MakeMake founder and Academy Award Winning Editor Angus Wall described his multi-armed entertainment studio as a 25 year-old startup. Over the course of two-and-a-half decades, Angus grew the roster of editors at Rock Paper Scissors while also adding a collective of 5 companies to expand the suite of production services. Individually, each company is an industry-leading outfit in its own right, but together, they were a fractured entity. Lacking the language to define their ecosystem, they approached us with a need to re-position, unify, and share their message to the outside world.
MakeMake
Designing the launch of a new breed entertainment studio
MakeMake Designing the launch of a new breed entertainment studio
Brand Positioning
Forming the collective story of many companies coming together under one studio banner
To understand how 6 companies could be presented as one organism, we had to know the inner workings intimately. We defined a foundational ethos that supports and respects the individual companies while simultaneously uniting them. A naming process followed, grounded in foundational research and storytelling, that culminated in a clear winner: MakeMake.
Digital
Architecting a digital home for a community of brands
With MakeMake newly identified as the umbrella studio, our goal was to present a unified story for the collective while also retaining separate experiences if users sought to navigate directly to a company sub-website within the group. We decided to wrap the digital experience in a user interface that functions like a fanned-out deck of cards, always accessible when opening the menu.
Though there is a singular URL framework, each sibling company can stand alone as a self-contained website experience. Legacy clientele of an individual brand can directly visit and experience that company’s site as its own singular offering, while the new design story illustrates that each company is now part of a larger studio.
Content Marketing
Bringing a symphony of voices alive in harmony
The work we did to define the internal values, voice and tone, and the positioning of the new studio informed the About Copy we wrote for each brand within the MakeMake family. Once strong guidelines were established, we designed a content marketing program that would present a united brand narrative from the studio while also allowing each company to maintain their own unique identity.
Functionally, there’s a centralized editorial program on the website, spidering amongst the different company verticals with appropriate diplomacy. We create original content to live on the site, including interviews with creatives, that gives their audience a peek behind the curtain on MakeMake happenings. On the social front, each company's individual channels can post freely, with brand guidelines in place to make sure those independent voices are syncopated and social strategy recommendations made by our team to increase engagement. By ideating and creating original content for social, like serialized posts designed to encourage follower interaction, we are able to celebrate creativity within the organization and allow MakeMake companies to be a source of inspiration for their larger creative community.
