Following a shift in ownership, London-based agency Devilfish Creative has relaunched as Wonderful Content. The new name reflects a new commitment to meeting the needs of modern broadcasters, said the company’s new creative director, Andi Granger.

“Those types of huge broadcast budgets for rebranding are not around as much, mainly because of new technology and new ways of producing things.” he told Brief from Wonderful’s new office in the Shoreditch neighborhood of London. “We’ve found there’s a need to support broadcasters with more added-value content. [Broadcasters’] internal teams make their day-to-day trailers and that sort of work, but when it comes to 360 work, internal broadcast teams are not necessarily that well set up for that.”

Wonderful will continue to do the broadcast branding and advertising work that Devilfish built its reputation on, but will also widen its offerings to include print design, video production and digital initiatives. With a background as a creative director for networks such as BBC and Sky, Granger has experience launching huge channels and producing multimedia advertising for massive shows. But also, having led large creative teams within those networks, he has a keen understanding of how agencies such as Wonderful can help the folks on the inside.

“Not only is Andi passionate about finding new and innovative ways to apply creativity to broadcasters, but he’s absolutely rooted in the day-to-day requirements of the job,” said Moray McLaren, Wonderful’s business director.

In addition to hiring Granger, another large part of Wonderful’s transition will involve tapping more directly into a global network of creatives that Devilfish founded in 2006: The Smalls. Begun as a two-day iPod-centric film festival called “Small Films for Small Screens,” The Smalls caught the attention of Apple itself, which wound up sponsoring that inaugural event. From there, The Smalls continued to produce filmmaking events and competitions, and eventually evolved into an online community of more than 10,000 directors, designers, artists, musicians and other creatives who could not only network with each other but with potential employers. In The Smalls’ Pitch Room, brands, nonprofits, recording artists seeking music videos and other entities post briefs that the community may bid on.

Previously, The Smalls existed in tandem with Devilfish, but wasn’t necessarily an integral part of the business. But Wonderful intends to draw heavily on the network it created, directly tapping the member base for video productions and other endeavors on a per-project basis.

“You get designers, artists, musicians, developers, and you make these interesting combinations, like pop-up teams,” said Granger. “You create these dream teams for client briefs. It’s all about connecting things. That’s what we love to do. We believe that when the right people, skills and ideas come together, wonderful things happen.”

Working in promo is generally a creatively stimulating career, but even in that happy realm, any number of factors can cause a worker to lose his or her motivation. By constantly supplementing its permanent staff’s broadcast industry expertise with new artistic personalities, visions and points of view recruited from The Smalls, Wonderful will be “able to offer some amazing creativity, keeping it fresh,” said Granger. “And, it’s a great way of casting a net to get lots of ideas and treatments for us. We sort of call it the world’s biggest creative department.”

In its drive to better meet the needs of the modern broadcaster, Wonderful has hit across a most modern way of producing content: personalizing each and every project by crowdsourcing from an ultra-specific social network that the company itself has built and curated.

“For us to be able to have at the heart of our business a nucleus of senior people drawn from broadcast and advertising and media and digital, and then be able to plug into this creative network… we thought that was just kind of the dream ticket,” said McLaren. “Endless creativity but filtered through a hard-won broadcast sensibility… As creative people, if we fill up people’s lives with content – whether that’s a great piece of print design or a digital app or a channel rebrand – we’ve almost got a moral obligation to make it wonderful.”

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