Give Me What I Crave: Craft in the Platform Age

The golden hour caught on film. A playful stop-motion sequence of charming hand-made puppets. A witty one-liner. We love beautifully-crafted work. But in an age where platforms are hungry for a never-ending stream of content, where brands and agencies are creating for all sorts of screens – and sometimes for no screen at all – where content is geared towards commerce, where personalisation and interactivity is expected, where does that leave craft? Is it still an important value and how is it manifesting?

That was the tension at the heart of one panel at the Little Black Book & Friends beach today, moderated by LBB’s Alex Reeves. The panellists were Cabell Hopkins, head of Rattling Stuff at Rattling Stick; David Rolfe, global head of production at WPP and Hogarth; Melissa Yang, global head of ecosystem partnerships at TikTok and Sergio Lopez, global head of production at Publicis Groupe.

In the creative industry, we often have a gut feeling about what craft is, exactly, but it’s rarely defined. To begin, the panel discussed what they mean when they talk about craft. “Craft is talent and the talent applied to the things we experience, to make us feel. But now more than ever it’s tools and the talent that couple to make us feel,” said David Rolfe. “Craft can be deployed to help with storytelling but I think craft can be deployed to help with storytelling, for instance but I think craft can present an aesthetic experience that in and of itself makes us feel.”

Melissa Yang, working at one of the foremost platforms in the new landscape, sees craft not simply as a static, polished product, but as a means of engaging. “Craft is about connecting with people. That’s how we connect in a way that evokes a feeling,” she said. “When I think about a medium like TikTok, I feel like you have the ability to build a community that really represents your brand.”

From Sergio Lopez’s perspective, producers now need to understand that craft might manifest differently on different channels and platforms. To illustrate he shared the insight that while a beautifully shot landscape at sunset will resonate with audiences in a cinema but will be skipped immediately if it shows up on a pre-roll.

“Craft is very difficult to define because it’s very layered and at times when we’re judging craft awards, craft is confused with scale,” says Sergio. “I always like looking back to look forward. When I was going to film school, there were beautiful pieces of cinematography, like ‘Morning Drive in Paris’, which was a camera in front of a Ferrari travelling in Paris. So, the lack of craft becomes a craft and it's something that is very calibrated; or when Easy Rider came out, it disrupted movies because before that it was all big scale. So now we're going back to the same point in social media and a world where there seems to be this disparity between the world that comes from television commercials – where it's all about scale – and the world of creators, which is all about expressing their voices through a different kind of storytelling. And I don't think that we should confuse one with the other, and both of them need to be celebrated.”

Democratisation of technology was a central theme of the conversation, enabling anyone to become not just a director or editor but a creator. David Rolfe shared the example of hip-hop star and influencer Lady London, who WPP and Hogarth had brought over to take part in a panel discussion. David reveals that Lady London contributed to her trip over, and at first he was confused as to why she had decided to make the effort to head to Cannes – before realising that to her it was a great location and opportunity to make content. During a celebration on a boat, David watched Lady London take out a drone to get footage of Cannes, operating it as the camera operators in her entourage could not.

“She's a hip-hop star, flat out, you know what I mean? The creative capabilities of new creators is just extraordinary,” said David. “We talk about them in terms of authenticity, and using people that are in the platform, and can do it – and they simply outstrip those on the outside. So you've got an entire new generation of craftspeople, without question.”

For Melissa, that lowering of the barrier to entry meant that the true craft innovation wasn’t tech but diversity. “So much of the innovation is being done by technology. The actual innovation now in my mind is diversity; diversity of thought, diversity of ideas, diversity of people is the innovation, right? Because that's what you need to make these machines more effective and more interesting anyway. And so, that moment for diversity to me is also really exciting because suddenly you're able to see content that really resonates in a deep way in a meaningful way,” she said.

Cabell Hopkins from Rattling Stuff echoed this idea of democratisation. An offshoot of the award-winning high end production company Rattling Stick, Rattling Stuff has been created to jump on the growing opportunities for lower budget work and social media. For the independent production community, producing work for the platform age requires a shift in mindset, an ability to think inventively to maximise the budget and a shift in model, including shooting projects in bulk.

“The projects are splintering, the big juicy big ads are few and far between, and there's lots of smaller things flying around – but the expectations are still very high to execute those. You can’t just have half the crew, and [use] a crap location. You have to approach it in a slightly different way, and also, I'm finding that on my shoots that the client and agency is maximising everything. So there's another little content shoot, there's stills… they are just getting as much out of the budget as possible,” said Cabell.

“The key is volume, that you can just churn. If you have a lot of them, they add up to something and you may not make money on some of them, others you might make more and then you sort of have to just play the long game with it,” he said. 

At the large networks and holding companies, a coupling of creative, media and production was proving to be a useful model for creating content for platforms, particularly when it comes to unique challenges from clients, whether budgetary or otherwise. David said that he doesn’t see production budgets as a problem per se, describing himself as ‘budget agnostic’.

And at Publicis Groupe, Sergio explained that in his current role he’s able to have visibility over media and creative as well as production – and that’s allowed him to see the hard numbers on the value of great craft and creative. Above average work, he says, performs 34% better than average work, getting the client more for their money – so whatever platform you’re creating for, great craft that is appropriate for that channel and audience, and great ideas, make clients’ media spend go further. After years of tightening belts and shrinking budgets, the platform age will require a new conversation about the value rather than the cost of craft.

“In production we've been talking about efficiencies over time. That's great, but that conversation is coming to an end. I don't know how much more efficient we can be. We're already shooting as far as we can go to get the best price with in-house, technology and automation,” he said. “So the next step is going to be true value and how do we show that creativity?”

And crucially, in order to be able to achieve that value for clients, producers and craftspeople have to respect the fact that ‘good craft’ might look very different depending on the platform. That requires producers to really understand those different media and the audience expectations that come with them.

For example, as Melissa shared, on TikTok, information dense, rich content is very important to users. Other platforms will differ and producers have to really get under the hood to appreciate what kind of audiences will expect on each.

“I do think it's important to have an understanding of the medium that you're working with. Obviously the way that you would operate when you're drawing on paper versus using a canvas is going to matter, So when I think about anything digital, that’s a different medium. TikTok is a type of medium. I think that users of the product come in having a certain expectation of what the medium looks like,” she said, warning against trivialising or condescending to the viewers.

“Give me what I crave – and that's the content that you're able to curate for yourself and the ability of technology to look at all of the world's creativity and pull together a personalised, curated experience for you that connects you authentically with brands. [Content] that makes you part of a larger community where a story is able to resonate in a really meaningful way. It's just so powerful. So, as craftspeople, I think our responsibility is to think about how we leverage this opportunity to do more, to do better. I think that's the challenge now that I see.”