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It’s three years since we first took a deep breath and swung open the doors to Daylight. To mark our third birthday, we (what else?) recorded a podcast. It features Duncan Greive, founder of The Spinoff, host of The Fold and also a co-founder of Daylight in conversation with two of the most crucial figures in Daylight’s short but proud history: CEO Lee Lowndes, and ECD, Charlie Godinet.
The following conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity and brevity. It’s best absorbed as audio, but read on if that’s how you like it.
Duncan
Kia ora Charlie, Lee! It's quite wild to think that it's now three years since we founded Daylight. Especially when you think back to its founding, amidst lockdowns and the huge uncertainty of the pandemic – and in some ways responding to that reality. Do you want to think back to those early days and speak to the leap that it involved for each of you personally?
Lee
I often think back to that pretty buzzy point in time. I remember coming in and meeting you [Duncan] for the first time and talking about the relationship that had formed with the WHO [World Health Organization] and getting a sense of the huge amount of content that the original team – a small group of freelancers and a couple of account managers – were producing for the WHO to distribute around markets all over the world. I remember feeling intimidated by that, because even though I’d come from a world of creating million dollar beer ads, those ads didn’t quite have the same impact as an explainer being shared by [WHO Director-General] Tedros Ghebreyesus, or the UN. I was pretty nervous to step into the role. I guess from there we just expanded a lot and grew and it became a necessity to break the business out of The Spinoff and to set something up independently.
Duncan
Obviously you had on one level, this intimidation factor – but there must have also been something that compelled you to take the leap. Do you recall what it was that drew you in?
Lee
It really felt like it was a totally blank sheet of paper, one that probably wasn't available within the market. There are social agencies, PR agencies and in-house content teams within media organisations, but a lot of that work isn't really being executed at a really, really excellent level. This was the opportunity to create something totally new, embedded in the news and media landscape, and to attempt to bring some of that seriously high craft from a brand agency perspective and into that world. Which is why I slid into Charlie’s DMs and said ‘Let's go have a beer, and want to leave your job and go and do this with me?’
Duncan
Charlie, let's talk about that. Because you were on a track at your previous agency and everything was set up for you to have a very fruitful career there. But again, like Lee, you chose to take this leap into the unknown. What was it about the proposition that made you think, ‘actually, yeah, I'm willing to do this’?
Charlie
Well, if I reflect back, I remember feeling just really excited by it. It was the allure of doing something completely new. At Colenso, we were always taught to chase the unknown and to go into something face-first with blind optimism. And ironically, that was the attitude that got me over to Daylight. When Lee explained that we were creating something that didn't really exist in this market – and there weren’t even really many shining examples from across the world – it felt like we could really take that and mould it.
Duncan
The foundational client was the World Health Organization working on the pandemic. As far as assignments go, this wasn't just another beer ad. Charlie, what did you find challenging about this client and the scale of the problem, and the different kind of way that it demanded you and your team work?
Charlie
Yeah, I think that was maybe the most terrifying part for me. Because ultimately when we talk about creating ads for beer companies or other products, I am a consumer of those products. And I was able to always put myself into that work. Coming to work on subject matter like vaccines and misinformation, it was quite removed from my day-to-day life. But what I was really impressed with was the rigour that was put around it. In traditional agencies, we have brand planners, but here we were reaching out to expert reaerchers, basically people who are at the centre of these conversations, and asking them to help us distil insights around these topics. So that reassured me that we were starting from a place of truth.
Duncan
While Daylight is very much not a traditional agency, the fact that you spent your careers in agencies has informed a huge part of what you've done with Daylight. It’s that merging of the editorial and journalistic world with that of the agency that I think gave it an initial point of difference. Lee, tell me about what you learned from agencies that you brought to Daylight?
Lee
I think at Daylight we have the privilege of working on a number of very complex but really important client sectors and industries. A lot of that spans across technology, but also quite extensively within the health and science sector. So, yes, working with the WHO, but working with National Science Challenge groups and organisations, through to local governments and NGOs. These groups often don't come with a very clear communications plan or a key insight that they need to communicate. It's a lot of fractured comms channels and hard-to-reach audiences. It’s been an interesting process to take the rigour of breaking down a clear communications strategy, trying to define a core insight and a very simple message that needs to come through in the work, and then giving it to the creative guys to explore and think of ideas that are really outside of the box.
For example The Delivery, that we created for the WHO recently. That brief was originally to explore how we bring an enormous amount of global COVID vaccine data to life through a data visualisation project. But that turned into a really immersive digital experience and developed into the concept of a cold box being the digital time capsule that wraps that information and then building a platform for people to be able to consume that content through.
So I think in summary, we've been able to bring agency rigour, approach, and expertise to a number of different categories that haven't maybe had that process before and it's been very interesting to see the types of work that come off the back of that.
Charlie
To feed into that, we're still in pursuit of the idea. We protect the idea over anything. But what's been amazing is we had a blank sheet of paper – so we were able to set up a craft department that had illustrators and animators. Those people don't traditionally sit within agencies. But we have that within our creative department, and now with the technology team as well, we integrated those teams and that's where we’re seeing those unique campaigns and ideas coming to life. We’re getting the perspective from the animator and the illustrator straight away. We're giving the tech perspective straight away – and that's something that we've fostered here, which is really cool.
Duncan
It’s been about two years since we merged with Translate Digital, which created the more fully-formed version of Daylight that we know today, where the creative disciplines and the technological disciplines are one. Charlie, do you want to talk about what it has been like to learn the different languages and approaches of technology, and how that has changed the way that you approach a creative challenge?
Charlie
Yeah, firstly, having that level of craft at your fingertips is epic. You can test something without spending a huge amount of money and know if it's the right solution or not, and move on. Being able to do that quickly is allowing us to get to really amazing places, responsibly. I think having the tech guys being at the start of a project means we have parameters early on but can still protect the idea throughout. It’s so easy for the conceptual department to go ‘let's do this, and what if we did this’ but having those kinds of guardrails and the right people in the room at the right time is really great. What Daylight's able to do – and you can see it with some of the products we're putting out – is that every single part of the project is integrated.
Duncan
Lee, is there a particular project where you felt like you saw a truly integrated technology and creative vision of Daylight expressed?
Lee
I think there are two that are interesting to call out. One is Safeswim, which was a historical client that came to Daylight when we merged with Translate Digital. So, that's a digital product that's been run through Auckland Council for seven years. It’s always been a really functional product that's had a very single-minded use of providing information on where it is safe to swim for Aucklanders. Bringing that client into Daylight, we were then looking at how to communicate or build bigger awareness around this incredible tool and product. And so one of the first things we did with them last year was create a brand platform for Safeswim. We created a really beautiful illustrated world, and a templated brand campaign system that was easy to roll out across hundreds of different channels and touchpoints. And then embedded a lot of the stylistic craft into the product itself, which elevated the whole experience.
The second one would be Pacific Media Network. That was a true end-to-end offering. We worked extensively with their team to understand the audience challenges that they had and the shift the network was going to have to make to create an entirely new digital infrastructure to talk to younger Pacific audiences in Aotearoa. We then went through the process of mapping out what that experience would look like, designing it and delivering the development part of that process. But across all of that was a very deeply considered brand positioning piece of work that Charlie led, refining what Pacific Media Network stood for and then building a seriously loud and proud design system to connect all of their different media channels and touchpoints, pulling them together into a single digital experience.
Duncan
Charlie for you, that project must have had a particular kind of resonance and something that you can't really imagine walking in the door at your previous agency roles. Do you want to talk about what it meant to you?
Charlie
I had a deep connection with that particular project based on my Pacific heritage. When I thought about the brand positioning, I thought about my Nanna and all these amazing Pacific people that forged lives here in Aotearoa. I wanted to think about my experience growing up. Life is very different here compared to where my roots are in Samoa, and so it made me think about the cultural expression of that in a new way.
Another thing to note is where a traditional agency might have solely focussed on brand positioning work in this project and put a band-aid on it by making it look flashy, we could recognise that it was an infrastructure problem and we needed that to catch up to the modern media landscape. So we were able to literally build the product and then wrap it in something that was truly meaningful for Pacific people. Seeing both sides of the business really come together and create something super special was really cool.
Duncan
So the way that we've come to explain Daylight is ‘responding to the world as it shifts’ There's a lot that we do and it can be hard to explain it all. What does that phrase mean to you?
Lee
I kind of hate the word perma-crisis now because I feel like it's been said so much over the last 18+ months. But everything pre-2019 feels like a golden era of some old world that we were all living in and then everything after 2019 (particularly the pandemic) feels pretty goddamn disruptive and like it just constantly changes overnight. We’re living in a world that we're kind of slightly losing control of. I think the concept of ‘responding to the world as it shifts’ has really come out of that environment and that context that we're living in now. We were, as a team, born within a newsroom and responding to literally the biggest global event that's happened in modern history, having to be incredibly reactive but also crafting messaging that very clearly communicated key information.
That essence has been carried forward into what we do now where we're helping clients who are trying to grapple with how they need to respond to shifting economic times, shifting political landscapes, shifting cultural changes, and be a bit more reactive and nimble to it, all through digital-first channels. So to us ‘responding to the world as it shifts’ looks like content storytelling and being able to react across a really advanced range of mediums and formats for clients from film through to podcasting, editorial and digital products and experiences.
Duncan
So we've been reflecting a lot on the past three years and what will forever be the foundation stones of Daylight – but the business actually feels like it's starting to have a strong sense of identity, and how it's differentiated in the market. Charlie, what is it that you're most excited about in terms of taking the hard-won lessons of the first three years and seeing where you can go from there?
Charlie
I'm most excited about further integration of the teams. Traditionally, we all sit in our separate departments and what we're fostering here at Daylight is the full integration of those teams. I think over the last three years we've done that really well with our creative and digital teams, but actually now including the craft teams in that too so we have this amazing ability to tell stories within our products that are stunning and truly meaningful. That's probably what I'm most excited about to see – how far we can push that, and what a different team looks like on each job. What we saw out of the studio last year was, I think, amazing for our scale and I don't want to lose that. I think as we continue to play in every medium and then mixing those mediums, that’s where we're going to find our edge.
Duncan
Thank you both so much. It's been an amazing few years to get to this point. I’m really excited to see where it goes from here.
