers because things blow up. But coming into marketing where there's a lot of that and I think that's part of the fun you can, it doesn't matter as much. There's gray areas and you can stretch the truth and that's part, that's an upside to me that makes the industry interesting.

It does. I mean and hey people got to pay the mortgages, some promoter get a better job. Nothing wrong with that. Right. But I just find it ironic when whether it like an effectiveness festival and showing you oh how the brand was effectiveness and I always say like how do you know whether creative is effective or not? Like what does that even mean to you?

That word effectiveness is really fascinating. Trying to understand how that works. If you go to a CFO and ask them what's effective, it's like a return on investment. Like it's a number.

Market share, market penetration, earnings. Yeah.

They will agree. You ask 10 marketers what effectiveness means, you'll get 10 different answers. Pre testing results, engagement clicks. Mmm studies awards, brand lift awards.

Roas row row us.

Yeah, exactly. It always varies and it's always different. And I think that's one of the difficult things marketing teams if you can't convey to the rest of the business the value you're adding in numbers because that's how the rest of the business works. That's when you end up getting budgets cut or fired. I'm asking for X dollars. What's that going to give the business? You need to have Something, pick a metric, pick something to say we've added value. Not just it's long term brand building, trust me.

Okay, so this brings me on to something I want to ask you because there's lots of common misconceptions in the industry, especially when it comes to effective creative. I'm using that word effective again. What do you think are some of the biggest misconceptions that you've noticed working with firms?

We're still learning as we go and the big thing for me, I don't have a background so I'm just constantly, how do you do this? How does it work? But I've got that kind of analytical mindset to it all. So the way our journey's kind of stepped through. Firstly, people would say I don't have budget for content because of various reasons. Right. So then you would look, okay, where's the biggest part of your budget go? It goes into media span.

Right.

Which channels, social channels these days. Okay, how do they work? Well, they're auctions. Okay, so if we made better creative then you would have more budget there. Yeah. So they kind of answer that efficiency question.

Right.

These are just cheaper to run. Step one. Then the next question comes up. Effect did actually work. Okay, well how do you measure it? You tell me. Firstly, click through rates comes up some kind of engagement, likes, comments, shares, something. Okay, we can measure that, that makes sense. But what's the next one? Then you will get the next market who doesn't believe any of that? And then it's brand list studies or pre testing studies or whatever it may be. So purchase intense, these kind of things where we're going surveying people.

Right.

So you add those on top of it as well. Then there's how do you go past that? How do you track sales? So I've got some companies that have, I know a couple of large CPGs that have set up D2C company brands purely to be able to measure the data, to apply the learnings to third party retailers like Amazon who or Coles or Woolies who maybe don't have the data in some cases or don't give it out freely. So how do you prove that effect.

As like an isolated pilot test? Almost exactly.

If it works best over here, then we can apply the learnings to what we're going to do in third party retailers. But I think that effectiveness thing is it's tricky because there's different ways that obviously in digital platforms you can measure more things but are they actually having the impact you want at the end of the day? Which ultimately should be sales. But you should see it in sales because if things are working at least medium term, longer term.

So one big thing for me, and correct me here, but I've seen what most people would deem unpolished or unprofessional creative work really, really well. Maybe the picture's grainy or it just looks weird or whatever. Like it never get approved internally because they want to sort of make sure everything's pixel perfect or whatever and spend the long on it. And this thing just like kills anything else of the creative ideas that you've got in the market. It's just like so popular that you kind of begrudgingly have to keep it on because it's so good. Have you noticed that as well?

Or low fire is not low quality. So quality is not what it looks like. Quality is how well it does the job. So if the job is to engage people and that's the type of content that engages them, then you should do that. I think it's not so much maybe statistical. If you looked at sort of all the campaigns we've run, yes, maybe lo fi UGC style content works better than a recut TV ad, but I think it's more testing different styles of content to see what works for your brand on that channel at that time. So it could be that static works better than video or the polish brand that actually works better than the ugc. But you need to test all of them and be led by what's working and however you want to measure that, you know, view through rates, click through rates, engagement, whatever it may be, but measure something to see which style works. But I think to your point, you're right, there are different styles work better on different channels and a TikTok probably wouldn't work on TV. But in general, people do crave authenticity and something that's real and something they can relate to. So we've seen that, I think on social platforms, sort of Facebook to Instagram to TikTok. And then I think you'll start to see that go the other way. Or you might see more rough and raw kind of content end up on connected TV or going the other way. Because this engages people, it cuts through that, you know, if they've just seen the same type of ads over and over, it also cuts through with something that's more engaging and sort of breaks the concentration. So pattern interruption. I suppose.

The other thing I want to mention as well, like I've seen some firms because we talked about sort of whether something's on brand or not and sort of have all these brand codes and everything. And it was really important for that quality standard. Right. I found sometimes though that can be really too enforced and too restrictive to the point of someone's basically got OCD with like a finger on the reject button and like it sort of goes beyond consistency of the look and the feel and associating that with a distinctive asset or that that brand versus really restricting what can be done to the point of like absurdity. Have you seen that as well? Or where's the. Where's a good balance there?

Yes, quite a few times. Can we make the logo bigger? Sure, sure.

Put the brand strip in. That's going to look ugly. Okay.

Exactly. We need the brand in the first 10 seconds of these 15 second AD. Like just taking up the whole screen, all that kind of stuff. I think you can make content go viral. You can have popular content. Does it actually add anything to the brand? You can have something to all about the brand but if it doesn't engage people, what's the point? There's a middle ground and the middle ground is definitely away from the brand. Any brand manager out there, keep in mind people don't care about your brand. No one cares. They care about themselves. But if you're doing content and putting in front of people, you need to make sure that they recognize it as your brand. Otherwise it's kind of pointless. So if you're testing a lot of content, you see something that takes off, go and turn into a branded ad after put some of the branding logo and distinctive assets in. Once you've run a lot of content and that's what organic. So particularly Ticket Tock is really good for. It's testing the ideas, finding something that works. Now how do we brand it and then put paid behind it? Yeah, there is a balance, but it's definitely more away from the 200 page brand book to do the one TikTok ad.

That's been my experience as well. And I think people lose that sort of. What's the first principle here? It's got to be branded in terms of like reminding you of that brand and that. That's it. Yeah, he's got to identify. He's got to sear into your brain and then you associate that brand with that content. That's. That's as much as you need to do. And I think some people go way too.

They do overcomplicate it. You're right. It needs to be distinctive. Do people recognize it as you and what's different about you from competitors in the same category. It's not hard to boil it down to those three things and put that into content.

But so speaking of that, I mean is there some things you wish you didn't have to deal with or you felt people did less of? We just kind of talked about one. But is there any other things that if we didn't do this, it'd make the whole process so much easier?

I think translating that old world into the new world. In theory, somebody could turn onto our platform and they could just use it as a production tool. I'm just going to produce stuff over.

And over like a tvc.

Not a tvc but if you want to produce for any online channel really. So if it's paid social or you know, retail media or e commerce sets or anything made of ones and zeros. If you want to produce stuff for that should take you 10 to 15 minutes to put a brief in the platform comes back logs later. Go on with your job. Where most of our work goes through now is taking that 300 pages of brand book and 50 pages of a brief that's already been done by somebody who's that was their job. And then we kind of onboard and say well we don't really need that. We just need to put three or four sentences and a couple of example images here. And away we go. So that almost like consulting the old, the new so they can use our tool. That takes up a lot of time and I think we find is once marketers get used to it, it's almost freeing. They've described it as over time. So before I had to distill, I've got all these ideas in these different segments and I've got to distill it down to one idea. And now it's just, I'm just going to run all 10 ideas. Like I could just get on my job.

In fact, if you knew about brand science with different category entry points, generally your market consists of like many of them. Like up to 18 or 12 in Coca Cola's case or whatever. For Cola I think there's even more than that. Or 21 sometimes. Like you can need a piece of creative for each 21 anyway. So how are you going to have one big idea that cuts across all? Doesn't make any sense logically, let alone.

Well, I think you see examples of this like an example I use with customers all the time get into trouble. There's a well known brand. It's all about real beauty, real people.

Oh yes it is.

Look up any of the rides ads and obviously Diversity is important. So you'll see one diverse image that has a tall person, short person, black person, white person, Asian person, skinny person. It looks like this group of people who don't know each other from a bar of soap. Rather than doing 10 different ads with each of those talking about their lived experiences, that is probably more relevant for that segment of the market. It is still the same theme. It's just executed in a way that makes sense for today's market.

I find this a lot as well. There's too many creative ideas. You know, they're trying to like touch all bases and all mediums and get everything to the one concept. And you're like, well you can just split them out, like do them individually.

Do it in six seconds.

Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Where are you heading then? Where do you think the future is for creative production? Lots of things seem to be converging now. Lots of state of change within the existing ecosystem. What are your sort of focus on? What do you think it's going to go?

Yeah, I think one of the really exciting things for us is this year we've started to get, get some teams come to us asking for creative production. We've had procurement departments can say that, you know, we've got like RFPs for creative production. We are excluding agencies and we are excluding influencer platforms. Can you apply for them? We were kind of like what? So it feels like it is a bit of a category that's forming which is exciting because that becomes normalized. I think that helps everyone. And there's, you know, not many people sort of looking at the world the way that we are.

Is this from this like in housing sort of trend that's almost sort of started to happen, do you think?

Sort of? I think the in house thing, I think that trend's almost going past that. We've got a lot of teams that use us that are in house teams because they recognize they can do a lot of the stuff cheaper and faster internally now, but they can't do the actual production side. So while we can do, here's some ready to use, you know, properly produced ads from the content we create, we can always also just feed the raw assets to a team that's there and they can do that as well. So it works both ways. So for us, you know, most of our time is going onto that education and piece with customers. No matter how to use this, where does it fit into your existing setup and your old design and all those questions with how to use it and where it fits, not so much what the actual solution is interesting.

Okay. Yeah. Because I've noticed this as well. Everyone who goes, oh, I'll just do it myself. I'll just use Canva. It's really easy. Every time I've seen this, unless I've done this before, they start using it and they go, oh, this is actually really hard. Oh. And then it's trying to space these things out and use the images, like. Oh, like there's a bit of a skill to this, actually. You know what I mean? There's something to this that I thought it'd just be easy. And they get this sold as sort of like, you know, by the platforms themselves. Is it going to be easy? DIY and then. No, it's not.

Yep, exactly. I'm certainly, like, getting to a creative industry without that background, learning how things work and how much time it takes. And if I've got to quickly do something and then somebody else on the team sees you put what in front of people. I couldn't get the spacing to align.

So have you seen the show Silicon Valley by HBO or not?

So we. We watch that normally every two years, because each time we've watched it as different stages of company, the jokes hit differently. So very familiar with it.

Okay, have you seen that scene where it's like the designer comes in, is playing the music, and they're trying to create the box design? So Richard's going, I don't care because I hate this box thing. Whatever, right? And the guys, the creatives playing the music and boom, boom. Do you like this? And showing, like, these animals. And Richard Hendricks, very logical kind of thing. He's like, what the hell? You creatives like, crazy, right? And he's like, just do whatever. I don't care. Anyways, so the creative guy comes back a couple of days later, like, here. Here's what we got. It's like the most boring, worst thing ever. And he's like, oh, come on. We want something better than that. It has to look good. And he's like, but you said you didn't care about it, right? And the guy's like, make it look better. Like, this is a reflection of us and, you know, our brand, you know? And the creative goes, well, I could do this, I could do that. And he's like, yes, do that. You know, make it look good. So it's kind of like this duality that exists, I think.

I don't care till I care.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I didn't know what I wanted until I saw it. I don't want that. Yeah, I think where we fit in that world, it's a lot of time going to that and also just for us, speeding things up too. So, coming up, how do you come up with those 20 ideas? And there's a lot of interesting things with AI there. Not so much on the production side, but the process side. How do you take the research from competitors and ad trends and how do you sort of make that into coming up with new ideas faster? We can do it pretty fast now, turning around 20 new ads in a week, but I think there's always scope to improve that. So that side of it on the product side and then with customers, there's just a lot of education around. You know what this is, what's different about what they're doing now, how it fits into their internal teams and influencer marketing and agency structure.

So it's funny, like, you know how some people think AI is going to be a threat to all this. I was just speaking to someone who does social media content very well, like multimillion dollar business in Sydney, and he's like. And I showed him the meta announcement today around, I think it's a million advertisers are using. A million advertisers are using Facebook meta advertisers are using AI features already. And it's like they've created 15 million ads using AI, whatever. Which isn't hard because I'm sure if you tick some of those boxes when you're shipping in, the platform that apply is AI so they could trump up the figures. But he was like, yeah, so zigzag, I'm going to go in the opposite direction and go real and no AI. So it's authentic and that's why we do everything ourselves of real people, like ad hoc with our, with our phone cameras and stuff. And he's like, that's an opportunity to stand out by not creating AI images.

So, yeah, I think there's a middle ground. You do need more content, but you need more content that works. Just not create a million ads using AI that. I mean, people, you look at an AI ad and you see this is an AI ad. People already recognize it. You don't need to have tech to tell you what it is. So it's definitely a middle ground. We'll see more of that.

Interesting. Okay, cool. Well, hey, thanks for coming on the show. And I think this is a really good. A bridge to two other episodes I've done on creative strategy. This is a bit more production focused and so was the last one. So the other two were with the Thinker Bell XMDs from Thinker Bell is a bit bigger agency. And then the other one was with Brett Friedman in New York, who runs a bit of a creative strategy kind of platform that he's creating. So I think between those three episodes, people got some really good ideas of maybe the new way of doing things. And yeah, thanks for being on the show and chatting about creative.

That's right. Thanks for having me on.

Go.