Before founding their own company in London, Simon Dixon and Aporva Baxi each rose through the ranks of the same agency, a multinational operation with more than 200 employees. Dixon was creative director for its San Francisco office, Baxi for its New York office. They each had “really exciting careers working with major international brands,” Baxi told Brief, but something was missing.

“We wanted to be far more hands-on, going back to the process of design and making things,” Baxi told Brief. “We wanted to be in control of the whole process, the relationship with collaborators and suppliers, so there was an end-to-end oversight… We wanted to control things ourselves, to see what we could do on our own terms. That was the driving force behind DixonBaxi.”

Founded in 2002, brand agency DixonBaxi was not necessarily inclined toward broadcast design work, yet won a pitch early on to do the brand positioning for MTV2 in the UK. The duo’s unique ability to be both creative and analytical, it turned out, was a perfect fit for that industry.


“What I think [MTV] found interesting,” said Baxi, “was that we came at it from a very strategic point of view… We understood the mechanics of making a channel – how a schedule works; all the [elements] you need for a channel to function; how it translates off-air; how it translates to second-screen, and so on… back then those things were fairly new and we could bring that [360-degree] brand approach to it. I think that’s why we ended up being quite successful there.”

Success has seen DixonBaxi grown into a team of more than 25 thinkers, designers, writers and animators, though that rigorous attention to detail remains firmly intact. On the company’s website, a four-step diagram outlines their approach, starting with insight, followed by interpretation, inspiration and impact. DixonBaxi understands that its campaigns have to be both creative and strategic in order to be successful.

Step one involves “finding the emotional heart.” It doesn’t sound particularly strategic, but what it entails, said Baxi, is “really uncovering what’s within the business itself. Uncovering insights, doing one-on-one interviews with the stakeholder team, speaking to the audience, doing research and so on… What comes out of those sessions, workshops and interviews is what we term the ‘emotional heart’ – the pure purpose that drives the brand or business.”

Perusing DixonBaxi’s impressive list of recent projects, that unveiled essence often seems to be synonymous with culture, both around the brand in question and within it. In rebranding Scotland’s STV, for instance they asked the stakeholders what it means to be part of the Scottish culture. They then captured that with an attitude summed up in two words: “Big Life.”

For their rebrand of Telemundo for the network’s U.S. audience, the words “Latino soy, aqui estoy” (“I am Latin, I am here”) expressed not only what it means to be a viewer of the network, but to be the network itself, with the opportunity to be a cultural icon for Hispanics in the US.

Even though such clients are entertainment brands, Baxi said they each “potentially have a bigger platform and a bigger responsibility… Not every channel or brand can do that but I do like that term culture because one, you’re building a culture and a place for an audience to feel relevant to them, [and two,] there’s a culture internally with people who run the brand or make it. We like to think about what it feels like to [those employees] and how the culture within that business or broadcast team is powerful enough that when they take our stuff and evolve the brand for TV, that they feel like they’ve got a mission.”

The biggest challenge of TV brands nowadays, Baxi continued, “is that the stuff where a lot of brands have typically put in a lot of effort is becoming way less important. Whereas tone of voice or the music experience or… the swipe on an app now becomes as important as the ident. If you pick up the phone to complain, the speed with which they respond is part of the brand. Typically we think of service as being at restaurants and hotels and so on, but more and more it’s very much part of every brand… everything counts. You can do an amazing ad but what if I can’t find the contact details to get in touch with you? Those little hiccups… they’re the experiences that turn people off instantly.”

Of course, good old-fashioned spots still have a role to play, and DixonBaxi has never had a problem with those. As graphic designers with a love of film, the duo are as capable of crafting stunning visual imagery, as they did with UKTV’s Watch, as they are earning laughs, as they did for UKTV’s pay TV channel Gold and its new brand positioning, “Where Funny Takes You.”

Like any successful brand agency, DixonBaxi are ultimately storytellers, and the best brand stories “bridge the gap between strategy and how it comes to life,” said Baxi. “When they don’t connect I don’t think you’ve got a solid brand. And that has to not just be a look; it’s got to be an attitude, a tone of voice. It’s got to affect the programming and scheduling, it’s got to affect the internal team and how they work. We try to think about all those things, not just how glossy it looks or how it moves.”

Going forward, DixonBaxi will continue to do a series of extra content for Gold as well as several projects that sit outside of TV, including strategic positioning for a Scandinavian software company whose name Baxi couldn’t reveal but which has more than 350 million users. The agency is also, after nearly 13 years in existence, branching out into movies, with a feature film in the works through its sister company Story Film.

“It’s a big deal to go from the world of brands to the world of films,” said Baxi. “I don’t know many companies of our type that migrate into [that] world, so it’s an interesting time.”

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