Six disciplines, one point of view

The sensible way to start a studio is narrow. Pick the thing you are best at, build a reputation for it, add services when demand and cash flow allow. Every piece of advice we were given said some version of that.

We launched with all six live instead: strategy, imagery, film, design, web and social. Not because we are in a hurry, but because the thing we kept being hired to fix was never a discipline. It was the seam between two of them.

The handoff is where the work gets worse

You have seen the pattern even if you have not named it. A strategy consultancy produces a positioning document. It is good. Nine months later a design studio makes an identity that does not quite express it, because they were briefed from a summary of a summary. A production company shoots a film against the identity but writes its own script, so the film argues a slightly different case. An agency runs the campaign and, needing something to post, invents a fourth version of the message.

Nobody involved did bad work. Every handoff cost a few per cent of the argument, and by the time it reached the audience the thing had been through translation four times. What arrives is not wrong exactly. It is just blurred, and blurred is the expensive outcome, because it is the one nobody can point at.

What changes when it is one team

Three things, concretely.

The brief is written once. The person who agreed the positioning is in the room when the shot list is written and when the site is wireframed. Not briefed. Present. That sounds like a small distinction and it is most of the value.

Assets get planned together, so they cost less. If we know in March that a film, a photography library and a website are all coming, we shoot them on the same days, in the same locations, with the same crew. Commissioned separately, that is three mobilisations. Planned together it is one, and the film and the stills actually match.

Nobody can hide behind a scope boundary. The failure mode of a multi-supplier setup is that when something is not working, each supplier can demonstrate that their bit is fine. Under one roof, "the campaign is not converting" is our problem, whichever discipline turns out to be the cause.

What it costs us

Being honest about the trade: a specialist will always go deeper than a generalist on their own patch. There are film production companies who do things we cannot, and identity studios with a decade in one category. When a client needs that specific depth and nothing else, they should hire them, and we say so.

What we are betting on is that most briefs are not that. Most briefs need six things that agree with each other more than they need one thing that is world-class and five that are approximate.

Six disciplines is not six generalists

The obvious objection is that a studio claiming six things is claiming to be excellent at nothing. Fair, and the answer is in how it is staffed: each discipline is run by somebody who does only that, and the six of them are in the same weekly conversation. That is different from six freelancers assembled per project, and different again from one person calling themselves full-service.

The test we apply to ourselves is whether the person leading a discipline would be hired for it on their own. If the answer is no, we are not offering it yet.

The tiers exist for the same reason

Glow, Beam and Halo are not packaging for its own sake. They are three honest answers to "how much of this do you need at once": one thing done properly, a campaign with legs, or the whole picture held on retainer. Most clients arrive at Beam and find that the second project is cheaper than the first, because nothing has to be rebuilt.

Which is the whole argument, really. Six disciplines is not a longer menu. It is one point of view, delivered without translation.