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What an agency's five senior hires buy a video client

If you are booking campaign video for the first quarter, the practical effect of a rival agency's hiring round is small unless you are invited to pitch against it. Paper Moose, an independent BCorp agency, announced on 10 November 2026 that it had made five senior appointments and two internal promotions. A client reading the release learns who will sign off the work and how quickly a brief can move, which is the same question anyone weighing a video production company against an in-house team or a monthly creative contract has to settle before the first call.

The roles tell you what the agency expects to sell. A creative director, a design lead, a senior designer, a digital media lead and an account manager cover the path from concept to delivery and then into placement. Read as a set, those five titles suggest the agency means to run a campaign end to end rather than farm out parts of it. That is my reading of the roster, not something the release states. This piece sets out what each hire changes for a buyer, how to compare a staffed agency with a production house, and what to check on scope and output before you commit.

The five appointments and the two promotions

Campaign Brief reported the round on 10 November 2026. Chris McMullen joins as Creative Director, Michael Macgregor as Design Lead, Alexander Glenny as senior designer, Daniel Rushi as Digital Media lead and Lili-Rose Sandiford as Account Manager. Inside the agency, Jazz Twemlow moved up to Associate Creative Director and Hannah Stokes to Senior Creative.

The backgrounds matter more than the titles, and they are what a video production company buyer should read first. McMullen brings two decades of advertising experience and a set of creative awards, having worked as a freelance Creative Director at Dentsu Creative, Lead Creative at Thinkerbell and Senior Art Director at VCCP and BWM. Macgregor came from 72andSunny as design lead and had contributed to projects that were awarded two D&AD Black Pencils, a Cannes Lions Titanium Grand Prix, two Cannes Lions Grands Prix and a Grand Effie. Glenny spent two years as a designer at Hogarth before joining.

Two of the hires sit closer to delivery than to craft. Rushi was digital activations manager at KINESSO Australia and joins the media and digital team. Sandiford came from Publicis Production within Publicis Groupe ANZ with end-to-end production experience, including time on the production side at VFX studio Blackbird. Those are the roles a client calls when a campaign schedule slips.

A creative director and a producer review a storyboard beside a pinned shoot schedule in a studio.

What each role changes for a client

The creative director decides whether the idea survives the first internal review. A senior hire with agency and freelance history shortens that loop because the person has already defended work in front of clients who ask hard questions. For a buyer, the practical test is who attends the concept presentation: if the creative director is absent and a junior presents, the senior hire is on the payroll but not on your account. That last point is worth pressing in writing, since a roster lists the people the agency hired, not the people who will sit in your reviews.

The design lead and senior designer control how fast assets adapt across sizes and channels. A campaign that ships in one format and gets resized later by whoever is free tends to lose the detail that made it work. Macgregor's awards record is a proxy for craft under constraint, not a promise about your brief, and it belongs on the shortlist file only as a question to ask about the last three projects.

The digital media lead changes how the work connects to placement. Rushi's background is in digital activations, which is the point in a campaign where budget moves between platform, audience and creative version. If the same team produces the video and reads the performance data, then version testing gets decided by the people who made the cuts. If those functions sit in different companies, you need a written handover before the first flight.

The account manager and the production-side hire control the calendar. Sandiford's background combines client service with delivery, and that is the combination that keeps a shoot date from moving every time a stakeholder adds a comment. Ask both of them, not the new business contact, how a slipped approval is handled mid-shoot.

Comparing a staffed agency with a production house

The two sellers look similar on a deck and differ on where risk sits. A video production company sells the shoot and the edit; a full-service agency sells the idea and the placement around it.

What you are buying	Staffed full-service agency	Production house
Idea and script	Creative team on retainer or per project	Often briefed by the client or its agency
Production and post	In-house or subcontracted	Core service, own crew
Media planning and buying	Part of the retainer, or separate	Usually outside scope
Speed of change	Depends on who is free and how approvals run	Depends on the shoot and post calendar
Cost shape	Retainer plus production and media	Per project or monthly output

A Hong Kong production house makes the second column concrete. Plan B Film Production has run since 2013 and says it has produced over 100 commercial, corporate and digital video projects across Hong Kong and Asia, covering TV commercials, online videos, corporate films, product demos, motion graphics and branded films. It puts a typical video timeline at 4 to 8 weeks depending on complexity, and runs pre-production, production and post-production as its three stages. Its own page records a 2023 Kam Fan Award from HK4As for Film Craft in Production Design Gold.

That timeline is the number to carry into a planning meeting. A four-week build leaves little room for a second concept, and a client who wants two rounds of creative exploration should ask where the extra weeks come from before signing a media plan that assumes a fixed launch date.

A producer marks shoot dates on a wall planner while two colleagues discuss the production timeline.

What the buyers of these services actually check

Production capability is not a single score. It breaks into questions with answers you can compare across suppliers.

Check	What to ask	Why it matters
Pipeline ownership	Which stages run in-house, which are subcontracted	A subcontracted edit is where deadlines slip
Format range	Can the team deliver vertical, wide and square cuts from one shoot	Reframing later costs a second edit
Output volume	How many finished assets per month, at what length	A monthly number beats a vague "as needed"
Revision rounds	How many rounds are priced in, and what starts a new one	Rounds are the most common scope dispute
Media separation	Is placement and media spend inside the fee or separate	Media fees hidden in a creative quote distort the comparison
Evidence	Named projects, awards, delivery dates	Awards show craft; dates show reliability

None of these checks needs a subscription or a retainer to answer. A supplier that cannot give a straight number on output volume and revision rounds is telling you something about how the contract will run. Print the table, fill in one column per supplier, and the gaps in the answers become visible before the pitch meetings start, usually earlier than you would otherwise notice them.

How to choose a video production company without a shootout

The shortcut most marketing teams take when they shortlist a video production company is to compare showreels. Showreels are edited for exactly that purpose, so they are poor evidence of how a supplier behaves on a schedule with a client watching. A better sequence starts with a written brief of the campaign you plan to run next quarter, including the channel mix and the number of assets each channel needs.

Send that brief to three suppliers and ask for the same five items back: a scope with named stages, a monthly or per-project output count, format specifications, the revision policy, plus a delivery date tied to your launch. Five answers in the same shape make a comparison. Compare those answers side by side rather than the creative ideas, because the ideas you see in a pitch are often produced by people who will not be on the account.

Then ask who handles performance. If the answer is that placement and optimisation are a separate contract, video ad optimization should be priced separately too, and the numbers stop being comparable the moment one quote bundles media into production. That single question exposes more about a quote than any line item, because a bundled media cost hides how the supplier intends to spend it.

The last check is the one buyers skip: a test round, priced and delivered like the first month of a video production company contract. A single short asset, delivered against a fixed brief and a fixed date, tells you more about a supplier than a full campaign proposal.

The gap buyers ask about: what separates the top ten production companies

Search results for the phrase return lists of names. The question underneath, what separates the top production companies from the rest, is answerable on capability rather than rank.

The dividing line is usually pre-production ownership. Some houses only shoot what a client or an agency has already written. A house that writes, storyboards and shoots with one team can change a scene on the day without re-briefing an outside writer. Plan B's three-stage structure, with pre-production named as a stage rather than an afterthought, is the shape to look for. Ask, though, whether the writer on your project is a staff member or a freelancer booked per job; the answer changes what "one team" means in practice.

Format range comes next. A house that can only shoot wide television spots will reframe for vertical placements after the fact, which affects where the first frame lands. A house that plans vertical and wide frames at the shoot keeps the opening second intact on both.

Timelines separate the rest. A supplier that publishes a typical range, as Plan B does with 4 to 8 weeks, has been asked the question enough times to answer it. One that says "fast turnaround" has not.

Award records belong in this comparison as evidence of craft, not as ranking. A 2023 Kam Fan Award for production design says something about set and art direction on one project. It does not say the same team will run your shoot in March, so treat it as a question about who is assigned, not as a score.

Art department staff arrange props on a lit film set while a camera crew prepares the next shot.

How Topkee's creative subscription maps onto these roles

Topkee sells the same set of functions as a monthly subscription rather than as a staffed team. The work an agency gives to its client service, creative, design, film and data staff is delivered as agreed output quantities each month, and the delivery team is Topkee's own cross-disciplinary team rather than a named group assigned to one client.

Topkee's creative subscription is priced in Hong Kong dollars on a monthly tier, with output defined as a fixed number of key visuals or short videos per month. Every standard video is capped at a set length, and dimensions, languages and revision rounds are agreed before work starts.

What the subscription does not include matters as much as what it does. Ad management and media fees are contracted separately, so creative production and placement are distinct scopes; shoots, talent, complex 3D and special effects are quoted on their own. There is no dedicated client team and no promise of unlimited meetings or revisions, which is why the revision count belongs in your first brief rather than in a later negotiation. Assets adapt to Google, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Xiaohongshu, TikTok, LinkedIn and Yahoo placements.

For a marketing team that needs a steady number of finished assets each month, the fixed-output structure answers the question this hiring round raises from the other side: whether to add senior staff or to buy a defined quantity of production. Topkee's own page states that it has worked with 3,000+ companies, and the knowledge base records no named client cases for the service, so treat the tier numbers as a pricing structure to test against your own output count, not as evidence of results.

Recommended next action

Before you write a brief for any supplier, count the assets your next campaign needs by channel and by length. That count, not the showreel, sets which kind of supplier fits. Teams that expect a monthly refresh rate rather than one campaign a quarter can compare a subscription structure against an agency retainer on the Facebook ads strategy guide, then check how vertical cuts get planned on the Reels and native content guide.

Where this evidence runs out

Three files sit behind this piece, and none of them answers the question a buyer is really asking. The hiring announcement gives titles and backgrounds but says nothing about fee levels, team structure, client load or which people would be assigned to a new account. Plan B's page states its own project count, timeline range and one award; it is the company describing itself, and the timeline is described as typical rather than measured. Topkee's page describes a product and the knowledge base describes its delivery, with no named client case attached to the subscription. So the comparison in these pages is a comparison of how the offers are described, not of how they perform.

I can tell you which questions separate a staffed agency from a production house, and which of those questions a supplier's own material will not answer. I cannot tell you from this dossier which kind of supplier will cost less for your output count, or which will deliver on time. Those answers live in a written quote, a named person on your account and one delivered test asset. No press release will contain them.

FAQ

Does an agency hiring a creative director change what I pay?

Not directly. A senior hire affects what the agency can deliver and who signs off the work, while the fee structure still comes from scope: retainer, production and media are usually priced separately. Ask which named people will be assigned to your account before anything else.

How long should a campaign video take to produce?

Plan B Film Production puts a typical video at 4 to 8 weeks depending on complexity, covering pre-production, production and post-production. A shorter window is possible but usually means fewer concept rounds, so agree the launch date and the revision rounds in the same conversation.

Should I buy video from an agency or a production house?

Buy from a production house when you or your agency already own the strategy and the brief. Buy from a full-service agency when the concept, the production and the placement need one owner. Buying both from separate companies works if the handover of performance data is written down.

What should a monthly creative subscription cover?

At minimum it should state the number of finished assets per month, the maximum length of each video, the formats and languages included, and the number of revision rounds. Placement, media spend, shoots and talent are usually outside a production subscription and should be priced separately.

Is a shorter video easier to optimise?

video ad optimization usually starts with cut length, because short assets give you more versions to test in the same budget. A short-video cap is common in subscription plans for that reason. Fewer frames also mean the first second carries more weight, so vertical and square cuts should be planned at the shoot rather than cropped later.