For Alex Wilson, Executive Creative Director at Amplify, making marketing content is just like making anything else: it’s all about grabbing (and keeping) people’s attention. “You can inform through the lens of entertainment,” says Alex. “I think people don’t mind being marketed to or advertised to if they enjoy it.”
Amplify is a global creative agency that specializes in experiential marketing, creating large-scale campaigns and experiences for brands like Playstation, Netflix, Levi’s, and many more. “We can bring creativity to life across all channels,” says Alex. “Historically, we’re known as more of a brand experience agency, but content was always at the heart of what we were doing.”
We had a chance to sit down with Alex to hear more about his creative process and his perspectives on the current marketing landscape. Read on for highlights from the chat or watch the interview above.
What’s your North Star when it comes to making video?
“Our mission is always to entertain and inform. I think that’s one of the true powers of video content. It allows you to do that with a captive audience. Ultimately, when someone comes to us, maybe wants to utilize this technology to do something, we think about that moment as purely a singular scene or canvas within a wider piece of storytelling.”
How do you make sure you’re making something great? What keeps you on track?
“Audience, always. Whoever we’re talking to is the key. Are you talking to them in the places they want to be spoken to, in the ways they want to be spoken to? You need to start with the audience and how you can best speak to them and bring them value. To not interrupt their experience, but elevate it.”
How do you know what kind of content is right for a specific client?
“Whether it’s an immersive TV show to find the biggest fan of a certain TV show for Netflix, whether it’s building a world around a mobile phone device and breaking the format for what a retail environment can be, to launching the newest sneaker, the newest game title. All our work starts with the audience and then ultimately the idea and how we can bring that idea to life across a multitude of channels.
We don’t necessarily like to work to a specific output. Obviously, our briefs and clients often come to us with that, but that’s what that compromise, collaboration, and co-creation comes from, is allowing you to find the best solution for them, even if it wasn’t necessarily what they thought it was in the first place.”
How do you evaluate the success of your work?
“For us, it’s ‘Did we tell that story authentically to the audience we designed it for?’ That’s always what we need to know. We work a lot with cultures and subcultures. We have an amazing strategic part of our agency that looks at culture. We’ve always, as an agency, been very close to that.
We try to work with individuals rather than broadcast to them, bring them in to co-create and help us create those experiences and content with them, to make sure it is a success for them and their audience. It’s a layered question as to what success can mean, but if we have outputted that work in ways that was well received by the audience, then that’s a good win for us.”
What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
“My chief creative officer, Jeavon Smith, said the phrase to me, ‘Ignore the noise.’ I think ignoring the noise is very valuable in a lot of contexts. I think it allows you to focus on what you’re there to do and what others are there to do with you and move together as one because there is a hell of a lot of noise that goes on.”
How do you use Vimeo?
“Lots of people in the studio and the agency use it in lots of different ways. Inspiration is definitely one of them. Discovering new talent is a really good one for us for that. In terms of an internal use, we talk about our body of work ultimately as a portfolio of work. When we need to find example of something we did here or how do we capture this in some way, Vimeo gives us a way to go back and access that.”
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