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When I started at Cutwater, we didn’t have a production team, and I was introduced to Armory through Christian Hughes, our President. They were introduced as our virtual studio. I wasn’t familiar working this way. At the agencies I worked at before all of the resources were in house, so I was a little uneasy in the beginning – not just about working with someone who was not in San Francisco nor in-house, but was three hours ahead.

I was worried that it wasn’t going to be efficient for us. I was very pleasantly surprised with Jeff Schur, who’s just great. I can pick up my phone anytime, it doesn’t really matter, and let him know about an issue I’m having. Armory’s approach is, ‘Call us with your problem, we’ll find you a solution, don’t worry about it.’ And when you’re working in such a small environment, as we were back then, it really took a burden off my shoulders.

Armory’s Dani Beck has become my close partner. It often feels as if she’s at the desk next to me. She’s really responsive and very proactive, and is often on top of things before I even think about them. It’s nice to have someone so strong in that production role; she always knows who to contact when there’s a question.

We worked with Armory on an integrated, multinational digital, print and out of home campaign for a videogame launch. We had to ensure that we were creating ads and assets that could be adapted and changed in the other markets, which was trickier than I had anticipated. Dani was really great. She made sure we developed good relationships with the other partners on the project, and acted almost as if she was a Cutwater employee. She made sure that things were delivered on time and to spec.

The campaign had lots of moving pieces, the timeline was crunched and there could have been missed deadlines at any point along the way. It was nice that I didn’t have to worry about that, because I knew Amory would just take care of it. It really didn’t matter how crazy the timeline was, I knew it would get done. Having that confidence level in a partner was worth its weight in gold.

Dani is client-facing on my businesses. She’s able to do that in emails and presentations. I include Dani on most of the emails I send to clients regarding production. She feels free to reach out to them and have me on that correspondence. So there’s not this ‘go-between’ between us. She just reaches out to them directly, and is very capable of doing that.

What Armory does is extremely valuable, and it’s something that small agencies probably don’t know they can have. I never knew that, without having an actual production studio in house, we could have the same level of thought, attention to detail and responsiveness. I just don’t think people understand that it doesn’t all have to be in house; that the way Armory works, it can be just as effective.