What you need to know 

• Endeavour Group has overhauled its creative production model, offloading the production of “multiple millions” of owned and paid assets each week to a new AI-powered production unit co-founded by Chris Howatson and his chief data and technology officer, Hoang Nguyen.
• In a matter of months, Plus Also Studios has developed propriety technology to automate the delivery of personalisation at scale for the retail and hospitality group’s brands – including Dan Murphy’s, BWS, Pinnacle Drinks, and ALH Hotels. The account is currently serviced by a team of 30 who work exclusively on the Endeavour business.
• Plus Also will work in conjunction with BMF, which was handed a consolidated creative remit across the Endeavour portfolio in July.
• The two agencies replace an in-house Creative Studio scaled by Endeavour since 2015, as well as a fully-fledged agency village fronted by creative shops Thinkerbell and M&C Saatchi and powered by production big guns Hogarth and Wellcom.
• The savings it’s making at the back end of the business have enabled Endeavour to funnel investment upstream to ensure they’re “making the right work in the first place”, per outgoing CMO Jo Rose.
• As well as the focus on effectiveness, Rose says the transformation has been driven by a strategic decision from the boardroom to consolidate operations around the customer, which sits on the background of the obvious pressures to deliver personalisation at scale – and do so efficiently.
• GM of brand, creative & operations, Katie Dally says the result has been “a radical inverse of what most people are doing” – i.e. switching from an output based model to an input based model.
• For Chris Howatson, it’s a bid to break the volume-cost paradigm that the usual head hours renumeration model entails – they’ll be charging on measures of efficiency and effectiveness instead. It’s the first significant play of its kind in this market, and clients are buying it – Qantas, Foxtel and Petbarn have taken up the Plus Also tech on a SaaS basis.
• Success could set the blueprint for others, but with a marketing leadership transition on the horizon, Endeavour will need to work hard to make sure the new model sticks.

Alternative intelligence

Earlier this year Endeavour took an unusually non-corporate approach to AI and risk-minimisation, switching out WPP’s global production hub Hogarth and South Korean-owned Innocean’s Wellcom Worldwide for a SaaS-based AI production and asset platform that was still being built by local independent agency Howatson+Co.

Suncorp CMO Mim Haysom made a move last month on AI and production consolidating with Publicis-owned Leo Burnett and its central production unit Prodigious but Endeavour is opting for an entirely different model.

“We have production agencies and we have creative agencies and they do quite fundamentally different things. What we aren't seeing in the marketplace is the coming together of those two things. They're still radically separate, says Endeavour’s Dally.  

“We went that's actually not what we need. We need creative thinkers and problem solvers. We need strategists who understand our business problems, and we need to be constantly innovating.”

With a portfolio that spans Dan Murphy’s and BWS liquor shops, liquor distributor Pinnacle Drinks, and the ALH Hotels network, the opportunities to “simplify” and “streamline” operations are plentiful, per the remarks of MD and CEO Steve Donohue in the Group’s 2024 report – and developing the group's "shared customer foundations” is top of the list.

It's led to an overhaul that’s seen Endeavour cull both its internal Creative Studio and bloated agency village to become a first-in-class adopter of a new age AI-driven production model – hanging its hat on Howatson + Company's AI production spinoff.

With its official launch out of the way last month, that shop – Plus Also Studios – will dovetail with new creative agency of record BMF via an ‘agency partner alliance’ to deliver Endeavour assets across the piste. 

Triple top line

The group’s chief marketer, Jo Rose, tells Mi3 the decision to transform Endeavour’s creative capabilities – both internally and externally – didn’t come lightly. But three key strategic drivers made it necessary.

First, customer centricity. Endeavour had been “increasingly acknowledging” the “common customer” shared by its portfolio of hospitality and retail brands.

“Irrespective of whether someone's engaging in Dan Murphy's or they're buying six pack from BWS, they're effectively engaging in a social occasion,” explains Rose. “So we're trying to understand them better in the more holistic context of that social occasion, but also to serve them better using that very distinct but complementary set of brands that we have.”

That rounded customer view bleeds into the second driver – efficiency. I.e. consolidating the creative outputs across Endeavour’s brands and amalgamating in-house and out-sourced capabilities to “maximise the efficiency of scale that we get from that whole business investment”, per Rose.

No business is immune from the pressure to deliver more with less – and Endeavour’s content output has expanded massively across owned and paid channels in recent years.

“Multiple millions” of assets are required on a weekly basis, per Rose. She points to the circa 5.5 million users signed up to the My Dan Murphy’s loyalty program alone.

Recent annual sales events amplify the challenge – the likes of Black Friday and Cyber Monday requiring daily price and promotion changes.

"We need to be able to move at speed, and that demands quite a high volume of assets as well," adds Rose.

But more isn’t always more – hence building out an efficient front end to rein-in the back was the third driver.

“We needed to be able to scale up the volume of assets that we create, but we also wanted to make sure that we're making the right work in the first place,” says Rose. The outputs needed to be high quality, and they needed to be driving outcomes.

That wasn't necessarily the case.

Outputs to inputs

Brand, creative and operations GM Katie Dally says that meant flipping the model on its head.

“When we had this initial conversation with Chris [Howatson], he came in very boldly and said we’ll take your team from an output-based model to an input-based model. That’s a fundamental shift – actually it’s a radical inverse of what most people are doing.”

The AI-powered solution put forward by Howatson has been sold in on the basis of easing Endeavour's bottom-heavy creative resource sink.  Per Dally, as much as 90 per cent of that resource previously sat in rollout teams – i.e. content creators, designers, finished artists and copywriters.

“We might be putting 40,000 assets out ... but maybe we should only be putting four out,” she says. “We [didn’t] have the right thinking in the front-end to make sure that what we're actually creating is the right thing to be creating.”

Under the new set up, rollout skillsets account for more like 20 per cent of headcount, and “everything else has gone upstream”.

In other words, Endeavour's model is moving towards what everybody is currently suggesting AI will do – but few are yet actually doing.

With machines powering the back-end of the business, Endeavour has been able to funnel investment into bolstering the front-end with the right strategic capability – strategists, creators, creatives, innovators, technology specialists etc. – to “look at the business problem we're trying to solve”. And presumably, solve it.

The bigger idea

Endeavour went to the market earlier this year to cast its new creative and production set up.

The first step was to consolidate creative across the group, which it did with Enero Group’s BMF back in July, pulling back the Dan Murphy and BWS accounts previously been held by Thinkerbell and M&C Saatchi.

That was when the hospitality and beverages giant first alluded to its new creative strategy.

“Having one partner will help us be more purposeful in the way we grow our brands, by ensuring they are playing distinct but complementary roles in serving the full spectrum of our customer needs,” per Rose's statement at the time.

Overhauling production was less straightforward. What Endeavour needed didn’t yet exist, says Dally.

“We have production agencies, and we have creative agencies, and they do quite fundamentally different things. What we aren't seeing in the marketplace is the coming together of those two things. They're still radically separate.

“We said 'that's actually not what we need. We need creative thinkers and problem solvers. We need strategists who understand our business problems, and we need to be constantly innovating'.”

And in a room in Surry Hills a pitch began to form.

Up until a few months ago, Endeavour ran production through an internal Creative Studio, which drove scale through agency partnerships with WPP’s Hogarth and Innocean Worldwide’s Wellcom. 

It was a setup that had served the business well for years, particularly through the Woolworths demerger, but it was no longer fit-for-purpose. At least not to “build for a future fit innovative and technology-based business”, per Dally.

In the background, a conversation was developing with Howatson + Company. Already with a foot in the door via the agency’s CRM work for the Dan Murphy’s brand, CEO Chris Howatson pitched his vision for an AI-powered production hub.

It was an idea that had been brewing within the agency since 2023, as the agency explored how it might be able to leverage accelerating AI technologies both for the business, and for clients.

They wanted to do two things, per Howatson. First, to enable clients to affordably “service their ecosystems with more content”, and then to use that saving to help them understand the “efficacy of the content that they’re deploying”.

"Every brand has an incredible weight of content that they have to create – more personalisation, more channels to push it through. But there is a proportional increase with the content you create in the human labour required to create it," Howatson tells Mi3. "Unless we break that paradigm, there's no way that brands can get the content that they need without proportionately increasing their costs."

Come February this year, Howatson’s senior leadership team had agreed they’d need to build a separate, technology-driven business to make that happen. But it would require a client that was prepared to put all of its eggs in a proverbial basket that didn't even exist. But timing is everything, and Endeavour was already in the midst of its own transformation. 

"Doing it and thinking it and doing it are two different things, and it requires incredibly ambitious and intelligent client," says Howatson. "We were very fortunate to build our relationship with the Endeavour Group.”

New model army

Co-founded by Howatson and his chief data and technology officer, Hoang Nguyen, and with Endeavour as the foundational client, the Plus Also Studios prop is that of a creative technology business. It’s separated from Howatson + Company, helmed by CHEP alum, Jessica Coulson, as managing director, and Effie Athanassiou as creative director.

Basically the aim is to distil and create the high quality input upfront to then feed the rapid output machines.

“Where we're really focusing this business is on creation of master assets and orchestration of those assets. So, in most instances – well, in every instance – Plus Also would be in partnership with a top-tier creative agency. It could be Howatson+Co, it could be BMF, it could be another agency,” explains Howatson.

In the case of Endeavour it’s BMF, and per Dally the business has “completely re-orchestrated” it’s briefing system to ensure toes aren't stepped on.

“We're being really deliberate about who owns which brief types across which brands and why,” she says. “It's our job as clients to make sure that there are very clear swim lanes and delineation so that people can be driven to do their best work knowing where the lines are.”

To prove it, they’re ditching ‘agency village’ label in favour of the more unified ‘agency partner alliance’. 

Howatson explains how he sees it working in practice.

“When a job comes into an agency, any agency, it typically goes to an operations team. That operations team casts the right talent to work on that job … Typically that involves, in the old world of casting, a creative team – a copywriter and an art director or a designer. What we now cast in that mix is a technologist, and that technologist looks at the requirements of the brief and figures out what's going to be required in the production phase to adapt the AI to what the client needs," he says.

“By doing that upfront, it helps us get there quicker.”

Endeavour has a 30-strong, dedicated team that sits within Plus Also – many of whom came across  after the group’s in-house studio was disbanded.

The team “might stay at that number” or it “might be half of that” down the track, per Howatson, but the point is that it’s able to flex with the technology and the demands of the market. 

Driving greater efficiency and effectiveness year-on-year is embedded in Plus Also’s renumeration model – an intentional shift from head hours.

“The fundamental issue with any service business around the world is that your revenue model is based on how long it takes”, says Howatson. “What happens if you achieve the same outcome, but you do it in a tenth of a time? You need to have a new remuneration model.”

Rather than head hours, Plus Also gets paid on outcomes.

Getting paid

Those outcomes are measured on a combination of efficiency and effectiveness metrics, with plans to deploy a performance dashboard that will feed customer data straight back into the business to enable Endeavour to “optimise in real time” – something they’ve “never been able to do” previously, per Rose.

There’s more in the pipe, with the Plus Also team exploring future opportunities in audio and retail media.

“Having that constant sense of not standing still is really holding both of us to account to make sure that this is not just ‘let's launch a model, set and forget’. We are genuinely trying to be pioneers of creating what the next wave of a creative technology business actually looks like,” says Rose.

Only Rose herself won’t be there to see that ambition through – she’s hanging up her hat after three years in the role, and six years at Woolworths before that, to head back to her native UK in the second quarter of 2025.

Her exit comes part of a swathe of changes across Endeavour’s C-suite – most notably coinciding with the chief strategy and transformation officer Ilana Stringer being replaced by Harinder Saluja, formerly a key player in the NSW process and technology harmonisation program, in a simplified remit as chief transformation officer.

However, Rose underlined that the businesses is committed to the new model – and she’s confident it’ll be left in good hands. She expects her replacement will be announced in the first two months of the new year.

In the meantime, Plus Also hasn't wasted any time, picking up contracts with Qantas, Foxtel, and Petbarn on a SaaS model for its tech. 

Howatson, as ever, is thinking big. He reckons within a few years Plus Also will be delivering master assets that stand up against “your top tier television production agencies" like Finch, Revolver and Sweet Shop. But it's not just jam tomorrow, with "very cutting-edge examples of master asset creation" only three-to-six months away.

Now to see if the model delivers.