A story of a gut punch, and good advice meeting a better truth.

It was a rainy night as I struggled to parallel park on Rampart, in the French Quarter. We were on our way to see Snarky Puppy play at the Mahalia Jackson Theatre when my client told me something that was a bit of a gut punch in that moment. He said

“Wes, you can’t put creative and technology together in the same company, you have to pick one, people will always be confused about what they’re buying from you if you try to do both”

This particular client was more than a client—he was a mentor whose opinion mattered deeply to me. His business expertise had guided many of the insights that I held close, and I’d learned a lot from watching him navigate everything from zoom calls with stakeholders to issues with the way video projects were going. As someone who had been there from the early days of our growing Creative+Technology video production company, I had come to value his perspective.

And while what he told me was wise, and correct in many ways, I didn’t let his advice slow me down.

Snarky Puppy encored with Shofukan that night, and on the way home I told him something that has become the cornerstone that guides the trajectory we’re attempting to create for our clients at version47.

Creative services $pend today doesn’t make market sense without the Leverage that technology provides us in the form of custom tools that you make yourself.

This isn't a new insight—it's been building for years. The tools of creative services have been rapidly evolving for decades. For video people like myself, this trajectory can be clocked in 5 key moments starting in 2005:

2005: Youtube launches, giving everyone a place to watch, post, and engage with video content.

2010: Canon 5D MkII launched, arguably the world’s first video DSLR, it gave the video production space a relatively cheap way to capture very cinematic video footage. This is common now today, but it’s impact on the gatekeeping of the tools of video production can’t be underestimated.

2012: The internet “video codec wars” (which is what that time felt like) chose mp4s as their champion, and small video file sizes that would play anywhere was born.

2013: Adobe Creative Suite became available as a monthly subscription instead of a $3000 one time cost.

2015: Youtube comes full circle as a place for anyone, anywhere, to access information that teaches how to use these now easily accessible tools in ways that simply never existed before.

There were many other little micro-aggressions on the old guard that was gatekeeping the keys to the commercial video production castle, but those moments in history are the big ones. Together they worked in coalition to completely democratize the tools of video production, in less than a decade.

Back to the present, AI is front and center because of it’s widespread appeal and seemingly endless ability to capture venture capital investment, but it’s simply a natural evolution of 20 years of rapid tools evolution, machine learning, and expanded artistic, creative, and commercial expression. It would be easy to blame AI for the disruption in creative services. But I’m here to claim that it’s simply the next natural step of the decades-long evolution of tools reaching a point of complete automated capability. This automation is hyper-aware and hyper-informed. But it lacks the human component that makes people invest in creative services.

This gap is where the real opportunity exists for we, the creative professionals.

When everyone has the same access, tools aren’t the thing, the differentiated results you can get with the tool are the thing.

And so we’ve arrived at the [cliffhanger] conclusion to today’s post, when I say “Custom Tools”, what I’m talking about is the NEXT phase of this longstanding rapid evolution, wherein the tools being built are yours, and they act as an extension of what you know as a creative, and they DAMN sure don’t replace the thing that your clients are paying you for.