Pat Murphy
Hi and welcome to the MCA Prodcast; your fix for everything innovative in advertising production. I’m Pat Murphy and I’ve been working in this industry for more than 35 years now. I’ve seen a lot of changes, but know there’s plenty more around the corner. Each week on the podcast, you’ll get to hear from one of the movers and shakers who are shaping the world of advertising production for the future, and we’ll dive into some of the key challenges facing our sector today and how we’re best placed to overcome them.

Today we’re talking to Nick Dodet, Founder and Managing Partner of PIG China. With more than 17 years of experience producing in the Chinese market alone. He’s also an experienced executive producer and has extensive film production expertise. Nick has produced over 800 TV ads, including some of the biggest films in Chinese advertising history. He’s worked with directors such as Robert Zemeckis, Spike Jonze, Lance Acord and Luc Besson, as well as celebrities such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Nicholas Cage, Bruce Willis and many, many others.

Nick, welcome to our podcast.

Nick Dodet
Thanks, Pat, for having me.

Now its been a while since we last spoke on our webinar during the pandemic. We talked to you about a whole range of different things and I’ve always been impressed by your vast experience of 17 years working in the Chinese market and with such a diverse and accomplished background, you bring a wealth of experience in advertising production, creative strategy, industry insights.

We’re really happy to have you today, but tell me, firstly, how did you end up in China and founding PIG China – how did that name come about?

Nick Dodet
Yeah, that’s a good question. The name actually came up in back in LA. We started PIG in LA with a couple of partners and the evening we basically made the decision to start the company I would say on the back end of a very, very long night, someone said, ‘hey, let’s call it PIG’, and we thought it was such a terrible name that the next day one of us went actually to register the name and now we’re stuck with it. So there’s not much behind it. It’s actually. It stands for Protean Image Group in the US.  In China everybody calls it PIG and I’m okay with that. It’s actually a lucky animal in China but not much of a story behind it.

I ended up here. I was Jesus 22, 23 years ago I was in Tokyo visiting clients during Golden Week. We had a couple days off and we said, ‘hey, let’s go to Shanghai’ . And I spent two days in Shanghai, went back to LA, told anyone who would listen that that I would move there one day. I loved it so much and I did that like three years later.

Pat Murphy
Wow, and so that name, like all great names for production houses or businesses, came out of an evening out.

Nick Dodet
Exactly! I’m pretty sure there were others, you know. I mean, I would call my company Banana. People would say it’s stupid, but Apple sounds pretty good today! So at the end of the day, RSA, just three letters, but Jesus, it packs a lot of muscle and great stuff behind it. So a name is a name and once you built your DNA behind it, then it takes on its own life.

Pat Murphy
Have you still left all your stuff back in LA? Because the last time we spoke you had it all stuck in a storage unit!

Nick Dodet
Yep, it’s been almost 18 years since I actually said ‘you know what, I’m probably going to be back in a few years, so, just in case, I’m going to keep everything there’, and I’ve been paying about $200 a month since which. I’m at a point now where I think it makes more sense to keep doing it, and then my kids in the inheritance package will find a key with a code and they will find my 1990s Gap jeans and probably a bunch of other stuff. I’m not too proud of in there as well.

Pat Murphy
It’s all your old vinyl and stuff like that’s still stuck in there. I’ve done the same. By the way, I’ve got a unit in London. Now I’m in Lisbon and you know what? You never get to go back in there because you forget what you’ve actually got in all those boxes!

Nick Dodet
It’s a time capsule! Totally.

Pat Murphy
Now you’ve worked in so many different roles as MD, Executive Producer, CMO, and all of those various roles have different skill sets, from operations to more creative type of things. From a creative CEO here talking right, how do you balance that creative aspect that comes with the world of advertising with the strategic and managerial and operational responsibilities?

Nick Dodet
It’s definitely juggling. I would say that when I arrived in China, obviously coming from Hollywood, my first tendency was to tell people, ‘step aside I’m gonna show you how it’s done’. And very quickly I realised that it was the other way around. So I had to unlearn everything I’d learned before and relearn it with a Chinese twist to it, and by doing so, basically… we were a startup, so you had to wear many hats at the same time, and sometimes it was the business one or even the legal one, when you’re dealing with contracts with clients or trying to get you to sign something where you won’t get any down payment for six months or so and others. Obviously you have to, and that’s actually it’s a very interesting part of production in China the creative aspects that a producer can and should bring to the equation, because a lot of creative agencies’ teams have a tendency to rely A on the director, B on the producer to help them sell things to the clients.

The dynamics in this part of the world, relationships are extremely vertical. There are very few people who work together. There are a lot of people who work for someone or have someone work for them and a lot of times, with traditional agencies, a team. By the time you get involved in terms of production. The creative team has been working on the project for three months, four months, five months, and they get to a point where it’s almost execution for them, trying to please the client. But they’re bringing new blood when finally there’s a green light to that project and the director comes in, the producer comes in and that’s the opportunity to actually kick some light back into the creative.

And a lot of times I’ve noticed that some of the creative teams are actually looking forward to that moment where we can fight some battles for them because we are the new faces, we are the new voices at the table and clients are very receptive to this.

And a lot of times I’ve noticed that for some creative teams it brought life, some life back into them because they’ve been beaten up for months, especially with companies like Coke and stuff, and at the end you’re doing some pretty cool stuff because everybody is kind of revived and that’s something I had lost a little bit in the past and I actually really enjoyed that. To make sure that a producer – it’s not about numbers, numbers – a trained monkey can do that. It’s really about trying to bring the best out of everyone and to make sure that, at the end of the day, the product you have is not only a really good product, but it’s a product that answers the client’s expectations within the budget. And I feel in China, where a lot of people say that it’s more execution than creation. It actually gives you a bigger responsibility as a producer to try to take that to the creative level and to fight for it.

Pat Murphy
Now, having worked in the United States and now in China, what do you see as the biggest differences in process between the two?

Nick Dodet
Well, it’s – Jesus. The biggest?  I don’t know. There are lots of them and it’s very hard to know where to start. Again, I think the main one and it’s more of an Asian thing, but it’s really, really pronounced in China is the vertical relationship where everybody has a place within that ladder and a lot of times if the person at the top says jump, and everybody downstream is going to ask how high? Now, one of the advantages that some of us have by not being Chinese or mainland Chinese is that, especially when you’re a Westerner, you’re not expected to know that. You may know it, but by not being expected to you can actually sometimes push batteries a lot more and get away with it.

What’s really frustrating as a Westerner working in the traditional advertising I’m not talking about some of the new companies and agencies and clients, but the traditional ones is that there is such a vertical series of layers that you have to go through before you actually get to the decision makers and a lot of times, by the time the person can actually green-light a project, sees the project, it’s already gone through so many layers of dilution. You start with a horse, you end up with a camel and that’s what the person at the end is going to see and probably not be super happy about it, but when you have a direct access to that person – as a foreigner, we can actually talk. For instance, if I’m sitting across a vice president of marketing at a PPM. As a Chinese, I’m never going to address that person because they are like 20 people between me and that person within the hierarchy. As a foreigner, I can actually ask questions and get answers which make a lot of sense and understand the problems the client has much better to find solutions.

Now at the PPM. It’s usually a bit late to get to that stage, but at least we do have that opportunity and that’s something that I’ve been guilty of using and probably abusing at times the fact that I am not Chinese and I’m going to do certain things my way.

Pat Murphy
But the benefit obviously is that you can leverage your position for all the right reasons.

Nick Dodet
Exactly. And, again, everything should always be extremely respectful of the dynamics. I’m not expected to understand it. I probably understand 20% of it, which already seems huge to me. But the more I scratch the more I realise there are many layers beyond it. I’m doing it because I believe it’s for the best of the project and I would like to think that, more often than not, agencies or clients as we do a lot of client-direct projects that will come back to us.

That’s because they like that dynamic, they like that more direct communication and more horizontal way of working. As to ‘I’ll be open with you guys as to the solutions you have and the ones you don’t have. Just tell me what your problem is and the more layers we put in between there, it’s just going to dilute the message’.

Pat Murphy
You mentioned just there that you’re doing more and more client-direct projects. Is that an increasing trend in China?

Nick Dodet
It is for us, and talking to other people in the industry, yes! I think overall you have more and more of this. On one hand, you have a consolidation with Publicis and Prodigious and Hogarth and LLB and etc. You see that at the agency level, where they’re trying to control the supply chain. At the same time, we see more and more clients coming directly to us. The reason being that the notion of having a long-term relationship in terms of strategy is disappearing faster and faster and I see it globally, but I think in China it’s even faster than that.

A client has a product that’s coming out in three months and they want to sell it in three months. They don’t want to build the brand for five years. They literally want a very quick ROI. Quite often we find ourselves pitching for a particular campaign against – it maybe BBH and LLB, for instance, because it’s a one-off. The more and more clients have in-house strategy, even in-house creatives.  Now Lots of the big Chinese brands, such as OPPO, have a team where they call the OPPO Lab, which are a bunch of creative guys that have come from London and LA and New York and Taipei. They’re trying to streamline the relationship. Now the bigger institutional clients – the Coca-Cola of the World, the VW, etc. They need the network side of agencies. They have a much more traditional approach to it. A lot of the younger companies, the startups, a lot of electric vehicle companies in China – Jesus, as we’re talking there’s probably another three brands that appeared. These guys they come straight to us now. They’ll go straight to agencies as well, but they will look at us as the same type of supplier.

Pat Murphy
And does that mean that you also have to tap into new types of capabilities? So strategy and creative. Do you have those kind of resources now coming into your business?

Nick Dodet
Yes, we have to tap into this. Once again strategy: most of the time the clients now especially for like new technology type of clients, that’s all in house. They have their own guys to do it.

Creatives – definitely. We’re lucky enough to in China today to have a huge pool of freelance creative directors. A lot of the guys who used to work at major creative agencies have decided to basically go on their own, which means that we don’t have to carry any creative directors on staff and rather per-project we can tap onto the people we feel are the best for a particular brand or a particular product category.

Pat Murphy
When we last chatted, it was part of our webinar series at MCA during the pandemic. How has the pandemic changed the way you approach production in China specifically?

Nick Dodet
Amazingly enough, as bad as the Chinese economy is doing right now. For the two and a half years during the pandemic it was cranking, unless you were in the hospitality business or FNB, where you would be shut down every other month. But a lot of the production companies and post-production houses had some of their best years ever.

Now, obviously, one of the reasons is that everything was closed so the clients could then tap onto front companies, but there’s more to this which I haven’t really managed to put my finger on. There was a lot of rebrand spending after the first, the original lockdown, but we were super busy.

Now one of the big issues is that all of a sudden, people are starting asking for a lot of money because directors people that you and I have never heard of would ask for $30,000, $35,000 per shoot day and wouldn’t show up at PPMs or Tech Rekies – literally guns for hire shoot Monday one brand, Tuesday the other one. They’ve been in for a pretty hard awakening the past few months.

The prices have gone up and I would say that’s independent of the inflation that we have for society.  This one was purely offer and demand, and production prices have gone way up in China, which is an issue, as clients’ budgets have not gone up and have the same rate. We basically we were really busy, so we didn’t really have to adapt to anything. They were, amazingly enough, as soon as China shut down, there were pretty much no COVID protocol except you either had a green QR code on your phone and you were in, and if you had a red one, you were taken away and sent to some kind of arena with another 20,000 people who were infected. That’s it. So people stopped wearing masks. It was really surreal compared to what we were seeing and hearing from the rest of the world and I was talking to some of my colleagues in the US, in Europe, in Australia it was a completely different world here.

Pat Murphy
Yeah, it absolutely reflects our experience as well. So China was our biggest market for a good couple of years during that pandemic, so that resonates with us.

Innovation is often a driving force behind successful advertising campaigns. As the saying you snooze, you lose. As I often see from your LinkedIn page, you often post about innovation in production, in subjects around AI or sustainability. Did you have a moment when you had to embrace innovation and that led to a breakthrough and a light bulb moment?

Nick Dodet
It’s interesting because obviously innovation needs to be encouraged, to be driven sometimes, and a lot of times, if you look at it at the scale of a society or a country and you see it with The States, you see it with the EU, it usually starts from the top, as in, you set the conditions and then you let innovation run away with it. Maybe you have to redirect it once in a while.

Obviously, politically, China right now it’s a bit in breath in terms of innovation and communication because it’s been recluse for a few years, a because of the pandemic, b because I think that the people in charge are actually perfectly happy not opening it up too much. But the price they’re paying is that the innovators within China do not have access to all the information, never mind the H100 GPU chips, but just the things that you can see. I mean obviously most of them are VPNs, but just if you’re browsing LinkedIn and you find out what’s happening here and there and bang, bang, bang, and that should breed ideas of your own and then you can develop things it is happening in China, but it’s much harder for the Chinese to do that. So what I realize right now is obviously everybody is talking about generative AI and brands keep talking about it.  It kind of reminds me, in a way, I would say, about 10, 12 years ago, when everybody was talking about apps and a brand would come to us and say ‘we want an app’. But what does your app do? Why do you want an app? How are you going to push it, etc. ‘We don’t know We want an app’.

It’s still very confused here. I mean, everybody wants to embrace it, but they’re not quite sure how and what they can do about it. One agency, the Blue Focus, announced several months ago that they will stop hiring freelance copywriters and instead will train their staff copywriters into prompting and start using ChatGPT and Bard and any kind of generative AI to reduce copyrights.

Pat Murphy
Yeah, it is an interesting time right now. I mean remember last year it was only a year ago we were talking about the Metaverse being the next big thing and that didn’t really materialise. This year is AI.  I have my own opinions about AI and how much you can use that around creating great ideas, but it’s not going to go away. We had a conversation with Nick Johnson from Osborne Clark the lawyers on one of our last podcasts. One of the challenges that we seem to be having is the legal frameworks and the ethics and the whole IP. Do you think that there’s going to be some kind of frameworks in China that will reflect what’s going on in Europe and the United States?

Nick Dodet
It will, because, as China needs to export more and more – and what I say export I mean export its own IP – it’s starting to protect the concept of IPs more and more. I think the biggest issue in terms of generative AI right now, and AI in general for China and mostly for the government, is to figure out ‘how can I control that’. And that’s why a lot of the players here are very careful as to what they put in the market, because they don’t want to get in trouble. It’s one thing to block Google and to control Baidu. It’s another when you have generative AI dipping into trillions of available content and data and try to censor this. That said, everything that has to do with IP, I think it’s becoming more and more structured, more and more codified.

Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if the blockchain doesn’t start getting involved pretty soon in terms of rights, as in, you post something online and if you put it on the blockchain, then whenever someone taps into it, you could automatically be getting royalty. So it’s obviously a lot of things need to be developed in that direction. I believe that for one transformative technology to happen, you need to have all the ecosystem around it. I think that’s the metaverse is part of it. I think the blockchain is part of it. A lot of these are actually coming to not maturity, but at least all the version 1.0s or 2.0s are starting to actually come together at the same time and I think they’re going to start tapping onto each other, we’re going to start seeing some pretty good stuff.

But I do think the biggest issue for China right now is how to use all of that technology safely without getting on the wrong hand of the government sledgehammer, because as some of the tech companies in the past few years found out, when that hammer comes down it’s brutal, and I think once they figure that out, or if at some point, the government publishes some kind of a Bible that says this yes, this no, then we’re going to see things go exponential here, and I do believe to go back to your original point, I think that that’s the. I think that the Chinese, within a few years, will probably be at the forefront of IP control. They have the tendency to be late and when they get into something, it’s 1.3 billion people doing it and next thing you know, the rest of the world is like ‘wow, that’s pretty good!’.

Pat Murphy
Yeah, I mean I hope so, because I think it’s a really important thing whereby, hopefully, we can get to some kind of global alignment in that, because as soon as you don’t have that global alignment in these kind of areas, then it becomes a bit of a free-for-all.

I saw that you were in Cannes this year, Nick, and unfortunately we didn’t get a chance to hook up, which I’m deeply upset about that you didn’t look me up…

Nick Dodet
Every time I showed up at the beach, you were in a panel so I said ‘alright, I’m going to wait’, and then something else would happen.

Pat Murphy
I found it a really inspiring week. What were the things that inspired you from Cannes this year?

Nick Dodet     
So it was my first time in probably five or six years, so what I found that was very interesting. Number one the presence of brands, compared to last time I went there, where it used to be like Google Beach, maybe like two or three beaches, and now there’s only one beach left that’s non major-brand.

What I found very interesting is that mostly all the conversations that were had on new subjects that four or five years ago we were not really talking about. We see AI being one of them, but a lot of them about inclusion, a lot of them about green production or green advertising, etc. Which we were starting touching few years ago. But it’s very real now. All of these subjects are actually at the forefront of a lot of conversations, a lot of panels, a lot of discussions.

Less so in China for the moment, and that’s why it’s always great for me to be able to finally get out of the country, because you get tunnel vision when you’re in your own within your own society, and then you go out and you realize that, ‘hey, some people have the same problems or different problems and they deal with it differently. And so forth’ and it’s super refreshing. That that’s one thing I really enjoyed to hear all these not new, but these newly super important subjects that were that were being discussed.

Now, one thing that I am still too find and maybe someone listens to the podcast and has the answer could maybe help me – there were all these signs, obviously, with Publicis  talking about Marcel and and the AI Software, that they decided not to enter any prizes, I think seven years ago, and instead they would spend the money into developing their own AI Software and they’re a lot of bragging about it. But every one of us that asked Publicis to explain to me exactly what it does. So far, I haven’t had anyone really able to do so.

Now, granted, I didn’t talk to any of the CTOs or whatever, and that’s probably where I should start, but anybody have seen from Prodigious or Publicis, basically, were telling me that it’s a great platform that allows different offices to work together. So it’s to me like it’s more about algorithm and communication and stuff, rather than than AI per-se, but that that to me that was one of the great mystery of can this year.

Pat Murphy
You mentioned those two words sustainability and diversity. And I was going to ask you that very question, because it has become a very key topic of conversation in the very early stages of production. For all of our clients now, and I was going to ask you whether its one of those things that you have to consider when you’re working on a project in China, and I think you’ve answered that that question for us. Do you think that that’s going to become a bigger trend?

Nick Dodet
It will. What’s interesting is that the Chinese society, kind of works like that. They try a lot of things and a lot of misses, but when there is a hit, its a big hit. Just before the pandemic, the government started a campaign and at the, the one good side of the type of Governance in in China is that when they decide on something, things happen. There’s no debate about it. Everyone does it. And in Shanghai the campaign was ‘everyone needs to sort their trash, otherwise they will get fined’. We had three types of trash. We had, you know, recyclable, we had food and we had the stuff that you shouldn’t throw in either of these. There was even a new small economy going on, with people knocking on your door and telling you ‘you know what, put everything into one bag and I will sort it for you for five bucks’ or whatever, for those were too lazy to actually sort things out. The pandemic took over that and that kind of died off. The thing is it will come back.

In terms of sustainability, China is the biggest or second biggest polluter in the world. It’s also the biggest by far, the biggest investor into green energy and sustainable energy, and I think that once it decides that, ‘okay, now on top of the list, we should do it’. Again it’s gonna start from behind and before you know it’s going to be ahead of the rest of the world because there will be no debates, there will be no lobbies trying to kill this or that. It’s gonna be full steam ahead and it’s going to move. And I think we’re really close to it now. Details-wise, there’s not a single agency or client that ask us to actually use recyclable cups or whatever on set. I mean, everybody’s still with plastic bottles. We try and make an effort. Ask me again in two years and for all I know what will be literally at the forefront of that, of that battle.

Pat Murphy
I’m gonna ask you in two years. I’m gonna put it in the diary now, Nick OK?
Now we’ve been driving the implementation of virtual production for a number of our clients, you know, which obviously reduces the carbon footprint dramatically by around 80% minimum. Plus you get a lot of other benefits with that as well. Is that something that you’ve been exploring?

Nick Dodet
Yeah, we actually. We did a couple of really big virtual production, which they call XSPA here. Big projects – one of them was a global launch for the Volkswagen ID6 model. One of the issues that China had is that it tried to develop the technology during the pandemic and we were not able to fly in the people in Germany, in England, in California, etc. that had been working on that for five, ten years and already have done a lot of the troubleshooting.

So a lot of it was flying by night and also there wasn’t a really smart, clear explaining to brands what it can do, how great it can be. A lot of times I’ve seen it used as very expensive light boxes, in which case in terms of carbon footprint, you could cut it in half by only having light boxes. But when properly used, as you said, it’s an incredible tool, and especially in China, where I would say 80% of the top tier of any kind of advertising has influencers and celebrities and these guys will never travel. They’re going to have to shoot them usually in Shanghai or in Beijing. If your script calls for sunsets in the Grand Canyon with that celebrity, well, the great thing with virtual production is that you get as many hours of sunset as you want, with as many clouds or no clouds as you want, and that celebrity is never is basically three kilometers away from his or her hotel. They don’t use it for that enough and I think that’s where here they would be an incredible opening to do it. But it’s again. It’s going to catch very quickly because a lot of the big players in town now are investing a lot of money into it. They’re flying people left and right to get the expertise going and I suspect within the year or two it’s going to represent a fairly noticeable percentage of what’s being shot.

Pat Murphy
That’s fantastic.
Now, MCA is a passionate supporter of independent production companies around the world. The advertising production ecosystem is changing dramatically. What would be your top tips for other independent production companies around the world to stay relevant?

Nick Dodet
I think number one, you need to make sure to create your own DNA and number two, you need to stick to it. A lot of the panels I go to – The World Producers Summit, etc. I hear a lot of people complaining about Prodigious stealing all the work. They are here to stay. They’re not going to go anywhere. We can complain about it all day, but at the end of the day, it’s their business model and if you focus your business model based on someone else’s, it’s a recipe for failure.

You have to trust that you are really good at doing something and you have a really good product and if you have that good product, you will find buyers. Now, it may not be the buyers that is buying from Prodigious, but you will find buyers. Don’t go find the battle in their field. Have your own battlefield. Going where you know, play with your strength, believe in what you’re doing and, once again, I think, stick to your DNA. Whatever that DNA is, you got to stick to it because people notice and you will find people who actually like it and they’ll come back and they’ll spread the gospel and more people will come. That’s great.

Pat Murphy
And finally, the question that’s become one of the highlights of our podcast: Nick what’s your favourite ad of all time?

Nick Dodet
So quick disclaimer I won’t even mention Ridley’s 1984 because I think it’s in a class of its own at every single level.

But the one I refer to a lot to friends, clients, my team etc. Is the Jonathan Glazer VW Polo Small or Protection or whatever it’s called. For many reasons – obviously, the directing, the cinematography, the creative, the copy’s fantastic, the whole thing being black and white, the music, but also for the client that signed off on a back shot. That’s pretty depressing and I think it’s fantastic and makes it a little more powerful. So it is today, if not the, definitely one of my all time favourite.

Pat Murphy
Fantastic, Nick, look. So many thanks to you for joining us on our podcast.

Nick Dodet
Thanks, Pat, and we’ll chat again in a couple years, I hope!

Pat Murphy
Today we talked to Nick Dodet, a founder and managing partner of PIG China. It was a great conversation about the evolution of production, innovation and what to expect in the future in China and in production in general.

To find out more about the MCA Prodcast, please head to theprodcast.com, where you’ll find details on all my guests, links to their favorite ads and full transcriptions of all the episodes.

If you’d like to feature on the Prodcast or have any comments, questions or feedback, please email us at podcast@murphycobb.com.

I’m Pat Murphy, CEO of MCA. Do come and connect with us on LinkedIn or Instagram, which all the links and the notes for this episode will be there. We’d love to hear from you.

Thanks again to Nick, my team at MCA, and to my production team at What Goes On Media. Thanks for listening. See you next time.