Chris Howatson Promises Production “Unicorn” Plus Also Will Give Marketers More For Less

Plus Also will make CMOs comfortable with asking for more without increasing their marketing budgets, promises Chris Howatson, because it is a “unicorn”: “good, fast, and cheap.”

The newly-launched AI production company which sits alongside, but separately from, Australian indie Howatson+Company addresses two tensions: marketing budgets are not increasing, and AI threatens to more cheaply and quickly gobble up “80 to 90%” of creative agencies’ typical work. Founder and CEO Chris realised he could either wait to be disrupted or create a disruptor.

So back in February, he held an off-site for his leadership team to discuss the impacts of AI on the industry. He asked the creative department and tech department to separately respond to a brief to create a Welcome to Country film, inspired by Telstra’s. When Chris first saw the telco's, he thought, “This is amazing, and this must have cost a lot of money.” He also thought, “This is probably the stuff that's going to be replaced soonest [by AI], because it doesn't really have a big idea. It's beautiful craft and production values.”

Hoang Nguyen - at that point Howatson’s chief data and technology officer, now a co-founder of Plus Also - led the tech team, which stitched together multiple AIs to create its Welcome to Country video. “One tool wrote the script, one tool got the images, one tool put motion on it, one tool did the voiceover, one tool stitched it together.”

“We played this video, and there were some people that got out of their chair and sat on the ground,” Chris tells LBB.

“Not in a petulant way, but you know when you get really shocking news, you stand up and you go and almost like sit down on the corner. And at that point, I'd just purchased this building [H+Co's new office on Sydney's South Dowling Street] as well. And I was like, 'Oh, man, like 80-90% of what we do as an industry can, in theory, be hoovered up by this. 

“We broke for lunch, and we all had a parma and a glass of Diet Coke, from memory, and we got back in the room in the afternoon and Hoang explained to us all how it happened and what it did.”

That led to a conversation around how businesses respond to an impending threat of disruption. “Do you wait and get disrupted and see what happens, or do you innovate and learn and change?”

“We started to say, 'What if?' 'What if those briefs where you currently have $20,000 to do an out-of-home campaign, which means you have to use stock or type or license an image of something you've already shot, what can we now achieve with those campaigns?” Chris says. 

“What can we now create in film that is now beyond the laws of physics or beyond the budget of a camera?'

“As soon as we turned it around from being an existential crisis to an opportunity for advantage and excitement to essentially express our craft creatively, we then got really focused on it.”

Ten months on, and Plus Also Studios launched last week, an AI-driven production company with a headcount of 41 and Endeavour Group as a founding client; the brand shuttered its in-house production capabilities to co-create the model just months after appointing BMF as its creative agency. Qantas, Petbarn, and Foxtel’s in-house teams are already licensing the Plus Also tech. 

“We also see a world where Plus Also would increasingly work as the production arm of client partnerships," Chris says. "So if you take Endeavour, the lead agency is BMF creatively, but the engine that drives their business is Plus Also.”

Hoang adds the product was originally considered a SaaS service, but while the licensing works, “the main service model of Plus Also works much better.”

It was set up separately to the Howatson+Company mothership; Chris says that’s because it “serves a different part of the market, and we didn’t want it to distract the proposition of Howatson+Company.”

The agency promises intersectional creativity across six disciplines: data, media, brand, customer experience, tech, and PR. Chris has also notoriously promised a cap of 200 people (currently, it sits at around 160).

“Plus Also is essentially a production proposition, and so it's not really congruent with the H+Co proposition,” he says. “It's got its own ABN, it's got its own leadership team, and is disrupting an area of our industry that's about to get disrupted really quickly.

“The focus in the Plus Also team is about speed, is about cost, is about efficiency. Of course, there's an effectiveness story in Plus Also too, in terms of what you can do with personalisation … but fundamentally, Plus Also, that is about efficiency. And I'd say Howatson+Company is probably more about effectiveness.”

Plus Also’s name comes from marketers asking “'Oh, and plus also...'” at the end of a meeting, “sheepishly, because they need it, but they don't think they can afford it.”

“'Plus Also' is the question that people ask when they aren't certain if it's something they can get,” Chris says. “And this is all about making people feel good about all the things that they want. 

“It's often the thing that they ask for when all the budget has run out: could we get a bit more personalisation? Could we get a different execution? That kind of talks to the problem that this business solves, is that clients have more channels to fill with more content. They have more diversity of audiences that they have to serve in different ways, and they have to do it all faster and more often.”

Renee Hyde, Howatson+Co’s managing director, notes “budgets are not increasing for production and agency. Retainers are not increasing. So there has to be another way.” With CMOs “fighting to grow their businesses in a pretty low growth environment,” Chris argues Plus Also will give them back both time and budget.

The logo is a unicorn because Plus Also is one, according to Chris, and it weaves in nods to both its name and that of Howatson+Company. The white space between the unicorn’s neck and back creates a ‘P’, and the legs carve out ‘A’, for Plus Also. The animal’s head looks like a plus sign, a nod to the first part of its name, and the plus sign for which Howatson+Company has become known. 

In creative departments, the model of an art director being paired with a copywriter hasn’t changed “since the Mad Men era,” Chris says. Howatson+Company preserves that structure “at the start of the process” and “in the middle of the process” has created a creation team at Plus Also: an AI engineer paired with a designer, sound editor, or editor, depending on the project. That duo canvases all IP-compliant AIs, and is tasked with crafting AI assets that the human eye can’t detect as being made by AI.

Using the large learning models available to other agencies would result in assets that look like AI. Instead, “Hoang has built these canvases, so rather than having one AI, you have 56 AIs that are all stitched together,” meaning an asset is “indistinguishable from if you shot it in camera.”

Hoang is a co-founder because “it has come from his hands”, Chris notes, and wouldn’t be possible without “the technology that he’s built.” He leads two workstreams centred on creation, and roll-out through Figma, which enables scale. Chris cites Qantas as an example.

“For an average out-of-home campaign, there are 300 assets that Qantas have to create. In this tool, it runs through a spreadsheet, which is essentially the media plan. You put it into the tool, and you press a button, and it's done. So the 300 bits of dispatch that would have normally taken three people three weeks are done in an instant. 

“Hoang has created us incredible IP in that lower end of the funnel of the marketing value chain, where brands, if they wanted to do more content, had to hire more people. 

“Hoang has essentially allowed us to liberate our clients from the trap that they're in at the moment of having lots of content to make, and not enough people to make it. At the very first instance, it allows an existing team to do more.

"And in a more dramatic instance [like that of Endeavour], it allows organisations to restructure their workforce, to move roles out of that low impact end of the spectrum ... and moving that labor cost earlier in the value chain around strategy and concepting.”

With an out-of-home roll-out cut from three weeks to three days, or a catalogue taking four weeks instead of 20, Renee notes a big part of introducing Plus Also to the market is a change management process, both internally and with clients. 

In the example of the catalogue, “What are you going to do with the extra 16 weeks?” This could involve personalisation, promotion strategy, or adding motion. 

Chris acknowledges that there will always be high-end productions requiring a more traditional shoot. 

“But just like in the old days, people used to cut sugarcane by hand, and now it's a machine that does it. I think it's the same thing when you want the craft. You might use a traditional method when you want something... I don't even think you distinguish it by craft, but there will be some cases where you use the traditional method and some cases you use the modern method.

“Technology never fully replaces the things that it surpasses, but it does create volume. And I think what we're recognising is that the volume of creative production is right now two seconds away from being dominated by AI. So rather than be disrupted, we're wanting to lead that wave of innovation.”