Offering the full production package: Claire Young talks about VCCP's Girl&Bear

The production landscape has changed beyond recognition over the last few years - there are more channels than ever before thanks to the explosion of social and new tech. To keep up with consumer demands and deliver in these channels everything needs to be made faster, campaigns are more integrated than ever before, and we’ve also seen a big move to self-filmed and low(wer)-fi content creation.

Therefore the world of production has had to change to keep up with delivering to all those touch points.

The pandemic also created an inversion point, a moment of reflection of what was and wasn't working in the industry. It showed how creatively capable we are when forced into unconventional circumstances. The old norms were challenged for the better. It accelerated us changing the way we make, introducing more variety to how we make.

These are the nub of why we set of Girl&Bear – and to challenge the bad habits of the production industry and flip the usual model on its head.

Creating Girl&Bear was about evolving the way we make, to create a new shape of production agency that delivers against the changing landscape of an integrated communication agency. It’s about ensuring that craft is ever present, but also about being able to deliver good value within the requirements of the task.

We felt that too often clients were being asked to choose between an agency that could deliver them a beautifully-crafted idea which traditionally comes with a high price tag, or an agency offering them value, speed, or a scale that comes with a compromise to quality.

At G&B, we fundamentally challenge this. As the makers at VCCP, we are fully integrated, which enables us to give the love and craft you get at the ideation stage to every single asset. With us, there is no need for clients to make a choice - we will always deliver craft without compromise, whatever the budget, whatever the channel, wherever in the world.

It’s an exciting time to be in production with new capabilities emerging so rapidly and because there are now so many channels and formats to deliver the demands on our making teams are greater than ever. A linear process, normal not that many years ago, just will not work with today’s output requirements.

To ensure that we prioritise creative production, we try to make sure that production thinking is happening upstream. We have strong relationships with both strategy and creative, which allows us to bring production thinking into the development process. The first ‘making’ conversations happen between the planner and our creative producers as soon as the brief lands – and in doing this, we’ve given the makers and production at Girl&Bear an important louder voice in the comms agency ecosystem, where historically agencies in production have had a quieter voice.

It’s something we apply to all aspects of the modern production process – whether we are working with Girl&Bear internal talent or partnering with various production partners– to bring all our ideas to life.