What you need to know:

• Hogarth Worldwide is pushing heavily into virtual production and automation, citing increasing demand on marketers to create unique and personalised content for many digital channels.
• Global CEO Richard Glasson says virtual production in LED or projector-based studios will rapidly replace traditional production techniques in many scenarios. Reckitt Benckiser has flagged it wants 80 per cent virtual production in 2023.
• Hogarth Australia CEO Justin Ricketts says there’s been an exponential, “thousands per cent increase”, in demands on marketers. It requires total transformation in the way content is created - processes, systems and people. Hogarth is working with Woolworths and Suncorp locally on such overhauls.
• There’s no long-term risk to creativity or creative agencies, Ricketts insists, rather there are opportunities to do things that weren’t previously possible. But they do have think and operate differently.
• Listen to the podcast here for the whole lowdown.

Top marketers have an “impossible job” at the moment, Hogarth Worldwide’s global CEO, Richard Glasson, reckons.

On one hand, budgets are flat – or decreasing. On the other, per Glasson, the head of WPP’s content production firm, Hogarth, marketers have a virtually unlimited amount of content to produce, tailor and personalise for an ever-increasing number of channels – up some 2,000 per cent over the past five years. “You've got to talk to audiences in ways that you've never spoken to them before and produce volumes of content,” Glasson says. Conventional TV campaigns, social media posts, personalised digital ads, customer experience journeys, e-commerce shop fronts, marketplaces, and other brand owned media assets, to name a few.

Enter artificial intelligence, hybrid studios, virtual production and modular content, which are beginning to have a massive – and global – impact on the way blue chip brands create and produce content. First, from a cost perspective. Woolmark, the Australian wool industry’s peak body, recreated a blazing inferno and a New York-style apartment in a single day – local Hogarth chief Justin Ricketts challenges anyone to recognise it was done virtually in a Melbourne studio. Likewise, Woolworths is eyeing localised state and store creative – all made in a single spot.

Second, from a creativity angle. Instead of producing a single TVC, a shoot could produce “millions” of variations on a theme – but that doesn’t cut out creative agencies. Creatives are the “architects”, Ricketts reckons, while the likes of Hogarth are the builders and engineers. Virtual and automated production open up more possibilities.

“There is a real need for bigger, bolder, longer brand campaigns that we as the engineers and builders can take long and deep,” he says.

Modular content

Glasson and Ricketts describe their approach to content creation as “modular”. That means it’s not a template or one-off creation, but attempting to think of everything a brand could possibly need from a single production.

“If we think about a brand that wants to show up in social media in a way that talks in a relevant way to its consumers and its client base, you've got to show up in a way which feels natively correct in that channel,” Glasson says.

“It's not about cutting a 30 second TVC down into 6 seconds so it works in any given channel … personalisation in the past felt a bit like being stalked on the Internet.”

Rather, it’s about capturing as much content as possible from a single shoot “so that that content can be compiled and put together and built in a way that it can be relevant to every channel, to every audience”. That might mean using AI or elements of automation to put it together, he adds, but the content is the most important bit. It has to be made for each channel.

“The best targeting is when you don't realise you're being targeted,” he says.

Ricketts adds: “When I'm talking to a client, I talk about how we take a brand platform or a campaign long and deep. We’re thinking up front, ‘How do we take this idea long across the calendar, across seasons, across sales events, across cultural events, how do we plan longer’? … So it's a mindset shift that actually sees you invest more in the primary production that leverages automation and offshoring for the construction of those ads.”

From The Mandalorian to Reckitt, Rolls Royce

The poster child of producing content virtually is Disney’s The Mandalorian – a western-themed Star Wars series set on fictitious, far-flung planets. Now, the likes of auto brands, FMCGs and retailers are piling in.

“It's becoming pretty much the go to or the default way; virtual production is becoming the default way of shooting and creating content,” Glasson says. It is an evolution of the green screen, which took a monotone background and added the background in post-production.

“That is a very slow, very expensive and not very natural process,” he says. In other words, it looked average. Virtual production removes the need for intense post-production work by using LED screens or projecting digital environments onto the background in a studio. It means twilight can last for 12 hours, the lighting can be more natural, and actors don’t have to imagine the sands of Tatooine – they can just look around.

“What you can now do in these environments is just extraordinary,” Glasson says. And it translates easily to non-Hollywood clients.  

“Imagine a retail client that shoots advertising in store. Every time they do that, they have to close the store down or they have to do it overnight and bring in huge amounts of lighting and huge amounts of disruption,” he says.  Or you have to shoot in a home environment, which, again, is a really uncomfortable, unpleasant way of shooting… I think virtual production is certainly in the film and TV world, it's become the go to, the default way of producing work. And I think the same thing is going to happen in advertising.”

Already multinational consumer goods company Reckitt Benckiser wants 80 per cent of all production made virtually next year. Hogarth helped Rolls Royce launch a new electric vehicle in a virtual environment. “It just makes sense,” Glasson says. “Virtual production is also highly sustainable production. It cuts down on carbon emissions, it cuts down on travel.”

A Woolmark video that features virtual production of a fire and New York apartment. 

Woolmark: virtual New York inferno

Australia produces 39 per cent of the world’s wool supply, worth – pre-pandemic – more than $3 billion. And representing the interests of the 60,000 woolgrowers in the country, who’ve suffered the brunt of floods, droughts and a pandemic, is the industry’s not-for-profit, Woolmark.

“Woolmark wanted to create a campaign that made the wool growers in this market feel a sense of pride of what they've gone through,” Ricketts says.

“They didn't have a huge amount of budget, they didn't have a huge amount of time, and we needed to create quite an emotional film. The challenge that virtual production helped us solve was that two of the scenes that were in the film were complex and technically expensive to shoot. One was we were showcasing the undergarment of wool that firefighters typically use – it's the inner protective layer. The scene would have required us creating a complex sort of fire inferno in rural Australia. Quite a complex scene, and probably not ethically the thing we want to be creating right now.”

Using a studio in Melbourne, Hogarth created a roaring computer-generated (CG) fire in full view of the client, then, just hours later, shoot a scene of a mother looking after a baby in New York.

“Typically, the old way of doing that, we would have flown a crew and a client and an agency and the creatives all the way to New York to that apartment,” he says. “I think we went from script and treatment to on air in less than two weeks. I will challenge any consumer to see that that was shot using virtual production. It's hyper realistic. It helps us deliver something that we would not have been able to deliver in the time and the budget available.”

Hogarth are now exploring virtual options with Woolworths, one of their biggest local clients, that would tailor content to regions.

“We can have different stores representing - they've got their core stores, their value stores, their high-end stores. We can now localise content to different states. There's an efficiency play enabling you to do things that usually would take a lot of time and a lot of travel. And there's also an effectiveness play where we can actually create content that can be more personalised to channel and audience,” Ricketts says.

Performance, not cost

Neither Glasson nor Ricketts would clearly outline how much Hogarth’s approach with virtual production, AI and automation can save brands, though they both say it is cost effective and allows for reinvestment of budgets. Cost-out is the wrong measurement, Glasson says.

“The only way to quantify it is by performance. The industry has always had this sort of fetishisation for creation. How many assets are we producing? What was the cost per asset? That's no longer a relevant construct, because instead of producing one asset, you might be producing 10,000, 100,000, a million,” he says.

“The relevant measure is, how is the work performing? … Increasingly, this isn't an efficiency conversation. It's a performance conversation. Those two things are very strongly linked. But we are seeing uplifts of 20, 30, 40 per cent in performance. And that's what clients are really interested in, and that's what all of this stuff can drive. I don't think it's any more relevant to think about what is the saving in terms of hours or cost per asset is simply about how is this work becoming more effective and how am I driving better results?”

Marketers have got to create more for less with budgets that “are flat at best”, Ricketts adds.

“And it's not a little bit more for less, it's exponentially more – thousands of per cent increase. You can't do that with a tweak. It requires a total transformation,” he says. Suncorp is one local brand going through that transformation, which has been “a significant investment they made to ultimately set them up for delivering more for less.”

No challenge to creative agencies

A rush towards virtual or automated content creation won’t result in bland, vanilla content, Ricketts says, nor will it remove the need for creative agencies and specialist creatives.

“Clients need brilliant creative ideas brought to life… I think there are huge opportunities for creative firms,” he says. There’ll be three tiers of creativity for global brands: Big, Cannes Lions-winning thinking, content hubs that develop more ideas, and a third layer that uses offshoring or automation to build scale.

“Bringing creative and making closer together, we're very optimistic about what that means for us in the business. But we're also optimistic about what that means for creativity in general and therefore for the role of the creative agency,” Ricketts adds.

But, that comes with a caveat. Knowing how a creative agency can be a part of the new automated, virtual world will be crucial. Per Glasson: “I think it's incumbent on people working in creative agencies to really understand what this technology can do, to understand the potential it creates, to think about how that might inform their campaign ideas… it creates huge new creative opportunities and all creatives shouldn't see this as something that limits their ability to produce incredible work. I think it multiplies their ability to produce amazing work. But to do that, you have to understand what is possible within this technology.”