A 20-year-old brand with a start-up mentality has helped pivot Happy Finish into the content production company that brands from McDonald’s to Dove hire for innovative advertising and marketing content. Toby Roberts, the London-based company’s president and COO, explains how the firm likes to ask “What If” as they develop content from virtual Hot Wheels designs to an AI-generated image of a mother to provoke a conversation on the pressures of motherhood.
You can hear more from Roberts in the video below or read our lightly edited transcript.
TRANSCRIPT
Stan Joosten
This month, we welcome Toby Roberts, who is the president and COO of Happy Finish. Toby, my first question to you, Explain what Happy Finish is, where you are located and how many people do you have?
Toby Roberts
Thank you, Stan. Great to be here, so Happy Finish is a content production company based in London with offices in Portland, Oregon where I’m based, as well as production facilities in Verona, Italy. We help the advertising industry as well as brands and the design companies create compelling visualization solutions for various different marketing, design and technology initiatives. We’re around 50 people worldwide at the moment, although that rapidly flexes and moves depending on the projects that we’re engaged with at any one time.
Great. Can you tell us something about the founding story of Happy Finish?
Absolutely. So Happy Finish was founded quite a long time ago.
We’re a little long-in-the-tooth for a traditional startup, having pivoted several times and added new services over the years. We started off as a representation agency for post production artists in the early 2000s, recognizing that at the time, visual post-production technology was really defining what creative looked like for the advertising and marketing industry, in addition to more traditional creators such as photographers and film directors, who were really the superstars previously.
We set up as a representation agency to gather the best minds that London had to offer at that time to those markets to really provide those as a service that was not well represented in and of itself. Over the years, Happy Finish gathered enough clients and notoriety as a purveyor of high-quality content production services that brands were coming to us directly. We added in the full-service suite of production capabilities that were required to support those brand initiatives.
That over time then led to a resurgence of 3D and we pivoted hard into the use of 3D in advertising content for animations, for product visualizations over the years. Then we found that with the rise of digital agencies in the kind of mid-2000s that a lot of the 3D content we were producing was becoming used in digital experiences directly as opposed to more traditional out-of-home or below-the-line and above-the-line advertising. So we began to support those initiatives as well starting in around 2012. Since then, we’ve really developed what I would consider three different product verticals that are complementary but also quite distinct depending on our client types.
The first being straight marketing, content production services that support major brands and advertisers. It’s our bread and butter where we started what we were founded to help solve. But what we found is that, that’s now very integrated within most brands with product visualization and product design because of the tighter times to market that are expected for new products.
That was really accelerated during the pandemic as well with the scarcity of physical samples that were available for product lines to be developed and then moved to the consumer. Then the final area of those three verticals is immersive experience design, which is complementary to both of those content centric production capabilities that we have, which is the ability to leverage new technologies to specifically tell stories in new and innovative ways that are visually derived. Those are kind of the three areas that Happy Finish has built up a capability on over the years that we’ve been really excited to have today as what we offer the market.
That’s fantastic. Can you give some examples for each area that come to mind?
Yeah, absolutely. I think some of our proudest moments recently have been supporting brands like Mattel with their virtual collectibles lines. We work with Hot Wheels to produce a whole range of digital twins of their physical castings for Hot Wheels products that lead their way into digital product lines that are sold to consumers as a digital collectible through Mattel Creations website. This involves a lot of animation, a lot of marketing collateral content.
What’s really interesting here is that there was an experimentation that was done with this content, but Happy Finish was able to add value in scaling that creating consistency over time and building in new technologies that can allow that to happen and an efficient production workflow. For us, that was introducing new technologies to that pipeline such as Unreal Engine to allow that technology to be scalable and also to create kind of a hub of archival content that could potentially be pivoted into new future use cases that had not yet been defined, and to create that opportunity for scale and future pivoting through prudent use of technology that existed today.
What Happy Finish is good at and what we love to do is be brought in to answer questions of “What If.” Then we reverse engineer from that “What if,” a solution that is potentially production viable today. Then we develop that into something that approximates that “What if” in the future, but with that kind of trajectory and that vector dialed in from the start.
We’ve been really excited to explore post-pandemic a lot of the kind of burgeoning space that has opened up for those kind of solutions because of the disruption that has happened to traditional ways of working since that has occurred. Digital visual content and its importance in either an e-commerce workflow or in a design process has really come to a fore as a result of that.
Asking what if questions is of course at the heart of a company that has innovation at the center right. One of the things in innovation these days are all the discussions about the use of AI. I’m assuming that in your company there have been many discussions around that as well. How are you using AI today and how do you see it develop in the next few years?
That’s a great question and absolutely AI is everywhere in every conversation that we have. If I go back a little bit, Happy Finish has been involved in experimental projects, proof of concept projects and innovation projects for a very long time. Our first AI project actually occurred in 2017 using generative adversarial networks for a number of marketing and PR campaigns with Dove in the UK.
Specifically, we did an AI-generated avatar that brought together a perception of what motherhood looks like in the media and created a brand ambassador that was the amalgamation through an AI process of what that mother might look like, which ended up looking quite pressuring for a mother, which is the insight that we were looking for to open up a new a new debate about authenticity within the marketplace for care products for young mothers and to move away from the media perception of them.
We’ve been doing that for quite a long time, working in visual generation of people, and working in optimization optimizations of work flows around generative AI.What’s been really interesting in the last couple of years is the widespread adoption of those tools as part of the baseline bedrock of a lot of established tool sets that visual artists use.Photoshop, Autodesk products, AI is now baked in.
Where we are using it today is as a force multiplier. It helps us do small iterative tasks where we are trying to find the core of what is visually impactful, quickly, effectively, and essentially to kill bad ideas before they cost us or our clients a lot of money. So if we can iterate by creating mood boards and style references for a creative document to inform a full production faster, then that is a win for us.
On a very practical level, we’re using AI today as a way to inform early stage decision making and creative developments for a wide variety of tasks to gain marginal gains in production that we can passed on as cost savings and time savings for our our productions.
It sounds like you’re taking what we will call a constructive disruption approach to AI and a positive but careful path ahead. That’s wonderful. One last question Toby that I want to ask. You’re an executive at a not-so-young startup, but still it’s a startup spirit, highly innovative. I assume you have learned a lot over the last few years in a very dynamic space. For people who are starting their entrepreneurial career, what advice do you have for them based on your deep experience of how to how to engage in a highly dynamic area?
Absolutely. My experience here comes from the service side, being a vendor to larger brands, to agencies, to design studios. On the service side of innovation, I think the advice that I would give is never be fully satisfied with the end result, but do so in a constructive way that allow you to learn what worked and what didn’t, and pursue that whenever possible. But at the same time, listen out for the subtle signals that your clients will give you about the real problem they’re trying to solve, as opposed to the somewhat tactical instruction they might be giving you at that time.
If you can create an environment of trust and innovation with your clients, with your partners, where that subtext is made known and you can bring technological solutions that might not be, might not be fully developed or they might not be aware of and you can be a playmaker. You create a huge amount of value both for yourself as a vendor, but also for that brand in exploring areas that they wouldn’t have otherwise had either the speed or the necessarily the knowledge of the bleeding edge of what’s possible to execute on and explore more fully.
So I think, if I can sum that down to, be a playmaker and actively listen with a focus on being solution-oriented.
Toby, those are wise words to live by, be solution-oriented and be a playmaker. Thank you so much for this very engaging discussion and I wish you all the best in this great interesting world of visual graphics and production. We hope to see you back sometime soon.
Thank you, Stan, a pleasure being here. Thank you.
