Portfolios are built out of launches: the big swing, the famous logo, the one-off that photographs well. Practices are built out of something less glamorous: the phone ringing again, from the same desk, because the last one worked.
Since 2014 I've been working with Prosper on exactly that basis. The output is steady and unflashy in shape: explainers, mostly, a lot of them, for brands like McDonald's, Canadian Tire, and Amex Canada, along with broadcast commercials for RexShares funds, BMAX and SSK. The McDonald's work grew big enough to earn its own card on this page.
The explainer is the workhorse of business video and the most underestimated format in it. Ninety seconds, one product, one audience, one metaphor that has to carry the whole thing. Get it right and the product finally makes sense out loud. Get it wrong and no amount of polish saves it. I've made more explainers than any other kind of video, a large share of them through this collaboration, and it's where I learned most of what I now know about the format.
But the real subject of this card is the shape of the relationship. A decade of repeat work changes what a brief looks like: it arrives earlier, rougher, and more honestly, because nobody has to perform certainty for a stranger. Half the job becomes helping decide what the video should be, not just making it. That's the quiet promotion nobody announces: from executing the brief to helping write it.
Nobody puts repeat business on a reel. It's the whole business.
A longer essay version of this case study is in progress.