Calling All Producers: KEEP Is Here to Save You From Paperwork
When people have ‘that thing’ – I could honestly listen to them talk about it all day. You know what I mean when I say ‘that thing’, right? It’s the thing that when someone starts to speak about it, their eyes light up, their chest gets proud, there’s a little fire stirring in their belly. That’s what I see every time I speak to long time friends and now business partners, Adam Sargent and Campbell Beaton. I’m completely drawn in – I can hardly believe that I too, am getting excited about…contracts? Yes, you got that right. Contracts. KEEP is an online platform for storing, managing and renewing IP rights across your campaigns.
But let’s back up a bit.
Three years ago, when working on a project for a large tech brand, Adam and Campbell did what most of us do when faced with a conundrum – they hit the pub. It wasn’t long until they were in the thick of it, discussing a systematic flaw that was plaguing the industry. “[The large tech brand] didn’t want to hold their own rights; it became clear this wasn’t fair and that it was out of the remit of what we had ever signed up to do,” explains Campbell. He’s referring to the cumbersome and often chaotic issue that is the management of contracts. They found themselves frequently and unwittingly shouldering the burden of navigating these contracts, as well as their storage and renewal processes.
In 14 years of award-winning producing and filmmaking, this wasn’t the first time that the pair were facing this problem. But now, they were calling it out for its bullshit. Instead of dedicating time to the stuff they love doing, they were wasting it with these incredibly time-consuming and, honestly, quite annoying tasks. They were now in the trenches of an idea. They decided to put their money where their mouth is and self funded the proof of concept. “It basically became a conversation about liability and how producers are so quick to help everyone around them,” Adam tells us.
Days later, they began laying down the groundwork for what would become KEEP: a streamlined platform there to alleviate the arduous administrative weight that producers have been forced to carry. One platform, end-to-end management, a halt to contractual insecurity, and the budget-draining markups on usage rights management. Here to not only help IP holders work more securely, as well as those buying the IP, but alleviate the imbalance of liability while they’re at it. For every campaign you upload all the contractual information – terms, dates, payment schedules – and KEEP automates the rest and stores in perpetuity
The Nitty Gritty
Campbell tells us that KEEP’s mission is to solve the industry's chronic challenge of outright inefficiency. Here’s what it is in a nutshell: people are selling IP to brands on a short term basis that needs constant renewal, therefore, brands need to be able to find them, pay them, and continually repeat. Right now, that’s a difficult process despite seeming simple. What is needed is a safe and secure platform for contracting and payments.
Many individuals will make IP for an advert, then they or the brand may move around a lot. Within the process of getting these people to the brand, there are steps that disappear. People close companies, people move out of the industry, people die. “Or maybe a producer has left the industry to become a chef. It really is that transient,” he adds. So the big question is – how do you keep track of everything that you’ve built to be able to use it again?
“Think about it like this,” says Adam, “imagine the case of a classic advertising campaign. There would be something like 50 to 100 contracts involved, which will sit in a filing cabinet, Excel spreadsheet, or Dropbox that no one has the password to.” He explains that most producers don’t stay in the same place for more than a year, or even more than six months. “So you end up with no trackability.”
That’s where KEEP comes in.
The scope of just how far this system will be able to assist productions is far broader than you might expect. Only a few weeks ago they were speaking to an agency who wanted to make an advert using historic advertising, but there was one big problem – no-one knew where the hell the contracts were. This meant that they weren’t able to use the adverts they’d spent money on a decade ago. It really makes no sense to me why someone hasn’t thought to solve this problem sooner. “As producers we are programmed to make things better. We end up getting involved in contracting people and helping them with their contracts. Producers don’t deserve that liability,” says Campbell.
Legally speaking, liability means that if something goes wrong with these contracts, the individual involved could suffer the consequences. What KEEP does, is put that liability (and blame if something goes wrong) in the right place.
“Honestly, sometimes making an advert can just be drowning in needless paperwork rather than being creative,”
He also tells us about walking through an airport a few weeks ago, where he took a selfie with the picture from an ad campaign behind him. “My mate was like, ‘That was supposed to be out of use a year ago.’ And then he had to go hunting for the contract to prove it.” This is piracy, and resolving issues like this in the current climate can be likened to finding a needle in a haystack. If this was on KEEP, the contract would be easily found, and the issue simply resolved. It consolidates everything making it easy to find, while automating the process of creation and renewal.
But Isn’t This Just Like DocuSign?
Short answer is a big, fat ‘NO’.
“The only comparable things in terms of contract signing and executing are things like DocuSign or Adobe Acrobat. But they’re really not comparable in terms of functionality,” explains Adam. “The industry is so fast paced, you might need to change a contract four times in a day, send it, resend, get it signed etc. You might have to do that with 30 contracts. Doing this every time is a pain in the ass,” he says, and he’s speaking from experience.
Campbell elaborates, “These other things have been set up for signing only one contract, not for additions and extensions. We have unique usage. With us, we can pre-sign, pay for things, and automatically start a new licence.”
Let’s look at it simply. If something is built with a broad service-usage case, it’s incredibly difficult to use in a particular niche – it’s a contradiction of terms. With KEEP, it’s a tool made specifically for producers and their business affairs. “That is the raison d’etre of it,” says Adam. “Everything we’ve done in designing the platform, the payments, and the contracts, is about making people’s lives easy for advertising. It’s not about just signing contracts online, because there are already products that do that.”
The reason this platform is capable of being a catch-all for all things production, is because Adam and Campbell know what to catch.
The pace of the industry is at the forefront of the creative genesis of this idea. But it isn’t stopping there. KEEP is aware that the business needs to match this pace and its constant evolution. “We’re working on the machine learning ability to upload thousands of historical contacts, generating new ones, creating clauses and managing all of it,” says Adam. “All of these things are important. So whatever the problems people are facing are, we will hear about them, we’re nimble. We’re going to get things done,” Campbell adds.
Safety First
It was Nobel-prize winning physicist, known as ‘The Great Explainer’, Professor Richard Feynman who put it best when speaking about actual wisdom. “Knowledge is having the right answers. Intelligence is asking the right questions. Wisdom is knowing when to ask the right questions.” That’s one of the things I think Adam and Campbell do best with KEEP. They know what they do, and don’t pretend to know what they don’t. That’s why they work closely with a leading media and technology law firm, Sheridans, to build everything in a way that is airtight and safe.
KEEP, while also being FCA compliant, ensures safety is at the core of everything it does. “The security is higher than anything else on the market. At the moment millions of pounds of money usage doesn’t conform to FCA regulation” Adam tells us. “We’re building a higher standard than anything that exists to try and lift that level of security and compliance.” In the near future, individuals will be able to access all these levels of security from the palm of their hand, in their phone.
This Isn’t About Contracts
The more you speak to them, the clearer it becomes that it isn’t actually the contracts that they care about. They aren’t doing this because they get animated about administration. They’re doing this because they care about their mates. “All of my friends are in this industry. Every single person I work with gets paid this way,” Campbell says.
“Numbers on a contract aren’t just numbers to me, they’re people. All the money is a representation of the work people have done, and the time and effort they’ve put in. There needs to be humanisation of money.”
People in the industry are suffering at the hands of a problem that isn’t rightly theirs to own. And these are just two guys who sat down together and said, “No more.”
It’s been 14 years since they met. A lot has changed since Campbell had a beard down to his chest that Adam still laughs about, and they were working on a low budget feature film along with Burberry commercials at the same time. Their characters are unique from each other in so many ways – even then, they knew their strong-points divided labour quite well. Campbell’s the details guy who gets stuff done, while Adam obsesses with the vision and looking after the product itself. Differences aside though, more than anything, it’s the things they have in common that drives them forward – and I don’t just mean their shared passion for technology. It’s that they truly care.
See, this isn’t a company about contracts. This is a company about people. And it just so happens that sorting out contracts is going to help people get back hours of their daily lives. That’s the reason they get all chest proud and excited when they talk about it. That’s why, you will care too.
Find out more about KEEP and how it can serve you here.
