Scenario Industrie

They describe the internet as the biggest social revolution in history. Stephen Whelan talks hubs, hierarchy, and talent clusters with the dynamic digital duo behind Scenario Industrie

Once upon a time there was newsprint and a radio and a television and a billboard and that was pretty much the entire media menu. Then along came the net and suddenly the love-hate, hide-and-seek game between advertisers and their audiences became a lot more complicated. To the baneful cries of fragmentation and niche the industry began to reshape itself, developing faster and smarter ways to gatecrash the online party with banners and buttons and finally, at last, slick streaming video content.

All well and good, but the problem for production companies still remained – how to protect your piece of the pie and reshape your business around a new era of content-as-entertainment? It’s a question that’s formed a key part of the thinking driving French prod co Irene and its offshoot Scenario Industrie, which was founded in 2005 by experienced EP Guillaume De Bary so that producers and directors could work closely together in small clusters.

“I wanted to create a workshop where I was working with the directors and developing them rather than repping people from all over the world,” he explains. “It was about how to choose a director and a script, and being consistent in the way we selected jobs that could bring a certain characteristic to the company rather than the volume of work.”

Having stumbled across a winning formula, De Bary went on to expand his offering by teaming up with Emmanuel Guiraud to launch Soixan7e Quin5e in 2003. With a roster that reads like a who’s who of French directing (from Frederic Planchon and Olivier Babinet to new-blood Jonas & Francois and Megaforce) the stage was set to move into high-end content production.

It was off the back of a music video project with Johan Camitz that De Bary first met Abdesslam Oulahbib at Source, the experimental wing of Virgin Records that boasts Daft Punk and Air amongst its luminaries. “The music industry has a totally different way of thinking about how you try and fill a space of time to engage your audience,” muses Oulahbib. “Yes, it’s about generating desire, but unlike advertising you don’t have a specific idea of what the market is and what it is you’re trying to sell. It’s a different model.”

Recognising the opportunity to develop a completely different offering, De Bary and Oulahbib launched Scenario Industrie. “We shared a vision that communication was more about the relationship between one person and another, rather than the pyramid hierarchy of brands sending their messages from above,” says De Bary. “It’s no longer about talking to mass markets, and the idea and the intention behind Scenario was to have a prospective, forward-looking and experimental approach and conversation with people.”

Straight out of the starting block, Scenario attracted the attention of Louis Vuitton chairman and CEO Yves Carcelle and pretty soon the ball was rolling on a project to create content for the launch of the fashion brand’s flagship Mongolian store in Ulan Bator.

“We had carte blanche to create something for the opening so we started by talking about the sort of voice we felt we had to use to create a sense of the most universal link that connects us as humanity to one another,” muses Oulahbib. “We decided to propose a film driven by music in order to overcome the language barriers. We chose to show the project on the internet rather than, say, as an installation, because we felt that the internet was the main tool used by consumers interested in the brand, and at the same time it represented the idea of going beyond the frontiers.”

Against expectations, the global recession seems to have stimulated rather than stymied demand for the sort of sur-mesure service offered by the likes of Scenario in contrast to the prêt-à-porter approach pedalled by agencies. “The problem is that agencies mostly propose advertising, and a lot of clients are looking for something different altogether,” enthuses De Bary. “We all know how to do advertising. It’s planned. There’s a script. What brands need now is something that’s more one-shot and bespoke – individual executions that aren’t repeated over and over.”

Along with the new creative mentality, suggests Oulahbib, there’s also a need to develop a different business model that reconfigures ownership of content.

“It’s an opportunity for us and the brand to revise the economic system of production. Creating these unique prototypes for brands has to be about a licensing agreement rather than the old way of executing a project and relinquishing ownership.”

It’s not just about the impact of the recession, though. Both De Bary and Oulahbib are firm believers in the notion that the internet has brought about the biggest social revolution to date. “It took us a hundred years to go from the horse to the train and a hundred from the train to the plane. The internet has only been here for 15 years. We are just at the beginning,” says Oulahbib.

“The rules of the game have been erased,” chimes De Bary. “Production is no longer about having the technical understanding to execute a concept. The director now is an inventor, an experimenter and an artisan. When you expose yourself like that, when you put yourself in danger, people look at what you propose in a totally different light. There’s a vulnerability and sincerity to that and it forges a deeper connection.”