Business arrangements are developed in many arenas, ranging from executive offices overlooking sweeping vistas to smoky backrooms. For Cause+Effect founders Jason Zemlicka and Jamie Hubbard, the seeds of their business were planted while riding speedy road bikes on the hills in and around New York.

Before they founded their creative studio that now handles work for clients ranging from Hulu and IFC to Intel, Samsung and Sesame Workshop, Zemlicka and Hubbard met at Nickelodeon. Zemlicka was a supervising producer there; Hubbard a freelance preditor. Their careers brought them together, but their shared hobby united them.

“We hit it off talking about bike racing,” Zemlicka said. “We became fast friends and on one of our many bike rides we talked a lot about work, and that led us to thinking how we could work together independently of working for networks. Over a couple years we came up with the rough strategy for starting a small creative shop, and one day we pulled the trigger and we did it.”

Cause+Effect started slowly, but it had steady work from clients Nickelodeon and VH1, and it grew quickly. Today, the studio occupies an entire floor of its building on West 27th Street, but the open-road tenets of discovery and exploration on which it was founded have not been diminished.

“An understanding of what the perception is, is always the first step of the creative process,” said Hubbard. “What is the perception of the brand outside of what they want to communicate and what they’re telling us?” Finding the answer is a process of “talking to trusted people, looking at forums, doing research in various ways to just get a bigger picture and understanding of what the client wants to put out there.” Once those elements are firmly established it’s time to turn the Cause+Effect team on to the project.

“As we get into creative development, we really open it up,” Hubbard said, “and our brainstorm sessions are broad and robust… We really try to engage our team and let everybody’s talents show through and we try to create an open-ended creative process that encourages participation and active ideation. I’d rather have 50 ideas and cull that down than have two people invest themselves in one idea for days and then step back and go, ‘Huh. Did we hit the mark here?’”

Cause+Effect staffers get to wear many hats, and everyone can find the chance to contribute creatively, if so inclined. The studio’s head of production, for instance, Sean Patrick Kelly, is also one half of a two-man directing team that credits itself as “Sean&Steve.” Kelly’s directing partner, Steve Figueiredo, began at Cause+Effect as a project manager and post-producer.

“It all started meeting here at the office and being part of that collaborative spirit,” said Hubbard. “They were really bringing great ideas to the table when we were developing creative and they really bring out the best in each other. That was evident in the writing process and has really proven to be true in their directing as well.”

Since rising through the creative ranks, Sean&Steve have directed some of Cause+Effect’s most high-profile projects, including “Come TV With Us,” a digital campaign for Hulu that finds Parks and Recreation star Aubrey Plaza introducing the audience to an array of potential viewer specimens whose lives could be changed by a subscription to the streaming service.

Cause+Effect began working on the Hulu campaign months before a celebrity spokesperson was selected. When they found out it would be the sandpaper-dry Plaza, they immediately set about rewriting the scripts for the spots, “which was a challenge,” said Cause+Effect creative director Anthony Gelsomino. “If you know Aubrey Plaza, she wasn’t really the most happy-go-lucky seller. So we had to figure out a way to make her voice come through when she was kind of trying to sell you something, and make it sound cool and make it sound like she wasn’t being that Aubrey Plaza that you think of when you think of Parks and Rec.”

Working through what Gelsomino estimates to be between 15 and 20 drafts, the studio finally found a tone that accomplishes no mean feat: “We took what you love about Aubrey Plaza and mixed it with her as a real person and tried to give it her voice and sell at the same time.”

The act of successfully walking such complicated balance beams is in evidence throughout Cause+Effect’s portfolio. Another Sean&Steve-directed project, for Geico’s “It’s What You Do” campaign, involved two spots that had to integrate the insurance brand with IFC’s quirky comedy Portlandia without alienating viewers who might not be familiar with the show.

“They knew they wanted them to feel like they came from the Portlandia world but also feel completely at home playing next to any other ‘It’s What You Do’ Geico spots,” said Zemlicka.

Both of the above clips exhibit a wry tone that often finds its way into Cause+Effect’s work. It’s a unique kind of comedic edge that garners laughter while hinting at something deeper.

“There is an obvious place for humor in everything and when it’s needed, yes it is a sweet spot of ours and we can deliver, but obviously not every job is going to be comedy,” Gelsomino said. “Whether it be the joke that makes the spots sing or the intelligence behind something that’s more technology-based… I feel like comedy is king but we have the backbone to provide storytelling that’s on a more serious note.”

That sentiment was firmly established in a brand film Cause+Effect completed last year for the launch campaign for Intel’s 3D XPoint memory technology.

In addition to crafting elaborate and beautifully executed special effects for a campaign dubbed “Architect of the Future,” the studio “created a whole brand filter and sweeping large-scale story that [Intel] could reference for marketing materials going forward,” Hubbard said. “A lot of people don’t think of storage as being glamorous or storage enabling really great things, but it is the backbone of computing architecture… We kept coming back to Intel being architects of the future and enabling architects of the future, and storage being a big part of that, and we wanted to tell a really expansive story of what storage can enable.”

With a permanent Los Angeles office in the works, Cause+Effect continues to grow, gradually expanding its clientele to non-broadcast companies including movie studios such as Fox, Paramount and Universal. But growth, Hubbard said, comes second to the preservation of company culture: “We love what we do and even if we just kept doing what we’re doing now, it would be amazing. Who doesn’t want to go to work every day and work on projects that you’re passionate about and invested in with people you love being in the creative trenches with? It doesn’t get much better than that.”

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