Happy Finish

🌟 Excited to share insights from Toby, President and COO of Happy Finish Portland, during his recent interview with Stan Joosten at P&G Signal360! 🌟 Toby highlighted Happy Finish's journey from a post-production artist representation agency 🚀 to a leading #content #production company with a global presence. Emphasising the crucial role of #Creativity and #Technology, Toby explained how Happy Finish innovates in #3D #content, #immersive #experiences, and #AI-driven #solutions to meet brand demands for B2B and B2C content that inspires and drives ROI. Check out the full interview https://lnkd.in/eGJ7xGRE to learn more about our innovative approaches and success stories with brands like Mattel, Inc. and Dove. 🚀🚀🚀🚀 Procter & Gamble | P&G Signal360 | Happy Finish | Different Factory🚀

🚀 Thrilled to have been a part of the Coca-Cola® K-Wave magic! 🚀A huge thank you to The Coca-Cola Company, the amazing VIRTUE Worldwide team, the Happy Finish super team, and every partner and individual involved. Your talent and dedication brought this vision to life, celebrating K-Pop fans worldwide. 🌎 Here's to creating more incredible experiences together. Cheers! 🥤 #TasteTheFruityFantasy #RealMagic #CocaColaCreations #Virtue #happyfinish #DifferentFactory

For us here at Happy Finish, one of the most profound changes since getting started is the way in which we measure things. When we started, our approach was driven by an almost single-minded obsession with artisanal creativity and expression. Validation would largely come through peer recognition and the sense that what we did pushed creative, technical and experiential boundaries, clients were back for more and awards kept coming. In hindsight, that is all well and good and without doubt a great foundation to build on, but, from a brand perspective, more often than not, that is not enough. Today, we can be much more analytical about what we do, and whether it works. The answer to the question of what success looks like today can be singularly, forensically, nerdily specific. We can measure it. Because that is the best way of knowing whether what we do actually moves the needle for our partner brands and agencies. Which is to say that #contentcreation today is no longer the indulgent preserve of a certain je nais se quois mindset. Content today needs to drive #conversion measurably, and it needs to do so on a whole range of #channels, with purchasing journeys often starting on one platform, then flitting to another, all the while keeping product story-telling consistent and true to brand. The inexorable shift towards digital has brought a level of quantitative accountability that was totally unheard of just a few years ago. We welcome this, and we often talk about how we help brands scale #cgi content production across multiple channels; not just #ecommerce, #marketing and #ooh but also right across multiple social formats and destinations. We were reminded of this recently when looking at our dashboard for one of the main social platforms:

As we've all firmly landed in 2024, the challenges and opportunities facing consumer brands haven't gone away; for example: how to align growing #omnichannel #content needs with internal processes, budgets and people? How to build vibrant content ecosystems? Or even better: how to build & configure content engines that support more, better for less? At Happy Finish we've been passionate about content from the start - from beautifully crafted one-off campaigns and activations to 3D e-com content delivered at unprecedented quality and scale. But where 20 years ago, content production was often seen in isolation, first and foremost a worthy end in itself, the advent of Computer Aided Design (#cad ) and Digital Product Creation (#dpc ) have opened up the very real possibility of millimeter-perfect digital product twins 'shadowing' the whole 'real' product life-cycle; if you like from #cad to #ad. As we know, some sectors were fast in take-up - notably automotive, and in the process cutting down on the huge logistics and carbon-footprints involved in 'old-school' lavish, and costly location-based 2D content production and vanity projects. Other sectors, notably #fashion have been laggards - not least because it is much harder to produce high-fidelity assets in 3D of organic materials, fabrics and clothes than it is to produce hard-surface assets and renders. However with the emergence of new tools and platforms, including #realtime rendering and #genai, digital twinning workflows in fashion are now firmly taking shape. We are now at a point of maturity, where no fashion-brand today can afford not to invest in digital product twinning and #fashiontech; where no fashion-brand has a future if it doesn't cut down on physical sampling and other wasteful practices, not to mention 20th century processes and logistics in a 21st century world! Read from our CEO, Mirko M. Scolari, on the evolving, strategic role technology and service partners like Happy Finish can play in the fashion industry, helping brands scale #sustainable content production and thereby maximise the value of their investments into #dpc and the whole digital asset life cycle: https://lnkd.in/ecZqEbvs Thanks to the amazing team at The Interline, especially to Ben Hanson and Lydia Mageean, and of course to Mark Harrop for bringing us into the conversation! 🙌🏻 🙌🏻 🙌🏻

As we sail towards the festive break, and with downtime to kill between family madness and jollity, why don't you take some time out for a look at the excellent 2023 #dpcreport ? Ben Hanson and his team at The Interline have put together this amazing resource for anyone interested in pushing transformative practices into all aspects of the fashion economy: from digital product creation, virtual sampling, on-demand production to innovative sell-in and sell-through. With interviews and contributions from Kelly Helfman, Eva Mattsson Culafic, Charlotte Fabienne Stobrawe, Brendon Ronon, Sylwia Szymczyk, Anupama Fernando, Hasini Weerasinghe, Mackenzie Delev, MSc, MM, Aasia D'Vaz-Sterling, Jennifer Holloway, Safir Bellali, Antonio Talarico, Emma Feldner-Busztin, Michael Ferrao, Jared Goldman, Mary Keefe Grim, Neha Singh, CLARE TATTERSALL, and the corporate team at HUGO BOSS Central to this excellent survey of creativity and innovation is the idea that #digitaltwins are fast becoming THE indispensable foundation for all stages of the product lifecycle. Here at Happy Finish we know that large-scale content creation can be a real challenge for many brands, with 65% reported to be struggling with the complexities of traditional production workflows (both CGI and Photography). With our Happyfai solution, which combines the power of #digitaltwins with #realtime workflows and #genai, we have created a fully customisable content factory platform that addresses the needs of brands and retailers for consistent, high-quality omni-channel content delivered at scale and speed. You can find out more about Happyfai in an interview with our very own Mirko M. Scolari starting on page 138 of the #dpcreport - link in comments. Have a great break!

How can consumer brands and retailers accelerate their rate of innovation when it comes to #omnichannel #contentcreation ? Read Happy Finish Co-Founder Rainer Usselmann's thoughts in The Grocer - link in the comments. Rainer argues that, with many brands struggling to scale the creation of high quality content, there is a pressing need to innovate how high-quality, inspirational product images, video and experiences are produced. At Happy Finish we have shown how automated, #genai-driven, #realtime workflows that utilise #virtual sampling, templatised ingestion of product data and creative guidelines can not only dramatically expedite creation and deployment of visual content, but also drive #sustainability . One of the biggest factors getting in the way of rolling out these solutions is a tendency towards siloed thinking within brands. All too often innovation, product, and content teams sit separately from ecom, marketing , instore or digital; creating inefficiencies and missed opportunities. To get around this, larger organisations can establish agile innovation teams that operate like internal startups and drive experimentation and adoption across internal silos. Situating innovation teams horizontally across departments, like buying, product creation, e-commerce, digital, in-store and marketing, can facilitate much better cross-pollination. But whilst this 'horizontal' approach to innovation comes naturally to start-ups, more established incumbents often struggle. Is this something you've come across?

The Omnichannel Content Challenge: How to create more, better, faster and for less? Being an enabling, strategic technology and service partner today comes with a unique blend of opportunity and responsibility. At this point in the content revolution, our role at HF increasingly transcends service provision alone, and we act as a critical friend to our many valued partner brands, a key influencer who helps inform and shape brand-side decision-making. It’s a tremendous opportunity to help define and establish best practices across the whole digital asset lifecycle. As a strategic partner, there's a great responsibility to help brands and retailers align their content strategies with consumer expectations. With our Happyfai solution, which combines #realtime workflows with #genai, we have created a fully customisable content factory platform that addresses the needs of brands and retailers for consistent, high-quality omni-channel content delivered at scale and speed. Exhibit A: the Home and Furniture Sector. Check out our feature in the December edition of Big Furniture Magazine, pages 58-60. Link in comments. #content #automation #realtime #ai

We’re proud to have been part of yesterday’s Meta Festival UK, a brand and retail-focused event at London’s amazing Outernet London to explore how brands can grow at the intersection of AI, creativity and culture. We were invited to show how we could translate our experience in retail/ ecommerce to Mixed Reality & Meta Quest 3. We decided to utilise our #epic Mega Grant winning visual merchandising solution and port this to Meta's Oculus Presence Platform, utilising: hand tracking with hand inputs, spatial anchors, colour passthrough, dynamic asset selection/creation, interactive asset placement, interactive asset manipulation, AI generated product imagery and AI generated video stings. Multiple takeaways from Meta Festival UK: Oculus Quest as a platform has come a long way! Oculus’ evolution from VR to MR is compelling and opens new use-cases for brands, particularly in a B2B environment: think visual merchandising, store-planning and B2B sell-in events and how a platform like Oculus can add great utility and immersion; where physical space or physical product samples are not available at the point of need, or where a rich narrative layer is needed to elevate product story-telling. Big thanks to team Meta: Adam Holmes, Miriam Faber, Oscar Swedrup, @Ellie Baker, @Thilo Rupprecht, @Adam ONeill, @Andrew Nash Thanks guys, you smashed it!! #meta #oculusquest #digitalinnovation #retailtrends #ecommercesolutions

🚀 Happy Finish Different Factory at TEDx Weekend TEDxVerona 🚀 🚀 We are thrilled to share our experience from the incredible #workshop we hosted at the TEDx weekend event in #Verona on Saturday. The response and engagement from TED Conferences and TEDx global community that participated in our workshop were #overwhelming, and it was an afternoon filled with #insightful #discussions, #innovative #ideas, and #inspiring #connections #FUN !! Our heartfelt thanks to our mother company Different Factory, for the amazing opportunity, and to Mauro Grandotto for his #vision, #support and #unstoppable quest for #innovation #excellence. 🚀 🚀 🚀 #RedCircle Team Mirko, Rainer and Toby 🚀 🚀 🚀 We would like to express our deepest gratitude to the all TEDx TEDxVerona organizers in particular to Francesco Magagnino and Cristina Di Francesco for the amazing support and for providing us with this platform to share our ideas and engage with such a diverse and dynamic audience. The event was a testament to TED's mission to spread #ideas that #spark #imagination, #embrace #possibility, and #catalyze #impact

For the launch of New EE yesterday night, Happy Finish creative tech transformed Fatboy Slim gig with the world's largest holographic projection, illuminating the London skyline above Alexandra Palace, Wow. What a great project to deliver: creative story-telling on another level! We loved every minute of it, even in the face of super-compressed time-lines and many many challenges, not least storm Babet! Big shout out to the amazing team around Chloe Mitchell and Bertie Turner at M&C Saatchi Talk, who brought us in, and the guys from Really Creative Media Ltd, who made sure the infrastructure delivered on the night; and of course to Christian Barrou Thrane, MD Marketing at EE, who had the vision to make all of this possible. The event, hosted by TV & Radio Presenter Pips Taylor, kept fans at Alexandra Palace in suspense until the surprise performer was revealed, marking the new chapter of EE to the nation with the intro to "Right Here, Right Now" resonating across the London skyline. The visual feat of Fatboy Slim appearing as a 50-meter-high holographic projection was joined ‘in the sky’ by a group of real fans from across the UK. The show continued with an energetic rendition of "Praise You," featuring a virtual chorus of backing dancers from across the country. Among the attendees were Ashley Roberts, Ella Eyre, Max George, Maisie Smith, Lucy Watson, and Yinka Bokinni. #CreativeTechnology #HolographicPerformance #CreativeStorytelling #TheNationsGig Image Credit: Sam Hussein / EE