Are Internal Creative Teams The Way Forward?

We are in the middle of a whirlwind revolution, a digital technological uprising; computers, smart phones, tablets, cameras, social media, gaming, hashtags, video-on-demand, drones… the list goes on and on.

For a creative business to survive in this climate, you need to judge what direction your market is going in precisely, and most importantly, to react quickly - to feed the consumer’s demand for stimulating video content.

The adage phrase customer is king is back with a vengeance. It’s no longer about who has the loudest mouth in advertising; who can afford to put a sticker on a Formula One car; or getting an ad on primetime TV. It’s about getting a great idea out there quickly so that people can respond and share it.

It’s no secret that the heavyweight advertising agencies, afraid of disrupting the applecart with their existing big name clients, are buying small satellite agencies. These consist of small creative teams with no corporate baggage, who mostly watch markets in order to react quickly to consumer trends and then try to capture their viewer's imaginations on the social media matrix.

This is all fine but a great idea from an agency is only great if it is produced and distributed quickly – and most importantly, before anyone else thinks of it. So where is the time bottleneck?

Traditionally, production involves a group of people around a table, equipped with a phone and a computer to call in the freelance crew, hire in cameras, lenses, lighting and props. Then you have to source a location or studio, booking post-production, talk to the editors and figure out how to distribute.

Once crew availability has been established, the studio has been booked and all the other assets sourced and secured, if you’re lucky, it could be a week until you start shooting… which is a long time in social media world.

So how can the industry make this work?

Imagine if we put a video production company within a film studio. Equipped with personal off-the-shelf cameras, lighting, set-building and other equipment. And attach an in-house post-production and graphics suite with daily on-site crew and staff.

These additions would fundamentally speed up the actual production time by reducing the legwork.

So how else can we improve reaction times?

Rather than working for external creative agencies, we could build a creative team into the studio to work alongside the production team. Ideas would bounce back and forth much faster, and they could be tried out virtually with a valuable budget and practical input from the producers. The creative teams could also experiment with practical ideas within budget for client pitches.

Okay, so some investment would be needed to make this possible, and client budgets may well be diluted due to the demand for content, but this is where the economics of in-house can win again!

2015 is a year where it’s not just the big agencies looking for satellite partners, it’s the clients themselves who go straight to production companies to save time, why not bring in a creative team to add leverage to production?

A ‘ProCreation’ company perhaps??

But seriously, one thing that is certain, video is here to stay, and the consumer’s ravenous appetite for video content has never been greater.