Never Two Small: The Aussie Content Agency that Won’t Grow

Have you ever heard of an agency that wanted to stay small? How about a production company?

Having worked in agencies up until 2013, Paul Chappell and Josh Whiteman wanted to model a production agency around a smaller model – slimming down the content team.

“I realised pretty quickly that the business model was broken because we were employing directors, producers, and editors in-house, and utilisation was pretty low,” says Paul Chappell, managing director of Brand+Story.

And slim down they did; they never hired anyone else. To this day, creative partnership Brand+Story only has two employees – its founders Paul and Josh.

Brand+Story is an Australian based branded content and entertainment company, having worked with Australia’s most iconic brands to deliver relevant, compelling brand stories. Their dynamic content output includes work for TV, radio, podcasting, and social media.

Their first brief came from QANTAS, who needed a new in-flight safety video.

As Paul recalls it, the safety videos at the time tended to feature Ricky Ponting or Michael Clark in the cockpit. “From one captain to another, have a safe flight.”

“Over a weekend, Josh and I basically broke the back of that brief and landed on this insight: we're talking about safety, but it's really about the passenger more than the airline. It was a fun turn of the lens, and all our subsequent safety videos for QANTAS have been really well received.”

In their early days creating work for QANTAS and the Motor Accident Commission, Josh set out a theme to Paul - one which they eventually set in stone when building their agency.

“At the beginning, neither of us wanted to start another agency,” Paul said. “We were actually looking to get out of that world. Starting a partnership meant that we could do the work that we wanted to do, but also allowed us to continue with our other projects in scripted entertainment.”

The pair keep busy out of office with projects for film, television, and stage. Paul and Josh have each developed their own TV pilots recently and work together on other film and theatre projects.

“Being a partnership allows us to traverse the two worlds of commercial production and long-form narrative work.”

Brand+Story is not, however, only a means to fund artistic ventures – it is also a passion project in its own right.

“It is actually really hard to stay small,” Paul says. “We’ve had opportunities to grow and bring staff on, but Josh and I have been lucky to work with clients who kind of understand our business model as well. And they use us accordingly.”

Paul says the best way to think about Brand+Story is as a SWAT team for big concepts.

“There will be a brief with a client, and we come in and solve a business problem with a creative strategy, and we work that from brief to broadcast,” Paul says. “So we don’t have a whole lot of juniors doing contacts sheets and reports, it’s all us.”

This simplifies and streamlines the creative experience for brands. As Josh will tell you, brands or clients are usually only really tapping into two people at an agency. 

“That's what Josh and I are,” Paul says. “We come to the table, just the two of us, and we answer the phone. We're 100% accountable for everything. And clients tell us that they love the approach because it is simple, it's uncluttered, and we just get on with the work.” 

For Paul, one of the most satisfying campaigns he’s been a part of at Brand+Story was some of their early work with the Motor Accident Commission in the Northern Territory.

“We went out to the country to film a lot of communities who were suffering from alcohol abuse,” Paul says. “We went up there a little bit naive, and found that these communities actually knew very little about road-safety, chiefly because it hadn’t been communicated to them before. The first campaign we did was called Sorry Business Stories. That was because the local communities did not have a word for grief, instead of grief, they say ‘sorry business’.” 

A lot of the work, according to Paul, was simply letting Indigenous communities share their own stories, videos, and artwork.

“That actually really made a huge impact in the local community,” Paul says. “We're very proud of that work.”

Brand+Story are based in Sydney, and their current clients include Qantas, CBA, IHG, REA Group, Oporto, and Destination Queenstown.