TRANSCRIPT
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Robert Berkeley 0:02
Hello and welcome to Inside jobs the podcast about and for in house agencies brought to you by the in house agency forum and express KCS. The production house to superstar in house agencies looking for round the clock all media creative production. This episode we are meeting Roger Hyde from AT&Tat&t who has had a pretty stellar career working at the various companies that ultimately became AT&Tat&t in house agency and indeed, who managed to ride the wave of many takeovers, starting with DirecTV and ending at AT&Tat&t, and winning a multitude of awards along the way, including, I have to say 2017, in house agency of the year, Roger is often quoted by the press who are very interested in this phenomena, this trend of in house agencies, and you'll see his name mentioned quite a lot. Now, Roger, Hyde hide from your from your accent? I don't think you're an American. No,
Roger Hyde 0:57
No, I know. And I have told people that I'm from the south. And then they look at me quizzically, and then it finally comes out that I'm from South Africa.
Robert Berkeley 1:04
So tell me where in South Africa do you come from? And and how did you get yourself over to the states.
1:09
So I was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, I was pretty much brought up in a very, you know, naive, innocent environment. Television was only quote, unquote, invented in 1974, in South Africa. And so we literally,
Robert Berkeley 1:27
there was no broadcasting before then
1:28
there was radio, and you basically played outside, you rode your bikes, and you listened to the radio. And that was pretty much it. And the first TV show I ever watched was The Brady Bunch in the news. What did you make of that? Well, I mean, we we'd heard about it. And we'd seen you know, we'd heard we'd seen movies with people watch TV at home. We just couldn't imagine what that must be. Wow. And so it's it's not really ironic, but unsurprising that I ended up in the television industry.
Robert Berkeley 1:56
Yeah, yeah. Okay, so. So what sort of family did you grew up in?
1:59
So there were five of us, I have a brother and a sister both older than me. And a lot a like most families in South Africa, at the sort of tail end of apartheid, we all knew that we had to leave at some point to seek a future and a fortune somewhere else. And so my brother and sister live in Australia, and I went to live in Germany. And so the opportunity was because my grandfather had a German passport. He was a German citizen, so I was able to work there. And it was it was an interesting time, because it was right when the Berlin Wall came down. Wow. Okay. And so what what I thought was going to be a two year stint turned into a five year stint, but it was all tantamount to the final goal of moving to the United States.
Robert Berkeley 2:42
So you were working in Germany, you're in Munich, right? That's right. And you went to Austria? I think. So. That was TV. How did you get from a kind of a background where TV was a very small part of your kind of ambient culture to actually being stuck into that? Was that something you wanted to do from from an early age or it and you found a path to do it? Or did it kind of happen across you by accident? Oh, no,
3:04
Oh, no, no, I had, I definitely put to put it in my mind that that's what I wanted to do. I was fascinated by the notion of live TV broadcast post production. And I had a lot of time to think about it, because back then in South Africa, all male school leavers had to go to the army was compulsory. And so I had two long years to think about what I wanted to do. And during my military service, a little tidbit I became a Bombardier in anti aircraft artillery, which has nothing to do with my career
Robert Berkeley 3:35
Did you have much call for these skills, at that time
3:37
they don't know, you just literally had to have a pulse. And you you were pretty much putting your hand in off your wing. But it did give me time to think and by the time I finished with the army, I was so ready to start my career. And I went to film school, and I, you know, I was Mr. average student my whole life until I went to film school. And maybe it was this pent up expectation of wanting to finally do something that I wanted to do. And I wasn't a straight A student, which my parents just they kept saying, you know, who are you? This is this is not the Roger we know and love. Exactly. And I was I was motivated. I was conscientious. I I you know, I even helped my friends with extra lessons. I loved it. I absolutely loved it.
Robert Berkeley 4:19
And you know, the creative side or the technical side? And did you struggle with any of it at all? Both of it,
4:24
Both of it, I think I had more of an affinity towards the people side of it. And so I while I was at film school, I had the opportunity to direct my first movie, and I just knew that this was something I wanted to do for the rest of my life. And I took to it to like a duck to water. In retrospect, I think I might have overstated my abilities and capabilities and talent, quite frankly, but that manifested a lot later as I went into the industry. But once I came out of film school, I was well and truly smitten with the industry.
Robert Berkeley 4:55
Well, I can see right now there's a whole set of inside jobs listeners who are now scurrying to use To try and find that first film, Roger. Yes, good
5:03
Yes, good luck there. This was this was way back in the early 80s. But you know, Happy hunting. Okay, well,
Robert Berkeley 5:09
Okay, well, maybe maybe one day someone will I know that. So you went to Germany. But did you speak German?
5:13
So I didn't I after I finished film school, I did an internship at a post production company that did documentaries. And I grew myself as an editor because I realised I couldn't walk out as a director, and I needed a skill. I
Robert Berkeley 5:26
I know. They couldn’t couldn't see what you could see.
5:28
Right, right. And so I became an editor. But back then we were editing your 16 millimetre reversal film, which, you know, was a far cry from where we are today. But it was a great way to learn, you know, decision making and quick decision making. And I went to work for young and Rubicam in Cape Town as an agency producer, and I would edit a lot of the spots that we'd produce and work for a couple of, you know, international clients like Cadbury's, and Ford, motor cars and Colgate, and the time came for me to move. And when I went to Germany, I thought to myself, yeah, I can learn this in a few years. I think I should be you know, I'll pick it up. But it was harder than I thought. But I was very good committed and determined to learn to speak fluently if I wanted to work in this industry. Yes Yeah. So interesting. The step to advertising came at that stage film school and then straight into advertising, you obviously felt that was where you could practice your skills a lot more easily than anywhere else, I suppose at the time. Yes, definitely. And also the, you know, the television industry in South Africa being as nascent as it was, production quality didn't really exist on air other than during TV, commercial breaks, because we had a cinema commercial industry that was fairly mature by the time TV was invented. And so the real dollars per second were being spent in advertising. And I had a lot of mentors and directors that I looked up to and wanted to work with and wanted to become an emulate in that side of the business. And I love the idea of advertising in that you're involved with a project. It's 30 seconds, and it's over and you're on to the next one. And I think that's something that really stuck with me when I very quickly realised that I didn't have the tenacity to slog for, you know, solid 1211 years, 11 years
Robert Berkeley 7:09
for living gestation with your idea that things constantly rework Yeah. And I think
7:13
And I think that you know, I you know, there are two kinds of workers a hammer and a plough, a hammer has a short burst of energy, and then it needs to rest a plough can do it forever.
Robert Berkeley 7:21
Let me guess. I'm a hammer. Exactly. So you so you took took that experience and started applying for jobs in America, I guess, late, late 90s.
7:32
Yes, I decided to, I decided to emigrate. Once again, I literally took it on a whim that that the time was right, I'd won a bunch of awards, I had a lot of relationships with international clients. And I just thought to myself, I just need to move. And so I moved to Los Angeles. And I was summoned back to Europe by a couple of the production companies who were still representing me out of Vienna out of Munich. And it took quite a few years to actually move my industry as it were into the United States. But I timed it really badly. And it was at a moment where kids at a college were working for free in the advertising industry just to get something on their reel. And I'd been doing this for you know, what was it now 14 years and I wasn't prepared to compete for free. And so I decided to reinvent myself as it were, and find an opportunity that could really utilise all of my combined talents. And I found a tiny little ad in Variety magazine, it was like literally half an inch by one inch for a company that never heard of. And I thought they'd spelt it incorrectly called DirecTV with just one T. And this was in 2000. And they brought me on as a contractor to produce on a promotions for pay per view porn, music and events and sports. And I my title was a predator was a producer, editor. And the company just got bought and bought and bought and bought, I think I think I survived. Was it five mergers over the years, and with each merger, there's a bunch of dust that has to settle. And I learned long ago that you need to go where the dust is, because that's where the gold is. And I've found opportunities to grow my my career and my responsibility each time we were purchased. And, you know, at first it was General Motors, and then News Corp, and then Liberty Media. Then we went independent. And then finally AT&Tat&t, here I am 19 years later.
Robert Berkeley 9:20
So you've managed to ride the tide every step of the way through all of that. That's right, what were the main skills you're employed to do that,
9:28
I think having had the experience of working at an ad agency, a production company, a post production company, and having worked on multiple continents with different kinds of people within the industry, the only piece of the puzzle I hadn't harnessed was being on the client side. And so I brought all that talent with me and developed the trust of the marketing organisation to build grow and and essentially take on a lot of the materials and work that we were just giving out of To our various external ad agencies. And it came at a point where we had a CMO who really believed in the in house model. And so it was it was almost him prodding me and me taking opportunity at to take on a lot more of the of the work, some of which I had no experience with, like print I had, I had never done print before. But I, you know, it was part of the deal, I had to learn it.
Robert Berkeley 10:20
So your role up to that point had been What then? Well, so it was.
10:24
So the role of had been reliance on an agency of record for external advertising. And then every single division of marketing had its own free choice of agencies, external agencies to do their little chunk of work. And as grew and grew, as the company grew, whether it was b2b, b2c products, retention, revenue, loyalty, you name it, everyone had their own favourite agency. And by the time a new CMO cmo came in, he basically saw that we had a very fragmented brand, because if you think about what each of those agencies biz dev guy would go to bed at night, thinking it would be the same thing. How do I get a bigger piece of the DirecTV pie? And the answer was always the same. Why don't we do something just slightly different so that we get noticed. And then someone says, oh, Who did that? I want them to do this work. And so within a short matter of time, it was like maybe six years, we had the most fragmented brand in the industry, because everyone was doing something just a little bit different. And you could see this happening around you, I could see it happening. And I had the solution. And the solution was, if we owned it all, and we managed it all in house, there would be no opportunity to reinterpret the brand to get another piece of the business. And so it was self inflicted pain and punishment, when I raised my hand and said, Yes, we should do this, because we didn't know what we needed in terms of how do we need a staff at apartment to be able to take on proofreading and retouching and all the other assets and attributes that an external agency has, you know, at their disposal, but we did it.
Robert Berkeley 11:56
So the model for that, presumably, was your previous experience in Germany and even young and Rubicam, I would imagine looking at how these things are structured. So when you when you first started to put something together, did you make something that looked like a traditional agency as you'd experienced it
12:12
very much. I think, you know, that was the North Star. And it started with designing the brief. And I cheated and used a lot of the briefs that we used to use in that the agency, just because the clarity of the information that we needed to be able to do a project was was critical. And we'd never had one before production management systems, the amount of time it took for us to do things, how we prioritise the work that was coming in, you know, was it was a client facing? Or was it high profile, you know, that the president of the company had asked for it? How did we prioritise it in a way that made sense for us? Or were we doing blood drive posters for the employees by the elevators, you know, we had to make sure that this was an important aspect of the company that needed to be respected and valued. And I'll tell you that that that struggle and that conversation and that education has not ended today. It still goes on.
Robert Berkeley 13:02
And along the way, were you recruiting people who are from agencies that would help kind of shape that, or were you already starting to see that it needed a slightly different shape from a traditional agency.
13:15
So we needed folks from traditional agencies, production companies, post production companies, and design studios. It wasn't just an agency model, because Don't forget, and I knew this from working in the agency world, they're extremely reliant on third parties. So they'll hire third party production folk or animators or Sound Studios. And we always wanted to be completely autonomous, which was pretty ballsy if you think about it, because it's a bigger investment to have studios and edit bays and sound bays. But, you know, if we wanted to own the entire output and the experience and manifest a certain quality, which would be the same regardless of who we were producing the work for, we had to own it all. And so piece by piece, bit by bit, we hired folks from the industry paid them the exact same salaries, gave them the same titles, it was still an issue at the time, because I would say we were doing this in the quote, unquote, pioneering phase of in housing, which still wasn't cool to be hiring people off of the designs the design industry and bringing them into a brand. Now it's a different story. But back then it was kind of hard to tempt and lure people to come and work here. But once they did, it was up to me to create an environment that was number one safe enough to fail, which is something I believe in solidly, but also that it was a creative environment and not a brand environment. And that's something we work on every day.
Robert Berkeley 14:37
I'll come to that in a minute. Because what we didn't mention before, you mentioned award winning, but you had actually had quite a degree of success before you went into this in the late 90s. Before you started at DirecTV, winning awards, you you had premieres, the LA Film Festival. I believe you you you were producing documentary. It wasn't one documentary or documentaries that were shown around the world. So you were involved. In quite big, solid, monolithic projects, you mentioned before you know about being a hammer, you yourself had had that experience Did that help start, if you like opening the gates to recruiting a listers who would come in and work with you that they would be encouraged by the fact that you personally had that background?
15:17
I'd like to believe that, you know, the point of the matter is, is that, you know, given given the 34 years of production experience that I've had, I know the business, I know, what's involved, I know, the various different skills required, it's kind of I think it was, who was it? Who said that, you know, being a producer is like being the conductor of an orchestra, you don't have to know how to play every instrument, but you should know what they supposed to sound like. And I think that having the conversations with the folks that I was hiring, they understood that I respected the craft. And I think it was the fact that I wasn't just a marketer, or just a business person, but I was actually a historic crafts person who knew all about production and post production. And I think that there was a degree of empathy that they saw in me, and felt that I would fight for them. And so they felt that they were embraced in this particular environment.
Robert Berkeley 16:10
Well, it was quite a journey, as you say, five different kind of, we say corporate environments, corporate ownership structures along the way, I presume each time that happened, it did sort of put the brakes on things for a bit it did it did sort of suspend progress. Did it along the way, or is any of that facilitating the sort of changes you wanted to make?
16:29
I think, yes, the opposite. We It It was literally a shot of adrenaline because as I said, when the dust hasn't settled, it's very, you know, it's something that I tell my mentees, those are where the opportunities are for people to step up in the darkness and raise the hand and say, I can help get this done. And when you know, the platform is burning, and suddenly you've got people in in in involved in an environment, they're not used to the one thing they're all looking for is help. And so I happen to be at the right place at the right time, each time that happened. And I was I was able to, you know, reach out and help whoever was struggling at the top who required some sustenance to help them fulfil their vision and deliver what it was they were expected to do.
Robert Berkeley 17:13
Did you ever find that there were there were also sort of if you like competing in house agencies that were around that maybe felt that they could bring more value to the to the new hot entire entity than the new Kurt? And did that make life difficult if they were there?
17:29
You know what I was always prepared for that very situation. You know, every time there was a there was a merger, I was ready to go, okay, it's probably going to be a drag out fight is going to be us against question mark. And And what can question mark do that we can't and it never actually happened. So when News Corp purchased us, they literally brought the entire management team over from Fox Sports to run this division called DirecTV. It was part of Murdoch's plan to have, you know, his satellite footprint in the United States. And so they worked with what we had, rather than bringing folks over there was no reciprocation of facility of your work load it was will bring that will bring the leaders and they will kick you up the ass so that you can actually get done what needs to be done.
Robert Berkeley 18:14
So next time you you braced brace yourself for something that never happened. Correct. Thank you.
18:18
Sorry. So News Corp was probably, you know, the biggest expectation of change, but the only thing that really did change was the leadership. By the time AT&Tat&t purchased us, I was again prepared for that very same fight. We had our decks polished, we, you know, ready for ready for any questions to be answered. And AT&Tat&t had actually never had an in house agency in its 140 year history.
Robert Berkeley 18:41
So maybe they were very sceptical about the whole idea of of an enhanced agency.
18:46
Yes. And I think that their reliance or the Uber reliance on an agency who would pick up the phone at midnight, and you know, bring everyone back to work and crank out something new for tomorrow stood against me, but I wasn't competing with another internal creative resource. And so in a way, I had the opportunity to run around like a crazy person, sell our value, promote what it is we can do what our capability set was. And it was a course of raised eyebrows and sparkled eyes going, Oh, my goodness, I had no idea we have this capability, right? I mean, they believed you,
Robert Berkeley 19:20
they believed you, they believed you. I mean, you're normally in a situation like that you're up against inertia and status quo and also relationships that individuals have with external agencies that might be long standing and well earned as well. you've, you've got that surely to compete against it couldn't have all been kind of people just sort of throwing rose petals in front of you.
19:39
You haven't seen my presentation. I'll be honest with you, because we've done so many different kinds of things. You know, it's not as if this was an in house agency selling just one product and that was one of the reasons we were able to attract such a great depth of talent was because of the variety whether it was launching original shows producing mega glossy magazines magazine rRevenue retention, upgrade marketing, the variety is so diverse that it was literally as if we had multiple clients within this agency. And so when I do my my dog and pony show, and I bring all my toys, and I put them on the table and people, you know, open the kits, and they open the press kits, and the boxes and the blowup dolls and the the the boxing belts, and the they watch the TV spots, whether it's with assets, without assets, animation, live action, it's very hard to be sceptical. I got to be honest with you, and I'm not being smug here. And I am saying this out of the utmost pride for the work that my team does every single day. But it is because they have this level set of quality. And because they have delivered just about any kind of product, you can mention that it checks every single box with sceptical people who come into the room and go, do I want to work with this in house team and I have to treat them like colleagues, and I'm not going to get a Christmas present, blah, blah, blah. But then they say that Yeah, but then they see the work. And then it it basically a nullifies all of those mysteries, and they become quite enamoured by the ability to just go downstairs and there we are. Or if they talk about a product, we already know about it, because we have it at home. And because we've we've we've we've listened to all of the content Earth circling around the launch of it. There's no learning curve here. And I think that that was key for a lot of sceptical clients. Number two, our bonuses, our salaries, we are incentivized for their success.
Robert Berkeley 21:38
A couple years ago, I know you won the I have agency of the Year Award, which is quite an achievement actually given the kind of rocky path that to get there with all the takeovers and so on. How do you create an award winning agency, then,
21:52
I don't know if it was ever my intention to create an award winning agency. But I do think that awards do a couple of things, they're really important for employee morale, they're also really important for the luring and the retaining of talent because it's one thing to get recognition from the client is lovely to get a wonderful email of thanks from a client and everyone's copy. But it's another thing to hear the industry complement the work you've done by saying it is the best of the best. In addition to that, it's also really good for our clients to understand that the work we've sweated on for them has actually been recognised by the industry as the best of the best,
Robert Berkeley 22:35
what are the main things that you have done that have led to the awards,
22:39
I think it's really important to make sure that the team feels that they're led by creative rather than by function, show, we have to be functional. And sure we have to, at the end of the day, deliver the product the client is looking for. But as long as we've been in operation, we've always taken the step to over deliver whatever we've been asked to do. And it's not a it's not an ego thing. And it's not about being overly sassy. But if the client has asked for something fairly plain, we will obviously make sure that we can deliver on that ask, and then we will go further. Because we want to make sure that we elevate the quality of what they're doing. We don't want to compromise the message, we don't want to compromise the response. But if we can create something that is a little bit more arresting, a little bit more memorable, we're going to suggest it and so we never just do the job. And if you have an environment with just doing the job isn't considered good enough, you will try harder to do more than just the job. So
Robert Berkeley 23:45
So how do you not how you've got your finger on their pulse? What's the structure that you have in place that communicates between the creatives and then how does it work as well? And and who are the people how they structured? And do you work on a project basis? And if so, how is that managed?
24:01
So we have just like in an ad agency, we have clients service groups who interface directly with the clients. They are the frontline for us. They're just like in an ad agency are the intermediary between the client and the ad agency. They're the ones who distil briefs those the ones who go back with questions, they're the ones who asked about budget and deadlines and deliverables assets and and all of the like, they then work with the creative team directly to come up with the pitch the brief and then you know, whatever the parameters are of the project, once the creative is is approved, it goes into production. If then we require animation, if we request sound design, you know if it's an AR or VR material that we require, you know, some specialised materials, but all of the above happens in house, so we never actually leave the building. The only time we do is if we're doing a live action shoot, but even then, we have a direct relationship with one or two production companies who facilitate for us to do all the work, so we direct it. And we make all the choices that our regular production company would make once again, saving the company. The various different marks markups upon markups between agencies and production companies.
Robert Berkeley 25:16
So you have you have an account facing team very similar to an agency and do they project manage this work as well? Nope, we
25:23
We have a project management team. Just like an agency, it's kind of like you would call a traffic group in an agency. And they meet every morning, they have a status meeting every single morning, they know exactly what resources are deployed to manage what projects and if the client makes late changes, which they're prone to do. And the team has to stay on this particular project. And they'll consider what resources they need for new incoming projects, just like a regular traffic team. We wanted to make sure that the person responsible for the client relationship is responsible for the client relationship. I don't want them bogged down with trying to find resources, people don't realise that we have a really large variety of lines of businesses that we support. I mean, you know, here are a few of them. 4k 5g, we up until recently had our own original content network called the audience network. And all of these shows required launching and developing and press kits and assets, branding assets for the brand as a whole call centre training and communications. We even do the annual report every year for the for the chairman that goes out to Wall Street, a lot of b2b work, particularly for DirecTV for business, whether it's hotels, bars, restaurants, we also support a lot of our indirect sales channels like mom and pop shop dealers who have a direct connection to their clients. We do a lot of cross sell mobility to video video to mobility, we do a lot of partner promotions with a new partners over at Warner media, HBO, and Zander which is our advertising division, we do a lot of product packaging design, which is not something that people would realise we support the sports marketing group, you know, with all the different sports initiatives every year from NFL Sunday ticket on subscription video on demand transactional video on demand pay per view events, we also support a lot of talking about events, a lot of the film festivals and our sponsorship, you know, appearances at Toronto and South by Southwest and Tribeca. So we literally touch a tonne of different avenues, including super Saturday night, which is the big event we do the night before the Super Bowl in whatever city the Superbowl is in that we just got home from Miami, where we featured Lady Gaga is one of the biggest events we've pulled off. So a really varied work front in terms of creative opportunities and opportunity to satisfy multiple lines of business.
Robert Berkeley 27:48
But how on earth do you manage all of this flow of work from all of these different areas, a lot of it is regular work,
27:53
and a lot of it is seasonal. And so we are structured to cope with the demand from the prior year. And so we know how many contractors we need, we know how big the teams need to be. And if things change dramatically, we will adapt and we will we will shift but inevitably, the client that lives on social media isn't suddenly going to get a massive budget this year and want to do TV, and the client that has to do TV because that is his only medium do sure isn't suddenly going to switch to print. And so there are fairly long relationships between the teams on each coast and the clients that they service our clients have fixed budgets to. And in terms of what their initiatives are, they can't just produce multiple pieces of creative if they don't have the media to go with them. And so there is there's an auto limitation of just how much materials they actually need. And so that's self governing. Auto prioritises what we do and who we do it for they'll come to us with a campaign, that campaign has a specific kickoff point, once we've delivered the assets the campaign is over. And then we'll move on to the next piece of business.
Robert Berkeley 29:00
So this has obviously been been hugely successful process. As I mentioned before with the I have award recognising and I remember the the various awards you picked up just this past year at the conference for various aspects, including the packaging that you mentioned there as well. Are you seeing that there are new lines of work that are starting to sort of grow and dominate or likely to dominate in the near future that perhaps have been less important recently,
29:28
social media without a question, I mean, just the between 2018 and 2019, we grew our social media project output by 700%. And so it's something that we heavily believe in, we do have done a lot of training, we've brought in a lot of talent, we've adapted some of our infrastructure to be able to handle you know, all the different platforms. We've even got social media strategists on board, who are actually helping us advise the client about going a little bit further with some of their paid media to make Get that much more effective. It is definitely the new toy in town. But we are already developing skills around VR, AR and mixed and mixed reality
Robert Berkeley 30:10
and the challenges equally equal parts content as well as production here. No, I
30:16
think it's the aptitude and opportunity for risk taking. Do we really want to go and take this to Snapchat? Is that really where we're going to find the audience even though we've got a killer idea? So
Robert Berkeley 30:27
So strategy is that is that is the big conundrum for you rather than you know, the execution of it.
30:32
It's not a conundrum. For me, it's it's being able to convince our clients to believe in the opportunity and how much more real it would be by being just that much closer to the ground of what's actually happening.
Robert Berkeley 30:45
Thank you so much, Roger, for your time there on the inside jobs podcast. I hope you enjoyed hearing about his career and about the AT&Tat&t operation. He's got that as ever, I want to thank pratique Srivastava for producing this, and the Express KCS. team for handling the editing so ably if you're interested in learning more about in house agencies do come to inside jobs podcast.org You can find all of the back editions there. You can listen to them and maybe take the chance to review us on iTunes. If you want to link in with me, please do. I'd be very happy to hear from you. Your thoughts about the podcast suggestions and emails always replied to so. We love hearing from you. Thank you so much once again and we look forward to another edition soon