Did I Ever See Myself Working at a One Stop Shop? No.

VFX literally meant VFX back in my creative agency days.

You had your post houses, offline editors and recording studios. Your day was spent running around Soho attending back-to-back sessions, in between tracking umatics, dats and Clearcast copies. We wanted specialists but they were all at different companies and managing them all was a real challenge. But things move on, we evolve.

When I ran Scramble Audio Post House, a small boutique audio facility, we really valued our bread & butter accounts with brands including L’Oréal, Reckitts and Curry’s. They were consistent plus you built great relationships with clients because they were in so regularly. However, ‘we can get everything done under one roof’ and ‘it just makes sense to move it’, inevitably became more frequent reasons for clients broadening their supplier services. At the time, I resented ‘one stop shops’.

Fast forward five years and here I am, part of the creative board at Tag Collective Arts, managing a team of specialists in every creative discipline and finally understanding fully what the client was saying back then.

My opening line when I present to a potential new client is ‘we can do everything from conception to delivery’. I’m often met with, “oh, we didn’t realise you do that too”, be it audio, music production, offline editing, transcreation. But the truth of the matter is that they aren’t separate capabilities - each stage of the production process informs the next. I learn more and more from my peers and there’s a huge cross section of talent that we work collaboratively with, across all capabilities. Working with Amazon Prime Video, a recent win, has been an incredible opportunity. I’m excited about the development of what other services we can offer them… dare I say it, all under one roof.

Another positive aspect of being part of a larger network is that it allows clients to tap into our global family. Amsterdam is an international creative hub with many global brands including Heineken & Reckitts using it as their European base. Since opening our doors there in 2017, I’ve been lucky enough to spend time working from our studio overlooking the Keizergracht, with an award-winning CG team. I desperately miss my regular sales trips and networking has been virtually impossible this year, which saddens me as it’s a massive and really enjoyable part of my job. I miss people and the buzz of cycling back to the office after a good meeting. However, I’ll be back and cannot wait to reconnect with the city and its Diversity.

With the perfect combination of a global production engine, brand expertise and marketing knowledge, delivering original creative messages to your audience, in all the languages, variants, formats, sizes and channels you need has never been easier.

I used to think one stop shop was a dirty term, but not anymore.

She would welcome the chance to provide a further insight to what services they can offer, ideally in person, but during Covid times you can contact her at donna@tagww.com