Microsoft needed a Windows 11 Launch Video but the agency failed to deliver.
It was a month before launch. The Windows Commercial Team came to us and said, ‘we need a launch video but we’ve only got 4 weeks.
‘We want you, Wild Gravity, to take the Windows Consumer Team’s launch video and replace the screens on the devices with screens that show business scenarios.’
Not our favorite brief, but right in our wheelhouse. We’re expert at building screens and animations for devices – phones, tablets, computers.
A week later they told us, ‘we’re dead in the water. The Consumer Team’s video got killed in an exec review.’
Our proposal, ‘why don’t we just shoot a new video concepted from the groundup to target business decision makers. We know all the scenarios you want to show. We can shoot it here.”
‘There’s no time for that,’ they said. ‘The Agency had three months to do this and failed.’
We cast it in two days and were shooting at our studio by the end of that week.
Hand-built every screen and animation, working directly with Windows engineering and UX teams. Animated, comped, color corrected, and finished everything in-house.
And delivered with time to spare.
The executives loved it. The video was featured in the Chief Product Officer’s Keynote and became the hero asset on Windows.com for Commercial and Consumer.
We delivered at 4X the speed and ¼ the cost of their agency that failed to deliver.
How?
We skipped all the agency B.S. Rather than having an agency, manage a production shop, post house, and visual effects studio, we have creative, production, post, and VFX all right here under the same roof in our gorgeous Seattle studio.
Look, I’m not anti-agency. I worked at them. Led accounts for AT&T, Microsoft, Turner. I’ve been on both sides. I know what agencies are good at. Strategy, big thinking, cultural curation.
You know what they suck at? Speed and agility.
McKinsey found that only 3% of brands characterized their agency’s transition to agile as “smooth.”
Over 80% reported obstacles.
The problem is structural. Big agencies have huge hierarchical teams and are mired in bureaucratic processes.
Agencies bill by the hour. Their business model rewards moving slowly. An R/GA exec admitted it: “If you bill by the hour, you’re incentivized to drag things out.”
63% of CMOs say they can’t make decisions fast enough.
They’re missing market opportunities because their execution velocity is garbage.
The solution isn’t to pressure your agency to move faster. They can’t. Not really. Not without breaking their business model.
The solution is to work with people who can do it all. have creative, production, post, and VFX under one roof. People who can pivot in real time because they’re not coordinating four different vendo
rs.
At Wild Gravity, we built the company for speed. Small teams of seasoned pros. Everyone’s an expert. No layers of approval.
Traditional agencies take months. We deliver in weeks. Sometimes days.
The difference? We make stuff. That’s our job. The only job.
Your quarterly campaign cycle? It’s a relic. By the time you go through agency concepting, focus group testing, production, and post, your competitors have already moved on.
Speed isn’t just a nice-to-have anymore. It’s survival.
The brands winning right now are the ones who can test fast, learn fast, and iterate fast.
You can’t do that when every change request goes through three layers of account managers before it reaches the person who actually does the work.
So yeah. We did in three weeks what the traditional process takes three months to do.
Not because we’re special. Because we removed the friction.
Maybe it’s time you did too.