To celebrate Dubai Lynx International Festival of Creativity's 10th birthday, Creativepool has partnered with the festival and sent over its founder Michael Tomes to talk with some of the speakers and guests about creativity, innovation and the state of our industry.
Recognised as one of the industry’s most respected figureheads in production and film today, Daniel founded international production company Stink in 1998.
Daniel was at Lynx today speaking on his topic titled "The Idea and the Execution: A New Model for Creativity" - the sticky topic of production companies, agencies and brands trying to work together in today's climate (see Lynx's overview on the talk here).
After Daniel's talk, Michael caught up with him for a conversation about the production world's evolving position in the advertising ecosystem.
Daniel said, "[In my talk] I was trying to be conclusive about an area which is not the easiest to be conclusive about: which is what's actually happening in our business - [from a production company's] point of view."
"The inevitable fact [is] that it's the audience's ultimate choice of what they want to watch, who they want to watch, and when they want to watch [it]."
"It's created a huge amount of demand for content and and endless amount of channels. Each brand is trying to build their own channel and trying to be involved, and have presence - so all these pipelines have to be filled with quality and emotionally engaging content, because brands need to create new relationships with people. And so it's all about making engaging, entertaining, emotional content."
There used to be no question on whether the content would be seen, Daniel explained. But in a crowded and evolving market, this viewability has changed - what was gospel yesterday is only partially relevant today.
"Agencies find it difficult to create genuine entertainment, pieces of content that the audiences will search for and look for, and [are dying] to see and experience."
Agencies have their own in-house production teams, equipment is cheaper, and the market is evolving rapidly. Daniel sees this as what he calls a "big bang," with regards to the huge rise of crowd content created on small budgets and the divergence of audience attention on content through so many different channels. According to Daniel, this big bang isn't unlike the one our own universe experienced 13,600 million years ago. But as with that explosion, for production companies, the elements disrupted from the industry's bang are now beginning to group back together.
"The big bang - everything moved apart - but now I can see those clusters coming back together."
"[Companies] are moving and adjusting and trying to be the trendsetters. Whoever stays still will be in trouble - these companies will shrink, or disappear, or rebuild ... traditional [above-the-line commercials-focused production and post companies] won't survive, because traditional has become a much smaller part of the portfolio of a client's need for a successful communication and engagement with their audience."
It isn't all doom and gloom in his predictions, though. "It will stabilise," Daniel says.
Learn more by listening to the full interview here on Creativepool's Soundcloud, and stay tuned to the Creativepool Magazine for more live coverage of Dubai Lynx as it happens.