How CLICKON’s New Intelligent Virtual Studio Empowers Brands to Own Their Digital Futures

The in-house revolution is gathering pace and things are changing for media and entertainment company CLICKON. CLICKON’s CEO of North America and global creative director, Ben Potter, co-founded the company 10 years ago as a “content creation disruptor”, since going through different iterations, becoming known for branded documentaries before focusing on commercial work and always-on social content. However, through working on everything from six-second videos to episodic TV, Ben and the team noticed that brands were becoming increasingly impatient with the traditional way of working.

“We used to be about 80% agency and 20% brand-direct - that's now flipped on its head,” he says. “The reason for this is the idea that agencies are charging too much money, [brands] don't feel like they're getting efficiency, speed or personalisation, and every year this has seemingly gotten worse and worse. Brands were even more frustrated every time we spoke to them.” 

This led to CLICKON becoming a content and creative department for two of its clients, the Special Olympics and the BBC. “They basically wanted to plug CLICKON in as a virtual studio… it worked so effectively, where our internal staff sat in on their marketing team or comms or production teams, and were invested with them. So without really knowing it, we were building these internal studios at these really great organisations.”

18 months ago, things… well, clicked! Instead of being a content creation powerhouse, Ben and co-founder Rich Wilson decided to become the engine that allows brands to become their own content publishers.

“We're not an agency anymore. We're not even a content creation company, whose work is for hire,” explains Ben. “Our mission is quite literally to empower organisations to own their digital future, [to] keep things in-house instead of spending millions of dollars creating these massive teams internally. They can literally just plug in our best creatives, our best producers, editors, directors, copywriters and plug in all our technology that's proprietary to CLICKON - and for a fraction of the price, they’re getting so much more than working with a big agency.”

“Everybody's looking to get more for less,” he adds, “and I think that old-school model with agencies, or even production companies, is just not really sustainable anymore.”

Following this philosophy, CLICKON has now launched its Intelligent Virtual Studio (IVS), an ecosystem that flexes to clients’ needs and doesn’t lock them into a fixed contract. “It’s essentially production and/or creative as a service.” This allows the client to scale up or down throughout the partnership, and only pay for the capabilities they lack internally. Though other small to medium sized clients do come to CLICKON for full-service capabilities - everything from creative to PR and tech.

“I think IVS works best when there's different departments working in harmony, because there’s scale to that, rather than when it's just siloed to just production or just social. But being this indispensable extension of their team - and a lot of the time we have email addresses at those companies - it makes that company feel like they truly have staff without the huge overheads of actually hiring. Especially at a time like now where there’s enormous uncertainty both in the UK and the US. A lot of companies are looking to scale back, and I think this plays into that.”

Tech has always been at the forefront of CLICKON’s approach, which is especially important for the ‘Intelligent’ aspect of the IVS. As they’re creating content at scale, organisation of this content becomes paramount - and that’s where tech solutions become vital. For the Special Olympics last year, for example, CLICKON created over 1000 pieces of video content and countless versions for different platforms. 

CLICKON IQ helps manage the whole production workflow from pre-production to asset delivery,and also has AI components and built-in compliancy checks. While another of their proprietary tools is MedialakeAI, a content data platform that brings assets stored on different platforms into one place.

“But really, the ‘Intelligent’ part [of IVS] is about making sure we're not being careless with content creation,” says Ben. “It's not that difficult anymore to create a lot of content at scale, but what to do with that and how to organise that is a huge challenge that most most people don't know what to do with.”

CLICKON does still create content for agencies, making them something of a competitor following this pivot, says Ben, who believes that this new approach is “naturally going to piss off some agencies”. However, with some excellent relationships having been developed with creative shops over the years, he expects those partnerships to continue.

Above: Case study for the CLICKON-produced 'Faces of the Fleet' series

“That isn’t CLICKON’s core business anymore, and we’ve been very transparent about that,” he says. “This is a model for the future for brands to work efficiently and sustainably. The truth is, this is direct competition. It’s a new way of working with a brand directly that often conflicts with the way an agency works.”

Ben adds that while freelancers will be utilised when needed - especially on more ambitious productions - the projects in CLICKON’s “sweet spot” for its IVS will be managed almost entirely by in-house staff. These ideal projects will largely be focused on digital, social and emerging technologies, rather than the TV-forward model which Ben says now has unsustainably thin margins.

“It’ll be social, new ways of using social and new technologies that we can incorporate - immersive too - and plugging in some of our AI developments into the workflow. That’s really key for us.”

Looking ahead to the first year of the IVS’ existence, Ben says that the plan is to show more partners the difference in value between using the IVS versus hiring CLICKON for content creation. “For some of the more legacy companies, it's tough to make that transition and make the commitment. But I think when they see the results, it's sort of like an ‘aha moment’ - they get it.”

This confidence in the viability of the IVS was only boosted when CLICKON’s client BBC Storyworks won Agency of the Year at the Brand Film Awards EMEA 2024. “That was one of those moments where we thought: ‘It's working’,” says Ben. “We help them and help their clients, and the industry sees them as this mega creative production hub - and we're the engine of that.”

“We don't need the recognition - CLICKON’s not here to win awards,” he adds. “We're here to be an engine of creativity in production, and let our clients thrive.”