Kate Oppenheim

Really luckily for us, m ss ng p eces was founded out of a genuine curiosity about how storytelling and media would evolve in the early days of digital video. Building a company out of a moment of disruption like that I think injected an “anything is possible” mentality that has served us so well and attracted a certain kind of person into the mix. What we’ve done is build a company that is welcoming to disruption, to new ideas, to fresh talent, to the unknown. Our systems and our culture have some flexibility to them so that we can pick up a new problem, look at it, ask questions about it, and come up with solutions while still putting a process in place that gives our talent and our clients the safety they need to do new things.

I don’t know any industry that sits at the intersection of more hype cycles than advertising does. We get it from tech companies, from entertainment, from internet culture--and over time I’ve found that the way we approach new trends and tech is really at the heart of our longevity. Over the last 10 years in particular, we saw a new acronym, platform or megatrend hit every year, from interactive video, social video, VR, AR, XR, metaverse, blockchain and now AI. What I think we’ve learned is to look at these changes with a critical eye, ask the right questions about it, and then do some experiments. That way when the first client brief hits, we’re ready to make something extraordinary. We make sure that we know the people and tools we need to actually make things before the first brief comes in. It’s not enough to talk about it and hype it, we have to know how to use it, make things for it, and be prepared to deliver world-class work.

I’ve been very lucky in my career to work with so many incredible, talented people. I was an associate at Ogilvy right after I graduated from college and am extremely grateful for that beginning--it was advertising super school, and Ogilvy had some tremendous leaders that really poured resources into training young talent. Personally, though, my two greatest influences have been here at m ss ng p eces--my partners Ari Kuschnir and Brian Latt have taught me more than I could have ever imagined as business people, creative people and friends.

The gains that have been made towards diversity on rosters in the last decade have been really tremendous, even though there’s still a long way to go. It showed as an industry we are truly capable of change--the question is now whether the industry will backslide as the winds change. I hope not. Unfortunately I think there are a couple things happening right now that are quite destructive to the health of the industry. First, the push by agencies to bring production in-house brings a deeply uncomfortable undertone to every pitch and every job, regardless of whether there’s an internal bidder in the mix. Second, the conversations around how AI will impact the business are perhaps more damaging than the impact of AI itself. The hype that tech companies have injected into the business conversation are intentionally reductive and incite a kind of corporate FOMO that is extremely dehumanizing and unhelpful. Breakthrough ideas, unique executions that build brand value, stories that move people’s emotions--these are not easy to come by. There’s clearly a top-down, rather cynical hope that there’s a shortcut if we can just figure out the right prompt, or the right AI agent. But part of what is special about great ideas is that… they’re special! AI won’t change that, and in fact it might make great ideas even more valuable in a sea of personalized, mediocre content slop. But, the way we make things will change over time and there’s no question it will have major effects on jobs across all types of production. There need to be serious, good faith conversations about how to adapt.

The m ss ng p eces team is by far my greatest accomplishment. The smartest, kindest, most fearless, curious, caring group of people you’ve ever met. We’ve won hundreds of awards and thousands of jobs, but the best part is working together.

I’ve always been really obsessed with how people interact with ideas. I studied political science and thought I’d become a diplomat--and in some ways I guess I have!

We’ve been talking a lot lately about what kind of company we could build today that we would be proud of in a decade. It’s our 20th year, and somehow it feels like the most disruptive year yet (which is saying a lot, considering the last 20 years!). We’re in an era where audience and influence are driving the stories that get made, perhaps more than the imaginations of the storytellers. We really need to interrogate that shift, not just as businesses but as human beings. There is already nearly infinite content to consume--what do we as creative people make that matters, to ourselves and to others? I think if we build a business around the answer to that question, we’re going to be ok.

Standing on a glacier in Antarctica with Alex Bogusky and Al Gore. Riding a bike around the underground tunnel of the large hadron collider at CERN on a Google shoot. Visiting haute couture ateliers in Paris. Production is a wild ride, and it’s taken me to some of the most extraordinary places in the world. I am so grateful.

I started reading SHOOT back at Ogilvy when I didn’t really even know what a production company was, but knew I needed to figure it out--quickly. As someone who didn’t come up through traditional production, SHOOT has been a great cheat sheet! It’s such a gift to have a publication that chronicles what we do, keeping tabs on the most ambitious work and celebrating our colleagues.