Q&A: Joseph Gordon-Levitt on Why His Content Studio Is Expanding With New Branded Content Division

HitRecord, the eight-year-old content studio from actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, is adding a branded content division. The Los Angeles company, which taps into a creative community of roughly 650,000 creators in 193 countries, has already worked with brands like Wag!, LG and Levis, but much of that work has come through calls to Gordon-Levitt's talent agency, WME. With the newly minted division, the 22-person team at HitRecord is pitching is collaborative community process to brands with the hope that access to more diverse voices, creators and ideas will be attractive. Adweek caught up with Gordon-Levitt and his HitRecord co-founder, Jared Geller, to find out more about how the shop will work with brands, what differentiates HitRecord Branded from crowdsourcing contests, what makes their process different and why they're expanding now. The following has been edited for length and clarity. Adweek: Why is HitRecord getting into the branded content space now? Gordon-Levitt: We’ve done a lot of partnerships with brands over the years. It’s been a big part of how HitRecord has kept the lights on and been able to pay for a lot of the different creative projects we’ve done. Geller: It wasn’t even something we intended to do. When we started, we were making films, music, live shows, books—but all along the way, brands started to approach us. Not only because they liked the stuff that we were making, but they liked that we were inclusive and that we had opened up the creative process to involve more people. As time when by, we started doing more and more of it. [kickout id="4"] What do you bring that maybe a traditional agency doesn’t bring to the space? Gordon-Levitt: Our whole point is collaboration. A lot of creativity that goes on online is people posting their own stuff and then saying, ‘Hey world! Look at me. Look at what I made.’ Whereas with HitRecord, our entire platform is designed to let people come together and make things they wouldn’t have been able to make on their own. One of the key differentiators between us and your typical creative agency making content out of Manhattan is that when you open up the process, the making of branded content becomes branded content itself. The audience is not only exposed to the finished piece of content but also different bits and pieces, whether call to action or highlighted contributions, etc. Throughout the process, there’s a social footprint of this campaign. I don’t think a conventional firm out of Manhattan can really compete with that. Can you tell us a bit more about how the collaboration process works? How do people work with brands and the brief? Gordon-Levitt: The people who come to HitRecord [aren't] just coming to contribute strictly to branded content. People come to HitRecord, I think, because it’s a stimulating, inspiring and encouraging creative community of people making all kinds of stuff together. Talking about the more "crowdsourced contest" things, which feel more like gimmicks, the people who are going to enter their work in contests like that are mostly looking at prize money. It’s sort of a mercenary affair. Whereas the people on HitRecord, that’s not why they came. They came because they enjoy being creative with a creative community of people, and while they’re [here], we're offering all sorts of creative opportunities. Some of those creative opportunities are artistic, and some of those opportunities are commercial. Geller: When we work with brands, we spend a lot of time with the brand to understand what their objectives are, what their goals are in whatever campaign they're working on, and we try to understand. For example, the first time we worked with LG, they said they they wanted to create a campaign that was intimate and hopefully uplifting. We basically spent some time crafting what we call ‘creative challenges.’ Then, we came up with creative challenges—whether that’s video, illustration or to tell a story—that will hopefully satisfy what the campaign’s goal will be. What does that turn into? Gordon-Levitt: You get commitment from people, and you get good work. Obviously, not all of the work can be featured in the final production, but that curation is a big part of the process. ... The thing you have to mention if you’re talking about people putting in a lot of time and effort is that we do pay people, and I think we pay people quite fairly. [kickout id="1"] That’s great. I was going to ask you about payment. Gordon-Levitt: There’s a lot of commerce on the internet that’s based on the notion that you can manage trade on people for free, and it’s really not what I ever wanted to do. Our payment process, for one thing, is extremely transparent. It’s also, I should say, done by human beings. There’s not a single algorithm going through our productions determining by computer or by mathematical equation what someone deserves to be paid. Our business model is a high quality—not necessarily a high volume model where we’re scaling up, but we’re not one of those companies that’s trying to churn out a million videos every week or something like that. We take pride in each and every piece that we do. We also pride ourselves on the relationship between each and every individual person who contributed to our productions. I never like to use the word "crowdsourcing." I don’t think it’s accurate. I also think it’s sort of dehumanizing, like, 'The crowd did that.' There’s no such thing. It’s always individual people. The talent and the work contributed by those individual people is exactly what makes our company what it is. So, when we pay people, there are human beings in our office in our community department who go through lists of every single person whose contribution is included in the final production that was monetized. They assign percentages of how much of the community payment pool goes to each person. ... We get all this feedback and we make sure that a human being in our office responds to every single comment about payment. We want to make sure that conversation is comprehensive and exhaustive. [kickout id="2"] Going at it with this model of having a ton of different creators who have the opportunity to be part of a campaign—that's a rather open process and not something we typically see from brands. Have brands been open to the process? Geller: Each brand is different. So far, so good. As long as we, in this office, have a mutual understanding of [the brand goals], whether a global electronics company like LG or a dog walking app like Wag!. We’re in constant communication to make sure the way we’re creating these campaigns and the calls to action we’re putting out there … all feel like a unified voice. Even though we’re working with hundreds of thousands of artists around the world, the content that we make generally does have a point of view and a voice. Gordon-Levitt: This is an important part of what HitRecord is and what it isn’t. That’s why I don’t like calling it crowdsourcing. One thing I say often within the community is that this isn't a democracy. It’s a benevolent dictatorship. I think that’s important. If you’re really democratic about the creative process—and I mean democratic in the purest, most extreme sense of the word, where there is no leadership—what you get is memes about cats. But if you want something of higher quality and with an authentic voice, then there’s got to be leadership, and that’s the balance we’re always striking on HitRecord: empowering a creative community, but also providing direction. It’s different than a brand engaging in a crowdsourced gimmick of, OK, we’ll let the crowd design our next logo or branded campaign. They don’t know what they’re going to get. They only know they’re leaving it up to people out there that they’re not even in touch with. That’s not what happens with HitRecord. It’s not this sort of haphazard contest. It’s a collaborative process done between lots and lots of people all over the world. That direction, that leadership [we provide] is really how we can guarantee for brands that what they’re going to get is something they’re going to be happy with. [kickout id="3"] What are your goals with the branded division? Gordon-Levitt: The money we make producing content for brands like LG, Levi's or anyone else—that money goes to fund more purely artistic projects going on in the community. The more people who contribute to all sorts of projects, the more people we’re drawing from to create this branded content. The more branded content we can generate, the more we can pay to fund all kinds of other creative projects. I hope it can just kind of continue to grow in that way. Honestly, it’s looking like it is, I’m happy to report.