Participants
Jake Banks, Founder/Creative Director, Stardust
Mateus de Paula Santos, Creative Director/Partner, Lobo
James Price, Creative Director, Transistor
Vivian Rosenthal, Co-Founder, Tronic
Jakob Trollbäck, Founder/Creative Director, Trollbäck + Co.

BOARDS: First off, I want to find out how you think your roles have changed in terms of producing work. With all the various platforms a campaign can exist on, are you expected to create the entire visual language that will communicate the central idea?

VIVIAN ROSENTHAL: There have definitely been a lot of shifts. What those have meant for us and probably everyone on this call is that we've had to be many things at once - designers and also idea generators - as opposed to just executing. We're involved from the beginning on projects now, and are taking on the role of trying to articulate what the client's visual language should be. After that is when design enters into it.

JAKE BANKS: Clients will think that they know what they want, but they really don't. In order to make the bridge across all the different platforms, from video games to web to an outdoor big-screen presentation, you have to sell them on the idea, even if they don't know they want it.

MATEUS DE PAULA SANTOS: What's happened with us is that sometimes inside the same agency, people working across different platforms don't know each other. So people who work on TV and online in the same agency would never have met before. We've had to fill the gap and work for both teams on the same job. That's an interesting part of the new reality.

JAKE: There's no reason why all of the assets can't go across all platforms - it should all come from the same creative and ideas. But I don't think the agencies have gotten there yet. To have people working on the same project but on different platforms that haven't spoken - that's outrageous.

VIVIAN: I think it's more of a natural fit for us in motion studios to be thinking that way. We're small enough entities that there aren't the different divisions that there are in agencies. In some ways I think agencies are catching up to us in terms of how we approach projects more holistically.

JAKOB TROLLBÄCK: Few agencies or networks understand that they have to change in order to do something successful. In many cases, we've come up with concepts that really need to be anchored across all the platforms, and it hasn't worked because there are different creative teams within different media. I have no idea how they can afford to do it [like that].

BOARDS: Are you all doing more direct-to-client work?

JAKOB: We are, yes.

MATEUS: We're 80% agency, 20% client.

VIVIAN: For us, it's more of a 50/50 split, and it always has been.

JAMES PRICE: For us at Transistor, we set ourselves up originally to do commercial work, and that's probably 80% of what we'd do. But in the last couple of years we've pushed ahead to do more interactive work, and that's become almost half of our business now. In that realm, there's been a bunch of digital design studios that went out to clients directly and said, 'You don't have to work with agencies anymore, you can just work with us.' So we've had instances where clients have come to us directly and asked, 'Can you work with us?' In our case, probably 80% of our business comes from agencies and you don't want to be seen as biting the hand that feeds you. We made the decision to not do direct-to-client work. The other side of that is for me, as a creative person, my main interest is in creating good work and ideas, and I don't want to get involved in account management and those other issues.

BOARDS: What areas have your companies grown into that perhaps a couple of years ago you wouldn't have thought to enter?

JAKOB: We really just want to do good work, and that sounds really trite. But we've been fortunate that some people have recognized work we've done either with the big IAC building [a Frank Gehry-designed building in New York City where Trollbäck + Co. provided content for a massive video wall] or work in commercials. The more different fields we're in, the more creative we get. But I agree with James - the one thing we're not set up for is getting into account management and dealing with the hard sells. And I didn't think we'd be involved in so much strategy.

VIVIAN: It comes down to the freedom we have in the project to create something that we feel pushes the boundaries in whatever medium we are working in. So we go back and forth between experiential design, with our architecture backgrounds, and broadcast design and animation. When we do something in one category, we learn something we then apply to the others.

MATEUS: We work with a lot of different markets - the US, Europe, Brazil and now more in Asia. That allows us to select the best projects we want to be involved with. We've been doing more online and live-action stuff but it's really about being able to choose the best projects for us, regardless of the medium.

BOARDS: Let's talk a little bit about the process of creating the work. A couple of years ago, many bigger shops were using a lot of freelance artists. Are you still, and how do you find that affects your company creatively and economically?

JAMES: An interesting thing that happened a couple of years ago is that everyone wanted to work from home. That's a great idea, until it doesn't work. Sure, you don't want to stifle people creatively and tell people they can't do that, but when you're hearing a brief from a client, you start formulating in your head who these people are and what they want to do with the work. If you don't have people that are working closely with you, then what you're giving back to the client probably isn't going to be as developed as it should be.