Tech Brands: Get Agency Quality Creative Without the Agency

Wild Gravity> Ad agencies are generally tasked with marketing strategy, campaign and ad concepts, and sometimes measurement for their clients, and it's a production company that produces a majority of the creative… First off we think it’s a losing battle for agencies to offer marketing strategy because the agency will never have all of the data the client has. Now if the client is doing the marketing strategy, then all that’s left for the agency to do is develop campaign creative concepts because they’re not going to actually produce the work. They’ll outsource that to a production company. Once savvy clients understand that they start to wonder why they’re paying their ad agency so much money when they’re not responsible for the strategy or the production.

Now there is a new breed of production companies that offer agency-quality creative development services on top of world-class production, so as a client you can skip a huge time-consuming and budget-consuming step by going direct to a creative production company.

Wild Gravity> A lot of brands, especially tech brands are tired of dealing with the whole ad-agency process. They’re doing these engineering sprints at their own companies but the ad-agency they’re working with takes three months to develop a strategy and campaign creative. And then, after all that they outsource the production. It leaves a lot of clients scratching their heads. 

So you’re starting to see more hybrid shops that are ready to execute and produce world-class creative. We think that’s what clients want, especially the impatient tech clients. They just want to make the stuff and get it into market. That’s where we come in. We have a bias for making stuff and most clients find it really refreshing. 

Wild Gravity> As mentioned above there are massive benefits in cost-savings and time-savings, but it’s about more than saving money. It’s about now being able to put your budget to better use making much higher-quality assets and to be able to generate more of them than you could have if your budget was committed to an agency. As more companies seek to streamline and remove bureaucracy, skipping the ad-agency is going to become increasingly more common for major tech brands.

It’s just a natural evolution and we’re far from the first to realise this trend. Agencies are adding production services and production companies are adding agency-services. Our point of view is that you have to build it from the ground up to be successful as a hybrid shop, otherwise you’re still battling with legacy bureaucracy.

Wild Gravity is proud to be a leading catalyst in the evolution of creative production.

Wild Gravity> A really common issue that we see time and again is around localisation for a tiered series of markets. Brands like Microsoft, Amazon, T-Mobile, etc have to localise many of the creative assets they develop. Often there are dozens of markets and those markets have various levels of marketing budget support. So the question they have is, how do I support my varied markets with localised creative?

We usually recommend a toolkit where an A-level market gets a completely localised asset (or assets) produced in-language, a B-level market might get a dubbed or subtitled version(s), and a C-level market might get a DIY kit so they can create their own asset according to a predetermined spec.

That’s just an example. There’s a lot of ways to handle it, but it’s a really common issue that we see, and at Wild Gravity we have the ability to develop the A-level assets and the 100+ different versions a client may need to deliver for all of their markets.