Louder than Words: How Unsaid Studio is Stepping Into the Unknown

Creativity is the new. It's a ticket to places you’ve never explored - or where you’ve never thought to explore. It’s the reason why you might embark on a journey without a set destination. It’s a positive gamble, with which you bet on creativity’s power to win a prize you didn’t know you wanted. It can be a struggle - or, more politely, a ‘process’. And there’s no faking it. 

This is all pretty fundamental stuff. But it’s perilously easy to forget in a media and cultural landscape dominated by distraction and generative content. What’s pure human creativity worth, really, when an AI can churn out a convincing enough replica in seconds?

But if you ever need a reminder of creativity’s humanity, it’s easy to find. Just launch into a conversation with Tom Buch, Doug Bello, and Keka Petrich - co-founders and executive producer, respectively, at Unsaid Studio (the US-based design and motion company with an increasingly global presence). The trio are united by an uncanny and infectious belief in the power of an organic creative process, and it’s one which reliably leaves clients and collaborators alike wanting more. 

If that’s setting expectations a little high, the team themselves are no strangers to ambition. By way of example, Unsaid’s overriding philosophy is described as ‘mind-blowing’ creativity. “We’re proud of how people react when they first see our work.” says Tom. “The responses are generally enthusiastic and passionate, because we always aim to provide at least one thing that blows expectations out of the water." 

Getting more analytical, Doug digs into the approach. “We’re trying to achieve an emotional response through bold clarity,” he says. “For a message to be strong, it needs to be instantly understandable.” 

The result is a philosophy that positions the studio as a creative partner - one which is happy to hold a client’s hand as they travel somewhere new together. “In that sense, there’s something kind of traditional and old fashioned about what we do,” says Tom. “It’s the idea that your creative partner can be someone who goes beyond sending you deliverables and logging off, and actually evolves with you. I think that’s part of the fundamentals of advertising.” 

For a bird’s-eye view of that philosophy in action, Unsaid’s Reel provides a perfect vantage point. It’s testament to the studio’s desire to bring more to any given creative idea - that innate desire to surprise partners and clients with ideas that surpass their expectations. 

The sizzle reel marks four years in business for Unsaid, and - as Doug explains - it's been an unpredictable and joyous journey. “We've flown through valleys and mountains with gaming’s biggest franchises, roasted marshmallows fireside with Lebron James and Walmart, launched a second earth, re-imagined a household name with Lowes, and created artwork for screens at the SoFi Super Bowl Stadium,” he recalls.

There’s a boldness and a focus to Unsaids work - at its best, it hooks you like a great pop song. In their own words, “we try to cut through the noise and simplify.”

More often than not, that results in stand-out commercial work. In fact, the studio’s first-ever campaign is another stellar case study of the flexible and open minded approach to creativity which has become Unsaid’s calling card. 

“I first took notice of Unsaid when the Walmart campaign came out”, recalled Keka, who joined the studio last year. “It was already an eye-catching piece of work before I heard the story behind it.” 

Above: LeBron James, Drew Barrymore, Neil Patrick Harris, and Todd Oldham all starred in a remarkably ambitious mid-pandemic campaign for Walmart, brought together thanks to Unsaid’s technical know-how. 

That story starts in the midst of the first pandemic lockdowns, around the spring of 2020. “It’s a bizarre fact that our first project as a studio was with one of the biggest brands in the US and just after the start of the pandemic'', recalls Tom, “but it’s true. I can remember scaling up from two of us to twenty just for that job. And we delivered. In my mind, that moment is where Unsaid really came together.” 

All in all, the Camp campaign for Walmart necessitated 30 deliverables in the span of two months - no mean feat for a studio that didn’t even exist months beforehand. But it’s just another manifestation of Unsaid’s willingness to embark on that creative journey, wherever the destination may be. 

But, paradoxically, Unsaid’s team frame it in slightly different terms. “There’s a Brazilian expression, ‘gambiarra’, which essentially means improvising a solution with the materials available to you,” says Keka. “That’s how I’d describe what we often do - we use what we have and improvise.” 

“I think a good word for it is ‘efficiency’”, says Tom. “In creativity, sometimes it’s good to cut a corner if it means taking the shortest route to a solution - especially if it’s not always the most obvious route. I honestly don’t think there are many studios out there who are as good at that as we are”. 

Maybe there’s another ingredient to pure, organic creativity: Surprise. It’s something that Unsaid have been doing ever since the studio launched three years ago, and it even shines through in conversation with its team. 

Ultimately, that’s what’s so refreshing about Unsaid. It’s the antithesis of staid predictability - a way of putting creativity to work that remembers the fun. In a moment where our industry is indulging in a kind of collective nervous breakdown regarding artificial intelligence and generative creativity, Unsaid’s approach could hardly be finding its feet at a more relevant time. There’s a lot more to creativity, after all, than a single - and predefined - outcome. 

It’s apt, then, that Unsaid is a studio which lets its creativity do the talking.