A couple of months ago, ad agency creative Mark Taylor and production house/agency vet Sylvia Kahn Versace teamed to launch Awesomesauce, a strategic and creative content studio. The new L.A.-based venture deals directly with clients, providing a nimble one-stop resource for creative, strategy and production.
Taylor and Versace were previously together at Radarworks, among their notable endeavors there being AT&T’s “Love is Changing History” outreach initiative to the LGBT community. Versace served as producer and Taylor directed (in conjunction with celeb co-directors Lance Bass and Pauley Perrette) a pair of short films for the campaign: Jenny which depicted the title character going to the high school prom with her girlfriend, and A Tale of Two Dads, in which a gay male couple adopts a child. Versace and Taylor brought in Julien Magnat to write the shorts which teamed Radarworks with AT&T’s diversity agency interTrend Communications. Magnat earned a Best Student Short Oscar nomination years back for his The All New Adventures of Chastity Blade.
The AT&T-sponsored shorts drove viewers to a website during last year’s LGBT History Month where people could share their stories of how love had changed history in their own lives, personal experiences which in turn could become part of a compilation placed within the Library of Congress archives. Furthermore each time Jenny, A Tale of Two Dads or the campaign website was shared, AT&T would donate $1 to The Trevor Project (up to $100,000), a national organization providing crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to LGBT youth. AT&T’s LGBT initiative was a resounding success, generating 475 million earned media impressions, celeb tweets from the likes of Neil Patrick Harris and George Takei, and 300,000 visitors to the site, according to the Web Marketing Association which bestowed a 2014 Internet Advertising Competition Award upon the initiative in the Best Gay/Lesbian Integrated Ad Campaign category.
Now Taylor and Versace are bringing their agency and production house expertise to bear at Awesomesauce. Taylor’s creative pedigree spans Ogilvy London, Doner London and then a move to Southern California which saw him become an associate creative director at JWT LA, then a creative director at Saatchi & Saatchi LA, and executive creative director at indie shop Radarworks. Along the way, he directed select projects for several of those agencies, including Saatchi (spots for Toyota), Ogilvy, JWT and Radarworks.
Versace is a production house vet who also has agency experience. She enjoyed a long tenure at the venerable Johns+Gorman Films, went on to Headquarters and then started the V3 new media division at Anonymous Content. She first met Taylor at the latter. In fact, V3 repped Taylor as a director for a stretch while he was still on the agency side. After four years at V3, Versace took on roles at Technicolor and then Radarworks where she reunited with Taylor.
SHOOT caught up with Versace and Taylor to gain insights into Awesomesauce.
SHOOT: What’s the business model behind Awesomesauce?
Taylor: Production companies have been very sensitive about not pissing off ad agencies even though they’re going directly to clients on the side. Production houses just aren’t announcing it. Likewise on the agency side, you have big agencies with their own production company arms and divisions but they are calling them something else so as not to piss off production companies. We’ve been in a long period waiting for people to stand up and say who they are. I feel like now is the time for that–and that applies to Awesomesauce. We’re a small, nimble company with agency creative, strategic and production expertise. We don’t have a lot of layers to get through and that’s what clients want and need–a creative and production resource that will be responsive to them and realize efficiencies in a changing video landscape, particularly for all the work that’s emerging on the digital platform.
Clients don’t always want or need six months of planning to do one commercial on a digital platform. They want a studio that can link them up with creative, strategy and production. They want a place that can act on a communications need and deliver a final high quality product without having to go through multiple layers and take so much time. Ours is an efficient model that clients feel is the right model for many of their projects. We’re not looking to be the agency of record. We work directly with clients on a per project basis.
Having been at big agencies, the thing I found frustrating was the inability of those organizations to move quickly and be truly nimble….Clients want quick solutions at a high level of creative and don’t want to dick around. Our process is nimble and transparent.
SHOOT: What work have you done thus far under the Awesomesauce banner?
Taylor: We’re doing work for a large electronics company and a large bank–but we’re not at liberty to identify them at this point.
SHOOT: Do the bank and the electronics company have agencies of record?
Versace: Yes, they do. Our collaborations with both clients have been very positive. When Mark talks about our process being transparent, it truly is. We like to partner with clients. It’s not a case of us versus them. The bank client for example told us what kind of money they had for the project and we developed creative within that budget.
Taylor: In one of our presentations, we cite the Chinese whispers game where by the time it comes all the way around through a circle of people, the story or description of the work is completely different than it was originally. We use that as an example of why so many layers are an obstacle to doing good work. By contrast, we are in direct contact with the client and we respond and deliver to them. It’s a much more efficient model to bypass all the steps in the traditional agency process where seemingly everybody has a different agenda.
We are finding that brands are open to working on a per project basis. Many in addition to keeping their agency of record are happy to take on other projects directly with other people.
SHOOT: How did your experience at Radarworks and on the AT&T LGBT initiative help shape your business model for–and decision to launch–Awesomesauce?
Versace: The AT&T campaign was all about helping brands fulfill their obligation to help society. It was all about social responsibility and corporate citizenship. We continue to talk with foundations, nonprofits and corporate sponsors to create more projects like that. We brought the Trevor Project into the AT&T campaign. We brought in a celebrity component with a social media following–Polly Perrette who is not gay but a strong spokesperson for gay rights and Lance Bass who is gay. This kind of work is our passion–we call it branded cause content marketing. It’s a great model but not the only thing we do.
Taylor: At Radarworks Sylvia and I practiced our in-house production model. We built an in-house production and postproduction department and it worked really well. It addressed a need in the marketplace.
SHOOT: Will Mark serve as director on everything that comes through Awesomesauce?
Versace: We do what’s right for the project. As a director, Mark can do a lot from live action to dialogue to animation. But there’s not the ego there which requires him to direct everything. We will tap into a talent pool of other directors to get the right one for the job at hand.
Taylor: Awesomesauce consists of the best things Sylvia and I have learned from the production house and agency sides of the business. When we staff up for a project, we do it as a production company would. We build a team tailored to what the project needs. If the project calls for it, for example, we’ll tap into longer format writers, not just ad industry copywriters.
