Johnny Durant (5)

Meet our Director of Content

Describe your career in 5 words or less.

Exciting. Hardworking. Evolving. Deodorants!.

As a Business Director – leading our Content team, can you tell us a bit about what your role entails and the work your team delivers?

As Director of Content, my role is to drive better and more frequent content outputs across a range of clients. Either through leading key content projects or by supporting the broader teams across all stages of the creative and production process; from brilliant briefing of our creative team, to ensuring we’re producing content that is pushing the boundaries.

As a Content team, our overall ambition is to deliver video assets that brands want to promote, partners want to share and fans want to watch. If we do that, then everyone is happy and we’ll continue to grow as a capability function.

Behind all the great videos created, we’re also refining key suppliers and commercial terms. As an agency, we’ve used too many different production houses in the past. We now manage a production roster that has been quality checked but also importantly contain individual commercial agreements, ensuring CSM are in the best position to seek any incrementals or broader opportunities.

You’ve worked with a number of high-profile brands this year including Unilever, Phemex, Capgemini, Akkodis and Zalando to name just a few. Talk us through some of the exciting projects you have delivered recently? It sounds like September was a particularly busy month…

September felt more like we worked for a Hollywood studio than a marketing agency! We worked out that we had 16 shoots for 10 different clients across that month. Exciting, hectic and hopefully a sign of things to come in 2023.

There has been some brilliant projects in 2022, and the quality of creative and production has reached new heights. That’s been a collective effort between client account teams, content teams and of course the brilliant creative offering we’re also building. Personally, I love the work that takes us outside our comfort zone and breaks new ground, so if I were to pick three, this would be the list:

  • Rexona – a global ATL creative brief that we won over major advertising houses. This was our content and creative teams punching above their weight to deliver a brilliant campaign coinciding with the FIFA World Cup for markets including Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, US, Qatar and the UK.
  • phemex – Our first foray into crypto based global content. The full spectrum of rights, restrictions and crypto crashes provided a challenge, but ultimately the end output with arguably the world’s best midfield in Kevin De Bruyne, was brilliant.
  • CapGemini – A short turn around, a shoot in New Zealand and a challenging brief. Ultimately though, a brilliant film to land the partnership with a hard hitting story around the 2021 Rugby World Cup. As luck would have it, the Black Ferns went on to win the tournament, proving there are some things you just can’t plan for!

When not at work, what would we find you doing?

Either on the golf course, in Portugal or in a good restaurant (with veggie options). If I could be greedy and wrap all three activities into one day…then I’m even happier!