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LONDON—Paris-based agency Les Télécréateurs has long been a regular face on the advertising production landscape. The company, founded in 1987 by Arno Moria, planted its roots in the short film and experimental television space but over time has branched out to commercials, music videos and branded content.
As activity in these sectors increased on its home turf and development abroad expanded, the company felt a need to rebrand and streamline its business. And so last year Les Télécréateurs became three separate entities: Insurrection and Division, both of which concentrate on production, and Movement, the design and creative strategy strand of the business.
“The name ‘Les Télécréateurs’ started to feel very dated and was becoming a bit of a burden throughout the years,” says Julien Chavepayre, head of creative strategy and development at Movement. “The company has evolved so much and our work has expanded to commercials, music videos, content for brands and TV channels and post-production. We felt … we needed to become more specialized and clean up our offering. People knew we had good talent to offer but to express specific expertise in a specific domain was becoming a bit more difficult.”
The core business of what was formerly Les Télécréateurs – heavy duty commercial and music video production—sits within Insurrection and is led by Moria.
“It’s the part of the business we use to produce a major film, commercial or music video,” says Chavepayre.
Division, meanwhile, houses the roster of French directors and creative talents the company has built up throughout the years. Insurrection/Division’s Francois Rousselet recently directed a new campaign for Axe grooming products that aired during Super Bowl 50. while directing duo Fleur & Manu were the visionaries behind rapper Drake’s “Energy” video.
Movement, is more of a hybrid, says Chavepayre. It’s the creative design and strategy business (which can also produce campaigns) that was born out of the shifting ecosystem of branded content.
“Parallel to our core production activity, we saw a shift from becoming a production company to a branded company,” he says. “This shift, in terms of environment, has called for much more strategy to build consistency, legitimacy and a fluid experience for the audience. Coming from production, we’ve always valued creative strategy and examining how you can transform a brand but sometimes this can be boring to the types of creatives we work with. So, we look at how to turn the strategy into a source of inspiration for them.”
In the current consumer climate, where global expectations of consumers is high and their relationships with brands span across multiple platforms “the public has never been more educated than today,” says Chavepayre.
Movement’s aim is to channel these interactions, make them consistent, meaningful and efficient. As a result, it became a necessity to put more marketing prowess into the business.
“We want to be the creative company but we realized we needed to bring in much more marketing and advertising culture into the group,” Chavepayre says. “We had the A-List creative talent but we also needed to have A-List marketing forces to be able to evolve and match the challenges that development of the economy has created for our clients.”
Last year, Movement hired advertising guru Jean Noël Perrin, former managing director of BETC Euro RSCG and DDB and previous CEO of digital agency Megalo. “He’s our own Mad Man,” quips Chavepayre.
Now, Movement is increasingly being approached by more consumer brands to do design and film work. The company is currently delivering a launch campaign for Samsung in France as well as an identity job for a large business center in the middle of Paris. Additionally, the outfit is in the throes of rebranding a major international news channel.
The company has also worked with Disney to launch a new channel in France dubbed Disney Cinema, in addition to rebranding the 2015 ICC Cricket World Cup, a campaign which reached 1.1 billion viewers across 47 global networks. And it did a network rebrand for sports channel Eurosport as well as campaigns for luxury fashion house Hermès.
“Now we can see that this vision to integrate more and more marketing and advertising into the culture of our work is becoming very fruitful and is actually quite an accelerator,” says Chavepayre.
But Chavepayre stresses that the rebrand of Les Télécréateurs is not a change in direction for the company, but rather a response to its natural evolution. The three divisions, and its fourth label Suffragette (which focuses on film and digital content for luxury fashion brands and had already existed before the rebrand) can work separately or together on a project-by-project basis.
“It’s the bridges between the companies that are important,” says Chavepayre. “We believe that sometimes we need to keep the team small and other times, we need to collaborate more. We are the same in the sense that we are still ever-striving for delivering creative and peculiar projects to give a voice to a brand. What has changed is that we are now better able to create consistency and fluidity of that voice throughout all media.”
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