The company shares Blake’s philosophy that the best stories and content are rooted in authenticity, value proposition and entertainment for the intended audience. So this time has been fruitful for us to help brands focus more on true branded storytelling and less on advertising, something that I think has contributed to our growth.” That’s really what we've always been about: telling stories that matter. “We’re seeing a lot of brands not rely as much on traditional ads and invest more in telling their brand story in a more holistic, human, meaningful ways. Now at around 100 people strong, Conscious Minds has recently used the pandemic as a chance to start working smarter, analyse consumer changes and re-focus on investing in storytelling. That's hopefully what makes us different, that true end-to-end experience from audience strategy - way upstream - to execution and delivery.” When you do that, you lose a little bit of connectivity, that sense of the ‘North Star’ every time you pass a baton to a different company. You don’t have to use two to three different companies to pass that baton between each other to get the same result. As a studio, we can move a lot quicker and connect the strategy to the end result in a really seamless way.
#AIRTABLE CAREERS HOW TO#
“You can find a lot of idea companies and advertising agencies or strategy companies thinking about those things, but they don't know how to make it end-to-end. According to the founder, the greatest benefit of this holistic end-to-end approach is the “synergy of time, money, and resources.” In an era where brands want more, higher quality and cheaper content, he says this synergy becomes a huge competitive advantage. Likening the process to the practices of entertainment companies, a la Warner Brothers or Netflix, he says the approach is more holistic and audience-first, creating things in response to what they learn from audience research. Where Blake feels the company has found a niche, is how early they begin their research on projects compared to other creative companies. I think our experience was really just being really young and probably naive enough to try and be a part of the change that we could see happening - the evolution of where we are today with storytelling and content.” We did a lot of things backwards, but now I think it's becoming the norm. He continues, “That beginning was also challenging because being a production company without a roster, working directly with brands was something most companies weren’t doing at the time. “Starting a company at that time and asking questions of how we could do things differently and capitalise on some of these new and emerging platforms - and exploring the storytelling potential of these - was a real motivator for me.” Beginning in this difficult environment before the rise of Instagram and the many emerging platforms that are now commonplace, the founder resorted to his natural “challenger” inclination and underdog mentality. Starting straight out of college, Blake took his first steps into the industry in 2008 - during an economic crisis that made finding employment ever more difficult.
The creative agency was officially started in 2012 when co-founder and ECD, Cameron DeArmond joined, bringing the “science and strategic vision to quantify the value, scale, and sustainability” of Conscious Minds’ content programs.įor Blake, the ‘why?’ behind Conscious Minds revolves around one question: “Can we create a studio that works differently and tells stories that matter, but also communicates and collaborates in a new way with our clients?” He says that the company has tried to forge its own path, with an unwavering eye toward this goal - providing high quality of life and value for its community. In 2008, Blake Heal began to build Conscious Minds - planning to found a “content company” with the purpose of storytelling for both brands and ads.