How New Tech Is Creating Stronger Collaboration between Agencies and Brands

Collaboration. Everyone talks about it. Everyone wants it. So difficult to do. It's the Holy Grail of any service business. And that’s because it's fucking difficult.

To suggest that day-to-day working relationships between marketers and their clients are currently as healthy and productive as they can be is plainly daft. From garbled briefs to multiple frustrating meetings to so-so results, as an industry, we’ve regularly reverted to a ‘them and us’ mindset, a contact battle which results in poor relationships and ultimately mediocre work.

Collaboration is hard - at every stage, sticks are being poked into your gleaming bicycle spokes, and obstacles being thrown at you which leads to you excusing yourself and working alone or solely with your own team. 

Well, it was until new tech such as NVIDIA’s Omniverse came along. 

Omniverse is a 3D collaboration platform that allows creatives and creative technologists to work hand-in-glove with clients. Omniverse allows users to import, manipulate, convert, validate, render, interact, collaborate and automate 3D content in real-time - saving time and making live working sessions with brand teams possible.

Because of this, it vastly improves your ability to collaborate with your client. Not just by making things quicker - but by bringing the joy of working together in real-time to make something brilliant.

Meetings become energised partnerships where lightbulb moments can be transformed into tangible results immediately - to be infinitely tweaked and adjusted with no expense and in the time it takes to make a few clicks of the mouse. One change to your master file amends every permutation. And because of this feedback loops disappear and meetings are something people look forward to. If technology did nothing else, this would still be little less than miraculous. 

The key to supercharging collaborative relationships has been USD (Universal Scene Description). No longer do you have to agonise over what data sources or storage systems your digital assets use, USD is completely file-system agnostic. It helps organise, manage, and quickly access digital assets regardless of your current set-up and means that whether you’re an animation expert, graphic artist or brand manager, you can all hook up together in real-time and see your ideas come to life before you. The future is democratised; open source. No walled gardens.

USD sound like a pipedream? A niche tech breakthrough that’s little more than a fad? Everyone will be using it in their 3D workflows. Everyone. How can we be so sure? Apple, the God of all closed platforms, became a founder member of the Alliance of OpenUSD (AOUSD) last summer - a non-profit promoting its use. To not make the change leaves you at risk of being seriously left behind.

The time constraints many campaigns shackle you to can be broken, and it’s the change of mindset that will allow you to do this, not a huge financial investment and complicated tech. Our combined use of real-time 3D and Omniverse to work creatively with our brands in a truly collaborative manner. It’s a genuine game-changer. 

Just think about how this way of working affects those working on the brand side. Not only can you test-drive and visualise 3D ideas and see if they work immediately; not only can you have the supreme confidence that your agency partners completely understand your vision - the whole process becomes enjoyable. 

This isn’t just a huge positive in the short term - it forges a deep understanding and trust for long-term relationships. Yes, it saves time, uncomplicates perversely tangled workflows and saves time-sheeted hours wasted on non-events but the effect on mental health and the return of the creative idea being celebrated has to be the real triumph. 

All this and there’s the obvious time, cash and carbon savings of real-time 3D to factor in too…none of which sees people being pushed out of the door as “machines steal their jobs”. In fact, the opportunities for 3D artists, whatever their backgrounds and wherever they’re from have never been greater.  Collective is currently working with Unilever and several other global brands, all of whom are finding that these easy-to-implement processes are revolutionising how they work and inspiring everyone involved. It’s only a matter of time before you join in.