I am sure you have already noticed: digital creative agency work heavily overlaps with start ups. I am hardly the first to notice that talent, ideas, formats and processes are very similar in nature. It’s no wonder some talented staff leave agencies to pursue their start up ideas. Murat Mutlu has delivered a great rant on it here. Similarly, whole agencies team up with venture capital to pursue start up ventures. R/GA’s Connected Devices Accelerator comes to mind. Check out the crowd in this new YouTube content called ‘That Start Up Show’ (you can read my review here). You’d be hard pressed to tell the people apart: agency geezers or start up folk?
Photo by Heisenberg Media under CC
Or look at the photo above: is it a group of start ups or a digital agency? Click through to Heisenberg Media and you will find out. So in many ways there is little difference. The reason we are still somewhat different is how agencies deal with a variety of industries & clients rather than one target market or one vertical. And most importantly, we differ in the way ‘our businesses work’. We agencies handle risk and reward a lot different from start ups. More often than not, we agencies would love to follow up, evolve, optimise and perfect our ideas for apps and services. Yet the budget often isn’t there for those last hard yards. On the side of the start ups people must often re-adjust their ideas and pivot the whole entreprise. And still their genius might hit a wall. Or the money might run out. Or the market might not react at all.
Photo by Heisenberg Media under CC
Despite those differences, I thought there is so much to be gained from getting closer to the start up world. I investigated our own Reactive agency & start up relationship further. And as part of our constant Research and Development, Reactive has started a relationship with Telstra’s incubator program Muru-D.
Through them we got to know a Sydney start up called ISSUE. Their venture is a browser-based authoring tool that creates mobile/tablet ready magazines with e-commerce and affiliate marketing, all built in. Or as they would call it: “Mobile magazines with shoppable stories”.
Last week Reactive Sydney turned into a little film set, hosting the ISSUE crew shooting a demo reel with us. Reactive is acting as their partner agency in this video (with yours truly among the amazing cast). The final video (see below) features fashion & design bloggers Lisa Hamilton from See Want Shop and Terri Winter, founder of Top3 by Design. They worked together with us to create an amazing interior design and fashion mag – and we had a blast being part of it.
We will post this ISSUE hype video once it’s finalised. In the meantime you can check out the elaborate set and suave actors in these ‘Behind the scenes’ shots:
Between 0 and 1 