merit
2022
Los Angeles
No Problem creates entertainment value for clients and audiences.
5
Underdog
Our Outlook - audiences don’t want to see your ad, they will pay not to see your ad. We want to meet people where they are with communications they’ll care about and engage with, not just ads they’ll pick up their phone to avoid.
Our Outfit - instead of a bloated agency, we run a production company-style model, with senior leadership managing diverse, specialist teams who are cast to deliver specific projects based on their skills and interest.
Our Output - because of our flexible model we are able to deliver varied solutions for our clients. A karaoke video for Candy Crush, a streamer partnership for Jameson, peelable OOH for the launch of Tony Hawk Pro Skater.
Our entire business is built on treating people as people and not trying to suck them dry for the minimum amount of salary. Because of our freelance model, we are highly dependent on those relationships between us and our partnerlancers. If we were assholes, they just wouldn’t come back and subsequently, we wouldn't have a business to write about.
This model also gives us great flexibility and breadth, by allowing us to bring in the right people for each brief, rather than trying to solve every brief with the same small group.
The flexible model has allowed us to create, in 2025 alone:
A 3 min karaoke film to launch Candy Crush All Stars
30+ hours of streamer content in partnership with Jameson
Hilarious OOH for Cocomelon
A full 360 launch for the Tony Hawk Pro Skater
The realization that what you’ve been made to think at the start of your career - focus on the creative work; sell the best solution to the brief; be straightforward with and nice to your clients and colleagues- is not always in the interest of the company that owns your business.
So, when you’re incentivized to sell media at whatever cost, you’re not thinking about the most effective way to help clients reach people, you’re thinking about the best way to sell media placements, (which are often already bought) and repackage them to clients like subprime mortgages stuffed with ads.
As with the industry at large, the new business churn remains a challenge, with the need to be constantly picking up new projects to account for inevitable losses on the other end, whether that’s due to client changes, economic circumstances or something else. I wouldn’t say we’ve overcome it but our best chance is to keep doing good work and get rewarded with more work.
I would love to see more indies working together to form more than the sum of their parts. Winning and successfully running large pieces of business would be proof that there is a way for smaller companies to do things their own way, creating environments their staff want to work in whilst taking on the most exciting briefs around.
