What’s the impact of the pandemic on you, your company, your approach to doing business in the future? What practices emerged that you will continue even as restrictions are loosening?
The impact has been largely positive in that we were forced to perfect an entirely different skill set in a matter of weeks. I was very nervous initially because I have always espoused the indirect relationship between creativity and proximity to others. Great ideas formulate much quicker when you can read the body language and facial expressions of your fellow creative teammates. Video calls do not facilitate those types of indicators, so the process initially felt opaque and more labored. Naturally, when you feel like you’re on your own, personal accountability has nowhere to go but up. Individual roles become more defined and communication must increase. That increased self-discipline gets passed onto our clients in the form of smarter communication. These skills are incredibly valuable when you combine them with existing production expertise. As things open up, we are highly focused on presenting a blend of the best of who we were before the pandemic and the best of what we’ve become after. We were already an extremely agile company pre-Covid, but our surprisingly seamless transition to a virtual workplace proved to me that we can succeed no matter what the world throws at us.
What are your goals, creatively speaking and/or from a business standpoint, for your company, division, studio or network in 2021?
We have experienced roughly 10 years of behavioral change in the span of a year, so I don’t think it’s wise to make prognostications about what production will look like in the near term because we’re still seeing Covid outbreaks. Watts will still need to be ready to pivot for at least another year and is hedging towards sticking with an all-virtual production model until it negatively affects the quality of our work. Common sense leads me to believe that clients will continue staying in the cozy confines of their home office, rather than come down to our studio for a powwow. This fundamentally changes how a company like ours presents itself culturally – so, in my opinion, it’s going to be less about the quirky physical office space that elicits creative whimsy and more about “Can you guys get the job done?” I think we’ll be seeing offices/studios transforming themselves into controlled, turnkey live-production and capture facilities and move away from the big communal workspaces with rows of editors and designers. It’s too expensive to put up a bunch of plastic barriers. This is unfortunate from a team-culture perspective, and I hope I’m wrong.
What trends, developments or issues would you point to thus far in 2021 as being most significant, perhaps carrying implications for the rest of the year and beyond?
In my mind, a huge development is the mass-lowering of the world’s visual “bar.” The ubiquity of UGC (user-generated content) and video chat capture has embedded itself into the lofty stratosphere of large, paid advertising campaigns or broadcast work, and unfortunately, it has become totally acceptable for most of the world’s eyeballs. So, for us, it might be more challenging to persuade a client to spend a little more for the extra polish and artistry that we bring to the table – especially when there’s now a cheaper and efficient alternative to fall back on. But there is opportunity here as well; when Watts creates something visually compelling and eye-catching, it will have a much better chance of standing out. I try to remind our newer clients that production quality always validates legitimacy for a new product/service in the minds of their target customers. This simple notion isn’t fundamentally going to change. The creative industry will eventually re-balance itself, and the cream will rise to the top, just like nature intended