Avocados and Coconuts Wants to Get Busy Making
Avocados and Coconuts is an agile creative production studio based in the San Francisco Bay Area, founded by South African surfer Dalia Burde, who serves as executive producer.
Dalia has been in the production world since 1996 and was one of the early webseries creators, producing streamable, branded content as early as 2005. She moved to San Francisco and helped agencies Ogilvy and Goodby Silverstein & Partners to develop their production capabilities, just as online video technology began to rapidly improve.
Streaming bandwidth increased, the likes of YouTube launched, and Dalia saw an opening to start a production company that focused on this wave of emerging media. After producing a documentary feature with a business partner, she launched Avocados and Coconuts in 2011, simultaneously for production and post. But the team quickly encountered a demand for a third skillset: creative development.
Describing it as “kismet” and a turning point for the company, while looking for a strategically-minded creative to join the team, Dalia crossed paths with Amani King on a project for Apple. At the time, he was the creative director running the campaign for multidisciplinary agency Eleven, and turned out to be a kindred spirit, having roots in the skate, surf and snowboarding scenes. After shooting around the world and editing for six months together, Amani joined as ECD in 2015.
Influenced by Dalia and Amani’s outdoorsy backgrounds, one of the team’s core philosophies has always been to implement sustainable practices into every arm of the business. They banned plastic water bottles on their sets over a decade ago, hire organic and environmentally conscious catering crews, and have even been known to drive compostable material back from set to areas which have compost facilities.
“Sometimes people get annoyed when I'm aggressive about it,” says Dalia. “But we have to take the time to do this because once you let one thing slip, everything does. We can only affect those little things that we can affect - some things are out of our control. We have to travel on planes and we live in a world where plastic exists, but we can make those little changes to make our impact less.”
For Amani, the psychological aspect is just as important, and regularly working with a different combination of talent allows Avocados and Coconuts’ way of working to influence an extended family within the industry. “At first, they might be annoyed. Then over time it becomes easier – it's like a ripple effect, ideally.”
Besides the shared values around environmentalism, Amani reflects that he was first attracted to join the company by the opportunity to leave behind the churn and bureaucracy that he saw water down creative ideas during his decade-plus on the agency side.
“The vitality in the constant making was so much more appealing to me, and the nimbleness felt like where the industry needed to go, considering the amount of content expansion that we were suddenly seeing.”
By the time he met Dalia, the online streaming revolution was in full swing, and has only grown since. “You could already see that was where it was headed; there needed to be more and more things made. My feeling is: let's get busy making! Let’s not spend three to six months patting ourselves on the back for our brilliant ideas. Let's just make things.”
According to Amani, this hands-on approach to constantly making has become a habit. “It’s like hiring a big name architect to build something, versus hiring a design-build person – somebody who actually works with the materials and the contractors directly, as opposed to somebody who's theoretical and gives you this giant Frank Gehry gesture: ‘Look at how amazing this will be!’. And you're like, ‘That's cool – I don't have a Frank Gehry budget!’.”
Above: Expedia - 'Micro-Stories' (prod. Avocados & Coconuts)
“We still want to bring creativity to it,” adds Dalia, explaining how the creative to production pipeline has changed now that clients need more than just “three huge TV spots in a year, a couple print campaigns and some billboards”. Case in point, Avocados and Coconuts recently produced 96 deliverables in one year for Expedia, with “probably a quarter of their commercial budget for one of their 30-second spots”.
“That's the world that we're in,” she continues. “So why not roll up your sleeves and try to do it in the most efficient way possible? With great ideas, but also, as Amani said, ’making, making, making’. Moving into production really quickly, and bringing on the right team that can be nimble, smart and creative, while not sacrificing too much production value.”
With that in mind, the team maximises its time and resources on set, ensuring the client gets what they want as well as enough content for a holistic marketing campaign, such as social cutdowns.
No matter the project, however, Dalia suggests that modern brands face the challenge of no longer being able to “pay for eyeballs”; with captive audiences few and far between, they must now earn their attention with creative content that cuts through the crowd in a useful and culturally relevant way. “At the end of the day, you're probably going to get more out of this if someone likes it and shares it with a friend, who shares it with a friend or reposts it online, than from any kind of media buy on TV or elsewhere.”
Above: Mill - 'The Wonderful Feeling of Wasting Nothing' (prod. Avocados & Coconuts)
The lion’s share of Avocados and Coconuts’ work is documentary-based, and so a lot of focus is placed on telling an engaging story for brands – but in a fresh way. For Amani, it’s about leveraging the subject’s unique qualities to create something universally appealing, but distinct enough to make an impact. “It comes out of that interplay – honouring whatever it is we're trying to highlight, and then finding a unique way to turn the lens on it, so that it’s truly something people haven't seen before.”
When the company launched, marrying creativity with a production focus in this way was relatively novel, but Dalia acknowledges that they now feel like “one of hundreds” of creative production studios that exist at this intersection. With that in mind, the team believes its point of difference is a company culture shaped by their boardsports backgrounds.
Defining the skate, surf and snowboard scenes through their DIY attitudes, respect for outdoors, and creative flow states, Amani says that these worlds have informed everything, from how they run a set, to their client services offering, to how they treat their people. “The [client] relationship is built on the trust that they're getting real value out of what we do, and a joy-filled vibe on set and in the edit suite. We love what we do and don't want it to be a gear-grinding process where we're fighting with the client or anyone else to get what we want.”
Above: AllTrails - 'Find Your Outside' (prod. Avocados & Coconuts)
From his agency days, Amani recalls rooms full of big egos – some of which were effective, and other times “horrible”. Contrastingly, he says that Avocados and Coconuts tries to cultivate a sense of being in the same boat. “We're all going to row together to get to this outcome, we're always going to listen, we're always going to be transparent and tell you what things cost. It’s a craft ethic… Like hiring a talented woodworker to install something in your house. They're going to stay true to their artistic and aesthetic values, and explain exactly why they're making their decisions.
“That's a big part of what we offer; something that feels honest, engaged and like we're all on the same team.” And whether it’s finding landmarks to visit on the way to shoot locations or finding the best places to eat after wrap, Dalia believes that nurturing a happier environment for talent and clients alike only strengthens the work.
“All the little details carry on into how we produce work – it never feels like a churn,” she says. “The work we do is hard, with a lot of stress. It's someone else's money, someone else's time. You may as well actually enjoy your day-to-day, otherwise why are we doing this?”
She adds, “We’re the lucky people in the world who make and create things for a living. I always try to remind myself and people around us to bring that joy back into it. It's totally a privilege.”
