When it comes to content, we’ve come a long way, baby.
Thinking Big
Things have changed a lot since the halcyon heydays depicted in AMC’s period drama series, Mad Men. Sure, the work is still challenging and the need for inspired, strategic creative work within ever-changing formats keeps us busy. But there’s change in the air. And it’s shaking some parts of our industry to the core.
“Now try not to be overwhelmed by all this technology. It looks complicated but the men who designed it made it simple enough for a woman to use.” — Joan Holloway: Mad Men, Season 1
Brands are struggling to keep up.
In some ways, the job of a marketer has never been more complicated. On one hand, the opportunities for reaching audiences in engaging ways is nearly limitless. Fantastic! Options abound. Yet on the other hand, that just means we have to do more things — or maybe fewer things — better, but with the same dollars or even less. And thanks to the myriad ways to track digital media channels, we now have more opportunities to become smarter marketers, all while fighting the tendency to become paralyzed by data overload. These are good things. For the most part. Yet there are still only 24 hours in a day.
And then there are the agencies.
Our clients have made it clear that they continue to need more from us in new and evolving ways. We’ve seen the industry go through periods of specialization. How many trendy “digital agencies” did we watch rise and fall in the past handful of years? More than we care to count. The truth is, if you didn’t figure out what it meant to be “digital” you’re no longer in business today. And here we are, facing the next wave of change in the industry. As if “content” is some new problem.
We’ve always been about making content.
The online world moves quickly and attention spans are shrinking. Consumers now expect new, fresh, interesting and engaging content 24/7. The market demands a new and more efficient model to supply a seemingly insatiable audience. We get it. Brands have a clear and defined need for higher volumes of content in a fraction of the time. And many creative agencies consistently fail to deliver a solution to that need, within reachable budgets or timelines. And the beat goes on.
We only see opportunity.
Something must change in order to get different results. We’ve watched countless marketplace examples of short-term solutions that have played out via cut-rate productions. And we asked ourselves: do clients really want to invest their hard-fought marketing budget and risk their brand equity in churn-and-burn content that does little more than add to the already noisy marketplace? We don’t think so. That’s not our style. And our clients agree.
We’ve got something up our sleeves.
We believe that the real answer to the content challenge is rooted in battle-tested storytelling chops, paired with strategic brand insights — while focusing years of production expertise into process efficiencies. You don’t have to sacrifice strategy or quality to achieve new volume and engagement milestones.
You may just need a new partner.
