03. Business, Systems & Scale
01 / Creative Network
At StudioNow, we built a distributed network of exceptional creative talent, first across the United States and then around the world. Talent ranged from independent filmmakers and animators to specialist creators, small production teams, high-end production companies and other specialized creative partners. Scale mattered, but only if the quality of the work remained high.
$4M → $20M+
Annual production growth
10,000+
Vetted creative professionals
70,000+
Projects
6,000+
Cities
60
Countries
A distributed creative network built to put the right talent within reach, wherever the work happened.
Building that network meant much more than recruiting names into a database. I built the processes that helped us strategically grow and diversify the talent in the Network, and helped shape the technology needed to make that model scalable. We developed systems for finding and vetting talent, capturing detailed information about capabilities and experience, and using technology to enhance producer judgment in building the right creative team for each assignment. Creative styles and guidelines created useful boundaries without turning the work into rigid templates.
Our customers were no longer limited by geography or by the names in a producer’s Rolodex. We could have crews filming in dozens of markets around the world at the same time, with the right creative team assembled for each assignment. We also built distributed post-production capacity, creating a follow-the-sun model that kept work moving around the clock. High-quality production at scale had become a reality.
As the company evolved, the same underlying approach supported increasingly sophisticated work for some of the world’s largest brands.
02 / COMMERCIAL GROWTH
At AOL, StudioNow worked closely with Ad Sales on major advertiser opportunities — brainstorming ideas, shaping content programs and often joining the pitch. Production became part of the commercial proposition: a value-add the sales team could use to strengthen an offer, expand a media commitment or close a deal.
In one year, StudioNow production was included in more than $75 million in media commitments, including major programs with Verizon, AT&T and Toyota.
$75M+
in annual media commitments WITH StudioNow production
$27M
Verizon media commitment
$25M
AT&T media commitment
$2.8M
Toyota ChooseControl program value
/ MULTI-YEAR PARTNERSHIP
StudioNow’s role in AOL’s Verizon relationship shows how custom content could expand the commercial opportunity. In the first year, the program included the production of a slate of short-form brand spots. Year two saw us push the creative ambition further, expanding into larger-scale storytelling, including Share America, a cross-country branded-content project built around music, people and place. Each year, Verizon increased its media commitment when custom production was incorporated into the total package.
YEAR ONE / BRANDED Commercial spots
YEAR TWO / SHARE AMERICA
03 / EMBEDDED CAPABILITY
At Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, we were brought in to replace and significantly improve the in-house production capabilities of two iconic brands. The mandate was broader than efficiency. We challenged the traditional approach to in-house production, with the goal of raising the level of talent and creativity, improving cost and scalability, and bringing a more flexible operating model to the work.
I spearheaded much of the implementation, helping identify, hire and train the right people and roll the model out thoughtfully. We built the studio around a strong core of producers who could lead the work, protect the creative standard and stay close to the business. Around that core, we applied the same StudioNow model, using the broader Network to add specialized skills and burst capacity as demand changed without continually adding full-time headcount.
Our work at Coca-Cola ultimately led, through referral and word of mouth, to a similar engagement with McDonald’s.
CafeMom Studios was another expression of the same idea. We helped CafeMom win a multi-million-dollar original programming initiative funded by YouTube, then used a similar model to build the production capability that delivered hundreds of episodes across multiple series.
The embedded studio model marked an important new way for StudioNow to grow, extending the business beyond project-by-project production into deeper, ongoing operating relationships with clients.
Coca-Cola Studios / Pitch Artifact
Page from the presentation that helped win the Coca-Cola Studios business. The storyboard framed the studio around talent, collaboration, and raising the creative bar for in-house production.
04 / WORKFLOW TECHNOLOGY
When the system becomes a company
Production Spend Sourced & Bid Through Octerra
Octerra / Bid & Award Workflow
A live project view showing competing bids, revisions, vendor details, creative treatment and award selection within a shared production workflow.
In the course of working with one of the world’s largest and most sophisticated marketers, we began to see a much bigger problem. Production is often one of the largest components of a brand’s marketing investment after media, yet brands were entrusting much of that spend to agencies with little to no visibility into how the money was actually being spent.
Recognizing that our technology platform could help solve that problem ultimately led to the creation and spinout of a new company, Octerra. As CEO, I led the business across product, sales, marketing, and account management as we turned our technology into an enterprise SaaS platform connecting brands, agencies and production vendors in a shared workflow, giving marketers far greater visibility into how work was being sourced, bid, awarded and managed.
What had historically been an opaque process became structured, auditable data captured upstream, at the point where production decisions were actually being made. Creative production had long resisted traditional procurement approaches because the work was complex, subjective and highly decentralized. Octerra was designed specifically for that reality and ultimately served some of the world's largest marketers, supporting more than $600M in production spend sourced and bid through the platform.
05 / APPLIED AI
Once Octerra had brought structure and visibility to the production workflow, AI opened up the next opportunity: bringing that same structure to the information moving through it. The question was where it could add real value.
Creative production generates enormous amounts of qualitative and quantitative information, much of it historically fragmented across briefs, estimates, revisions, spreadsheets and conversations. The challenge compounds when multiple production companies are bidding on the same work, each with different assumptions, scopes and ways of presenting proposals and cost.
I identified where AI could create the most value and led the product direction, defining what we needed to build, how it should work, and iterating successive versions with our development team. Built within Octerra’s AWS environment, the capability combined document extraction and generative AI to interpret complex production estimates and bidding information. Grounded in rigorous production domain knowledge, workflows and evaluation criteria, our Production Bid Intelligence Engine turned that complexity into something structured and usable, helping users identify not only what was present or missing, but what should be there, why it mattered, and what needed to be resolved before a sound decision could be made.
The goal was never to have AI make the creative or commercial decision. Those judgments still belong with the people who understand the work. The opportunity was to make the work faster, the job easier and the decisions better, while turning information that once disappeared into individual projects into true production intelligence that could become more valuable over time.
Octerra / AI Bid Intelligence
AI-assisted analysis organizes requirements, compares competing bids, surfaces gaps and inconsistencies, and gives producers a clearer starting point for decisions that still require human judgment.
Requirement-Level Analysis
Project requirements are evaluated against each bid, with supporting evidence organized side by side for human review.
Systems & Scale