Meet the Ex-Microsoft Marketers Who Hacked the Creative Production Process

With an attitude for embracing the unconventional, two former colleagues, Jon Sneider and Jonathan Harris, came together to found an exciting new creative production model - one that successfully answers brand marketers’ needs in the modern age. 

Skipping the slow and laborious processes left over from ad days of the past, Wild Gravity has hacked the system to deliver cinema-quality video and digital content, faster and better than most conventional shops.

The Seattle-based production company counts global brands such as Microsoft, Amazon, Slalom Consulting, Wizards of the Coast and Brooks Running as client-partners, as well as a string of major companies across Washington, including KEXP, Alaska Airlines, Trupanion, DomainTools, Convoy, The Woodland Park Zoo and The Seahawks..

But how did they crack the code to reconfigure creative production for modern day marketing?

They say it all started with a shared driving force: frustration with the status-quo.

Founder, president and executive producer Jon Sneider tells us, “I just kept thinking, there has to be a better way. As director of advertising and social media at Windows (where I first met Jonathan), I worked with a lot of the largest agencies in the country, award-winning agencies that were great for global advertising campaigns. But whenever we wanted to do something quick-turn they could never execute that. I’d ask for something in two-weeks and they’d say, we’ll have the SOW to you in two weeks.”

“The quarterly advertising process would start with agencies presenting campaign-concepts to us, we’d agree to a campaign, then they’d present spots, and we'd agree to maybe ten of those. Two to three concepts would get killed in focus-groups, so then we’d shoot seven or eight spots which would go into testing, at least two would get killed in the testing round, so you might launch six spots. Then two of those would really out-perform. So then you put all your media behind those two and literally run them to death, until they no longer perform. By the end, you’ve spent millions of dollars, involved hundreds of people, and spent months of your life to get two decent spots. I’d be reading results on my laptop and then look around our sets with over a hundred people, the agency, the production company and the post company all there, twenty white-panel trucks and think… this is just stupid.”

Co-founder, EVP and executive creative producer, Jonathan Harris adds: “Yeah, that was the big agency experience, but then on the flip-side we’d try and develop smaller vendors for fast-turn stuff but then you might be working with a dude with a Red camera and a MacBook Pro that thinks he’s a filmmaker. Now we could get good work out of those people because both Jon and I had been agency-side. But most clients don’t have the production-savviness to manage vendors that have no experience working with big brands.”

Having worked both agency- and client-side, Jon has a holistic view of the advertising process, and understands the challenges on both sides. Reflecting over the sticking points, Jon saw that there was an obvious gap in the marketplace for a more sophisticated and agile shop that can create world-class work at a fraction of the cost, footprint, and timeline.

In 2017, he launched Wild Gravity with co-founder Jonathan Harris, who also boasts decades of agency and client-side experience, building brands such as Windows, Amazon, Pemco, and The Seattle Sounders.

“The original concept for the company was advertising agency services via a consultant model,” Jon explains. “So rather than hire an agency, you could hire me and Jonathan, and between the two of us we could develop your whole campaign from marketing strategy to creative development. Everything an agency would do. Then we would work with like-minded production partners to get work out better, faster, cheaper - while having more fun in the process.”

“I was a nascent digital marketer so when I made my first TV spot for LL Bean I was surprised to learn that the ad-agency doesn’t make the stuff,” Jon reveals. “They hire a production company for that, who then hires a post company to finish it. I spent about a decade working with huge agencies for huge brands making campaigns that way, the whole time thinking, there has got to be a better way.”

Wild Gravity is a hybrid shop with agency services, production, VFX and post-production all under one roof. "We have no illusion that we are the first to try this,” says Jonathan. 

“But what makes us different, and is the key to making that model work, is our ability to scale,” Jon adds.

Their model starts with the core group of experts that make up the company. “With the fifteen of us here we can make almost any piece of commercial creative,” Jon explains. That core group develops a custom operations-team from their diverse network of contractors and freelancers. “We develop custom teams for each project and people love working with us so we can scale super fast for larger projects.”

“It allows us to go from 15 to 100 people within a matter of weeks which is essential for companies like Amazon and Microsoft, because they can go dark and then all of a sudden need something huge in four to six weeks. We're the only creative company we know of that can scale that fast.”

“There are a few reasons why we can do this,” Jonathan notes. “First, we have the room to do it. We have a beautiful studio in downtown Seattle with the space to import all these people. People want to work here. Second, we treat them really well, we pay them well and on time. It seems like a silly, obvious thing, but there are a lot of people that don't do that. Third, each client gets a custom team that's assembled exactly for their job’s needs. We don't have anybody sitting on the bench that needs billable hours - we don't track billable hours,we don’t operate that way. So the client always gets the best person for the job, not the person who needs more hours.”

With this streamlined approach, Wild Gravity has ‘hacked’ the system – focusing on the things that they consider to be essential to business and losing the things that aren’t vital.

“The advertising production process is extremely bloated – everybody knows this,” Jon highlights. “It’s been a keynote topic at Cannes so I’m not saying anything new or iconoclast. Big agencies are trying to fix it by adding production capabilities, and production companies are trying to add agency services. But the reason both those models won’t work is that they’re stacking new infrastructure on top of already bloated infrastructure, so it won’t make the process quicker. You need to have built the organisation to be lean and nimble from the beginning.”

“That’s why I think our company is going to win, and why there will be more companies like Wild Gravity. We don’t spend time on things that don’t affect the quality of the creative, like our craft services suck because nobody’s boss cares how good the guacamole was on-set.  We realised if we cut out all the bullshit we could make the same quality commercial or better with literally a quarter of the people an agency would staff on a project which allows for a smaller footprint, budget and timeline.”

And while most other production companies place great importance on data-driven strategy, Wild Gravity identifies a flaw in this approach. 

“Most corporations, like Microsoft, Amazon and Nike will share metrics with their agency, but certainly not all of the data an agency would need to truly be responsive to it. “Yet, many clients still off-load marketing strategy to an agency,” Jon points out. “How can an agency really be responsible for the strategy if they don’t have all the data?” 

“When I was the client, agencies would come in with strategies, and we’d respond, that would make sense if you were aware of this new report we just saw.. So, we got rid of ‘data-driven’ very quickly, because the marketer, the client needs to be data-driven and the creative shop needs to be responsive to that. If a brand wants to offload that job, that’s fine, but we’re not the ones to do it – we’re not strategy consultants. ‘Junior Joes’ want to do strategy; seasoned pros execute. We’ll make a creative strategy, but we’re not going to be responsible for your data when we know we won’t receive all the information.”

The company’s seminal work for Amazon Fire TV is emblematic of the way in which it works. “We pitched a job to do the in-product video for them, teaching users how to operate Amazon Fire TV,” Jonathan says. “We came up with five scenarios and five different creative platforms. When we asked what creative platform they wanted, they said they wanted to test all five against each other. So we asked which scenarios they wanted for which platform, and they said, they wanted all five for all five platforms. So we went from making five videos for them to 25.”

“During the ride home, the client called and said they need to make it for five different markets too – US, UK, France, Germany, and Japan. Again, they wanted all five scenarios on all five platforms for all five markets. Now we’re up to 125 videos to be made in six weeks.”

To meet the demands of the job, Wild Gravity utilised its network to go from six to 60 people in a week, with two film crews and an animation team all going at once. “We shot 125 15-second spots, with end cards and title cards for every one of them,” Jon reveals. “They ended up killing one of the markets, so we actually finished 100 videos with something like 250 assets related to them all within six weeks. The client was absolutely thrilled. I don’t know anybody else in Seattle, New York or LA who could have pulled that off.”

On what brands can expect when working with Wild Gravity, Jon summarises the experience as ‘refreshing’.

“Anybody that's worked with any other agency or production company is universally super excited to work for us. We are very professional, we know exactly what they need, we're fun, we’re funny. People just have a great time working with us and that’s important - we want people to have a good time.” 

“We have a beautiful location where people can come and co-edit with us. It's just a more pleasant and personable experience for our clients. And it's a relief for them to know that we can take so much of their work off their plate because we understand,” he adds. “We understand what goes on behind the scenes in their job, which is a huge weight off their shoulders. They’re always so surprised and relieved that we understand this. Inevitably, there's a million moments like that when you're working with us. We surprise and delight our clients a lot.”

At the core of it all is a value and mission to always do the right thing. “Early on in the decision-making process, we ask ‘should we do it this way or this way?’ And we always land on ‘what's the right way? Let's do that.’ Because there are so many agency and production company owners trying to cut corners and eke out extra dollars in production - and that's just not our MO,” Jon states. “It’s the same thing with people - a lot of owners and managers are trying to squeeze every hour out of a person without letting them rest and rejuvenate. One of the things we strive for is to let people rest and take a couple days after a huge delivery.”

“Then there’s the little things that count such as enjoying pizza or tacos together every Friday as a team. Or the free beer on tap that we provide,” adds Jonathan. “It encourages a real family atmosphere where people genuinely like each other. Our culture is super important to us.”

With a strong and nimble foundation in place, Wild Gravity has been growing at 33% year over year for five years. “I’m so proud of what Wild Gravity has achieved. We are truly disrupting the agency-production process and we believe this will be the new industry standard production model for brands ready to go-to-market.”