We’re all about sharing here at Simian, so it’s only natural we’d take that concept and expand it to aseries of events where people in the industry can gather and share insights, opinions, tips and warstories, all with the goal of finding new and better ways to get work done.

We’ve done this in the past at roundtable dinners with production company EPs and members of the post production community, and last year we expanded this to include the agency production community.

We kicked this off in the spring of 2018 with an informal lunch and roundtable for agency Heads of Production in New York, and followed that up with another event in New York in October and one in L.A. this past May. Coming up will be HoP roundtables in San Francisco and Chicago between now and the end of the year.

We’ve had a growing and positive response to these get-togethers. In L.A., our roundtable included senior agency production execs from such shops as 180 LA, Conill, DNG (David & Goliath), Doner, MAL for Good, Saatchi, TBWA, Team One and Zambezi. In New York, our roundtables have included execs from Barbarian, FCB, FIG, Hudson Rouge, The Martin Agency, mcgarrybowen, Merkley, Mother and Translation.

The topics covered at these off-the-record get-togethers have varied: shooting abroad, dealing with digital deliverables, recruiting talent, staffing and managing in-house departments, coping with tighter budgets and shrunken schedules, dealing with cost consultants, handling integrated and experiential projects, you name it. Those who’ve attended say they value the opportunities to share points of view and insights with their peers at other agencies; they get few chances to spend time together, so the roundtables offer a welcome forum for connection, networking and education.

For Simian, the benefits are numerous: serving as host gives us insight into the agency production process that helps us anticipate problems and challenges that both agency production departments (a growing segment of our business) and their vendors on the production and post production sides face on a daily basis. It’s also part of our renewed effort to extend our sharing and collaborating platform into a vehicle for experiences that help participants live up to our mantra of working smarter and more efficiently – which naturally lets people focus on what they do best, which is be more creative.

These events also give us an opportunity to discuss new features of Simian with an influential audience of experienced production heads who can give us valuable feedback on new tools, new concepts and new capabilities.