Endeavour to reinvent production with AI-led agency

Independent creative agency Howatson+Company has launched an AI-led production agency to help brands drive efficiencies and achieve commercial growth, starting with foundation client Endeavour Group.

The team behind Plus Also Studio with Endeavour Group

Endeavour Group, the retail business behind BWS and Dan Murphy’s, has appointed an AI-enabled production agency, Plus Also Studio, as part of a new strategic focus to build deeper connections with customers.

The agency has been launched as a stand-alone business by one of the most awarded independent creative agencies, Howatson+Company, to help brands maintain the hefty content requirements for advertising and marketing channels, while keeping budgets in check.

As the foundation client for the new agency, Endeavour Group will work with Plus Also Studios to keep pace with changing pricing, stock and competitor actions to produce brand assets in a fraction of the time by using AI technology.

However, the key to this model is its focus on taking the cost savings from the AI production and reinvesting this upstream in strategic, creative and technology people. This process aims to ensure the work is strategically aligned to the business and its audience, and is contributing to commercial growth.

The appointment is part of a strategic shift by Endeavour Group to bring all its brands and creative production together in a single operating model as the business works to position around the customer.

The business recently appointed creative agency BMF to manage the consolidated advertising account and this latest appointment saw Endeavour Group shutter in-house production capabilities.

Endeavour Group chief marketing officer Jo Rose told The Growth Agenda: “A key part of this strategy is to deepen how our customers experience the benefits of Endeavour Group as a whole, more fully than the sum of their engagement with each brand alone.

“This experience is core to Endeavour’s transformation from being a family of retail, hospitality and product brands to an intuitive ecosystem of beloved brands that come together to make good times happen for customers.

“We made a very deliberate decision to consolidate some in-house capability we had with multiple different outsource capabilities into one solution so that we can maximise efficiency and effectiveness there. We’ve also made a deliberate decision to consolidate across our brands again so that we could get efficiencies of scale. So we’ve historically had an agency with a relationship with Dan Murphy’s and one with a relationship with BWS, bringing that together in one solution so that we could really get maximum impact.

“We’re embracing AI in many parts of our marketing mix, but creativity and production is such a big part of the pie and, as I’m sure it is for many marketers, it’s a space that is ripe for efficiency. We work in retail and hospitality, which moves at the speed of light, so we see the value of AI when it comes to agility.”

While Ms Rose said the move was driven by the need for greater efficiencies within the production process, it was also the ability to leverage those efficiencies into the broader marketing goal of building stronger connections with customers to drive business growth that sealed the deal.

“There is a big efficiency play here and we have had to make a very difficult decision to impact people in our team, and we don’t do that lightly. There had to be a pretty compelling business case for us to pursue this as an opportunity, which there was. And, not only was there a compelling business case in terms of the way that we fund the model and cost efficiency there, but there is also a compelling opportunity in terms of the volume of output that we get at the other end. And that is very critical in terms of being able to scale in terms of personalisation and experimentation,” Ms Rose said.

The model for Plus Also Studio, which was co-created with the Endeavour team, combines traditional and AI production with senior strategic and creative talent and will be led by co-founder and chief data and technology officer Hoang Nguyen, managing director Jess Coulson and creative director Effie Athanassiou.

This focus on technology and people was a crucial differentiator, according to Endeavour GM of brand, creative and operations Katie Dally.

“With this model we found a way to bring creative thinkers, strategic thinkers and innovative tech thinkers together as one solution. Because what we saw from a production agency perspective was the focus seemed to be on output and the volume of output.

“We wanted to flip that on its head and focus on the smarts, the thinking, the challenges upfront to get to the right decision-making, to solve a business problem and then work out what the output was off the back of that. That’s quite a different approach in terms of model,” Ms Dally said.

With marketing budgets under increasing scrutiny and company revenues declining by 7.7 per cent, according to Gartner’s annual CMO survey, the Plus Also Studio model is a “step change” for the industry, according to Howatson+Company chief executive officer Chris Howatson.

He said while other agencies have aligned to AI partnerships, this approach enables the agency to combine AI models and use the global tech innovators. This approach means clients get the best tech solutions and the best people for their business.

“We’re at a tipping point right now,” he said. “Where we need so much content that all of our effort is going into making it, and AI is helping us make that more efficient, so we need fewer people making it, which allows brands to invest that same amount of money back upstream in value-creating roles like strategy, data, immersion, creative and that is balancing how brands go to market.

“It’s a real step-change and it’s reinventing the production model by putting far more intelligence and creativity in the upstream roles, because we don’t have that weight of human labour being wasted at the bottom.”

The launch comes as agencies seek to embrace technology to improve the ability to help clients achieve more growth. Last month Accenture Media revealed its plans to combine AI automation with senior strategic talent to help clients drive business growth.