Small Ax Creative is more than a video production company. Rather, it is a full-service team dedicated to providing comprehensive marketing content to help companies thrive in the new world of media. Made up of hundreds of creators, the company does more than just create videos. It takes a new approach to the traditional agency model by providing opportunities for organizations to get the content they need in a more streamlined and efficient manner. Most importantly, the work they do gets results.

More Than Just a Video Production Agency

Small Ax Creative helps businesses create content that fits all of their needs, from digital ads to videos that tell stories about their services and customers. The traditional ad agency process can be complex and expensive, especially when a brand needs something done fast. However, Small Ax Creative offers a better solution by providing access to an extensive creative network of talented professionals, powerful technology to facilitate the process, and a frictionless process for connecting. The end result is a more efficient and intelligent outcome – and a video that gets the right attention of the right people.

A Look at Their History

Jon Seidman (CEO) and RJ McFarlane (CCO) are co-founders of Small Ax Creative. They recognized the problems in the industry early on when working with a company that crowdsourced the ideas and work of thousands of creators in order to create video for brands. The partners saw ways to improve upon this model, and make it more efficient, with higher quality product delivered to brands.

Why Traditional Crowdsourcing Didn’t Work

With the traditional crowdsourcing approach the output was often an ineffective product that companies spent a lot of money on but very rarely got the results they needed from it – and often, they would spend tens of thousands on a finished product that looked like it was done for just a few hundred.

These organizations typically used crowdsourcing to get the end product completed by a creator inexpensively. While this opens the door to reach a new range of creators, it also creates a significant liability risk for the company itself. Consider that all of those working on the project now have direct access to the company’s proprietary information and assets.

McFarlane and Seidman created a solution in Small Ax Creative to address this need. They created an open-sourced model with a vast network of vetted creative professionals – one similar to what was being used already – and created a more narrowed and focused product. Their focus was on creating a solution that would address the rapidly changing advertising industry. The goal was to strip away the old and outdated way of getting content created to a more streamlined and efficient solution that better fit the client’s needs

What’s Different About the Industry Today?

A variety of things have changed over the years when it comes to advertising, of course. Looking at the creative content process, there’s far more opportunity today for people who want to participate and offer their services than ever. However, there are differences to consider, too.

For example, video created today is likely to be shared on numerous channels and in various manners, not just as a broadcast TV ad, for example. Rather, the creation of video assets must consider the 30 seconds of the TV ad, but also streaming services, social media, smartphones, websites, and more. Each of these outlets creates a new way to reach customers, and video is consistently one of the best tools to achieve success in marketing, especially in today’s ever-connected world.

What’s more, it’s not just where the content is streaming but also what its goals are. There are wildly different expectations for how that content will look, function, and perform. That includes the length, but also the way it can be applied to social media – whether the end viewer will share it on Facebook, Snapchat, or Instagram, for example. Different social media platforms require unique optimization of elements such as aspect ratios, file types or sizes.

Another difference in today’s video production is the need to have creative content that plays to the needs of the consumer. Typically, that means it needs to have a tempo and output that’s much higher. Viewers are impatient, and at the same time, the industry is always moving and changing. Keeping up with this is significantly more challenging today than it was just a few years ago.

There’s also the need to have more content than in the past. Because brands need to have a consistent way of connecting with their customers, typically on a near-constant basis, there is the need for more content delivered at a faster pace. It has to be fresh, interesting, and share-worthy.

While the need for new content is growing, it’s also important to recognize that most small business budgets are not necessarily growing at the same rate, and they need to create more content on the same budget. They simply don’t have huge budgets to meet big production needs on a constant basis.

How Small Ax Creative Is Fixing the Underlying Problem

When you take into consideration all of these new demands, the partnership between brands and agencies is more important than ever. Small Ax Creative helps to meet the needs of brands in a more efficient manner by managing a set of creative professionals that can help to provide exactly what companies need.

Small Ax Creative has seen a significant amount of success with this model as well. It’s helped many companies, including Facebook, Disney, Belkin, Overstock.com, Labcorp, American Greetings, Kind, and Bayer, among many others, to get the content they need to be delivered in a more streamlined manner.

The projects themselves are produced around the world. This allows for there to be ample support as well as diversity of creative approaches. It’s different from huge crowdsourced systems, though. Instead of thousands of unvetted people who provide these services, the content is created only by recruited, vetted professionals. That means that this pool of creators is more specialized and offers a better quality of service.

Members of the Creative Network work as an ideation think tank on the project. Each creator works within a fixed production budget, too, which helps to keep project financials under control more effectively. They each develop at least two concepts for consideration. The end result ensures that there are ample options and that the final product fits within financial goals and is something that can be realistically produced.