Although the last eighteen months have been a really challenging time for most people in the advertising industry, there is one sector that has positively blossomed as a result of the turmoil caused by the recession. As advertisers consolidated their spend into single agencies, many found that they just did not have the capability to deliver on the digital side and therefore relied heavily on the digital production companies. Piero Frescobaldi said, “We have been in production for 10 years now, but the last 2 have been the most exciting, as we have seen the best creative teams of ATL agencies world wide actively reaching out to production shops and enjoying it.“
Historically Sweden has been the hub of digital production for quite some time with such great agencies as B-Reel and North Kingdom (although B-reel also now has capabilities in London). This was as a direct result of the fact that the Swedish government invested very early in a good internet framework – the UK is still far behind on the broadband front (in fact the UK is 14th in Economist Intelligence Unit’s digital economy rankings). However with the recent growth in the UK market, can the UK become the new hub? One agency head felt that alas it will not happen anytime soon as he felt the UK advertising is still too traditional in its view and another agency head said that the UK is too conservative. However Nicky Hamilton from Your Mum disagreed “A large proportion of our enquiries have been from the agencies erroneously classified as ‘traditional’ who may well have smaller digital production capabilities but appear to have some fantastic digital ideas.” One production shop head went as far to say “Digital agencies, are the new dinosaurs. If they don’t evolve quickly they will have lost the 10 year head start they have enjoyed so far.”
One recent development in the Swedish digital production market has been the move away from digital production by some, choosing instead to work with clients direct. Is there a risk that this may happen in the UK as well? Tim Rodgers of rehab feels not “I don’t see that happening here. Most have some direct to client relationships already (with brands looking for special project intelligence on a project by project basis). The classic agency style set up has a much larger, layered structure that we’re simply not interested in. But agile-collaborative projects with any type of client are a lot of fun!”
So what is exciting those in the digital production world? Well obviously there is the iPad – as much because it represents computing for our mums – all the fun bits of computing without the geeky bits. As a starter, this means people can now have fun redefining a grammar for magazines. Related to this is the launch of HTML5 and the very public spat between Apple and Adobe – no-one still knows where this is going to go but the digital production companies are surely going to have a big say. Social media was obviously an area of interest with one agency head particularly excited about creating immersive interactive experiences based on your social media footprint and interactions using Unity3D.
Others are excited by the fact that digital is increasingly becoming more tactile, with increased fusion between digital and physical. It will not be long until we become a world where all of your digital touch-points will accumulate to provide a seamless interactive experience – from your alarm going off in the morning telling you your favorite director has just released a new film, to being able to order it on the way to work on your phone and then it being downloaded, ready to watch when you get home.
So what developments can we expect over the next 12 months. Many would like to see standarisation across the digital production space and hopefully the development of stndrd_, an open source approach to establishing standards and practices in digital production, should hopefully facilitate this. There is also likely to be a move to a Director model, which is more akin to TVC production. Not unexpectedly many also would like to see budgets continue to grow and expressed a continued . A few also pointed to the challenges of talent – Eduardo de Felipe, founder of Pirata, commented “University courses for digital careers are on the rise, however small production agencies are heavily reliant on experienced talent and as their teams tend to be smaller, creatives often need to be accomplished in more than one skillset. Its getting increasingly difficult to find experienced digital people that are familiar with working in this way, particularly in roles such as hybrid producers who needs to be both account and project managers. If we can establish the UK as a hot bed for learning this craft, we’ll be well on the way to maintaining it as a hub for digital production world-wide.” Hopefully the potential launch of Hyperisland, the leading Swedish digital school, in the next 12 months in the UK will help address this issue.
Irrespective there is no doubt that there next 12 months are going to be exciting for the digital production industry in the UK. As Tim Rodgers quite succinctly put it, “it’s going to be awesome”.
Anyway here are the key players in the UK:
From top left clockwise: B-reel London offices, Unit 9 on Hoxton Square, Founders of rehab, Sam and Dave from LMFM attack Your Mum and the team @Pirata. More photos can be found here
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Has Technology hit a plateau?
And if it has does than mean the power is back with the ideas people?
So the summer and awards are over. I judged the One Show earlier this year and kept a pretty close idea on everything else. And although there were some good pieces there was nothing earth-shatteringly good. The closest was Nike Chalkbot.
There could be a number of reasons for this. First up when the economy is tanking no one wants to take risks. Also maybe when the world is in a recession it’s also just a little depressing and you wonder whether you really give a shit or not, you are reluctant to go the extra mile. Who knows?
But one thing I think is true is that there was nothing really new in terms of technology. With regards to technology and advertising we seem to have hit a plateau.
It used to be that judging awards was pretty simple because changes in technology allowed you to do things that no one had seen before. So the first banner to house video: Gong! The first banners that talked to each other: Gong! Papervision doing jazzy things: Gong! Having fun with webcams or more recently Augmented Reality: Gong! First branded iPhone app: Gong! Of course to win really big it wasn’t enough to just use those pieces of tech – you had to do something with a decent idea or well crafted (sometimes even both!). But there was definitely a sense of, ‘ooh I haven’t seen that before. Gong!’ I’m as guilty as anyone in that regard. But this is changing.
And this is a good thing. For too long the interactive world has obsessed with technology and being first. When I award work I like to think it will last the test of time. So that means not blindly awarding something because it’s not been done before but actually studying whether it’s a decent idea and has some story to it. For example the technology behind Chalkbot is nothing special, it’s twitter and a computer controlled spray can, but it has real emotion and tells a story. Bob Greenberg is famous for saying that storytelling is dead in the digital age. I can’t believe that he really believes that, I think he’s just fishing for headlines.
The flip side to this is also not dismissing something because it’s been done before – from a technology point of view. Saying something like a YouTube page takeover has been done and therefore not awarding it is a little like saying 30 second TV ads have been done. Of course if the actual creative idea has been done before then things should be marked down but I think we need to start awarding ideas and craft more rather than media firsts. New does not necessarily mean good.
Have we really reached a plateau? I think so. People are now comfortable with all forms of Social Media, Geo Location, Augmented Reality. The changes I see ahead are more about convergence – Google TV etc than a new piece of technology breaking through. Some recent work that has hit the headlines seems to prove this point. The Uniqlo Lucky Counter site where the price goes down the more you tweet about a garment is a fine example of how technology has become mainstream. And the Arcade Fire Google Maps work (which although I think is interesting is perhaps not as good as most people seem to think) is made possible through people feeling comfortable with Google Maps’ functionality.
The correlation of this is of course that if we are no longer obsessing about technology and being the first to use it (technology has become more democratic), the creative power – in theory – swings away from digital agencies and more towards ad agencies. In theory.