Plus Also Studios, the AI-first production business spun out of advertising agency Howatson+Company has officially launched Unicorn — a new SaaS product and business that aims to give brands unlimited campaign asset roll out for a flat, and enticingly low, fee.
Its ambitions, perhaps unsurprising given its name, are far from quaint.
The product launched in secret three months ago. Today, it has broken cover. It is available on subscription at AU$1,500 per month per seat, with a seven-day free trial.
There are no rollout limits, outputs are supported in all languages, and the platform runs on “enterprise-grade” governance, with no compute costs or hidden fees.
This new product, as Hoang Nguyen, Plus Also’s co-founder and chief data and technology officer and Chris Howatson, founder and CEO of his eponymous agency, told B&T aims to “liberate” the 2 million designers from the drudgery of repetitive campaign roll out. It arrives at a time of significant financial strain for many of the country’s agencies and marketing teams.
“In general, the economics for marketing are very hard right now. There’s downward pressure on allocation of sales to marketing budget to start with. Then you look at allocation of budgets, more is going into media, less money is going into agencies, internal teams and martech. Media is up to maintain share of voice and net marketing budgets are down. That puts enormous pressure on production budgets to create quality assets,” said Howatson.
“I’d go as far as to say that marketing budgets haven’t changed that much in the 25 years I’ve been in advertising. When I started, you’d get a million-dollar budget to do a big campaign. Nothing has changed in 25 years. The average campaign in 2022 had two channels, the average now has 10. The entire supply chain is squeezed.
“We think that this tool genuinely gives brands and agencies the ability to spend less money on the stuff that creates no value, which is roll out. The asset schedules have ballooned. It’s not unusual for a schedule to have 1,300 assets. That’s insane. And it’s sucking up a lot of money that could be better spent creating the original asset in the first place, the original shoot, the original master art. We think that this is a problem and this is a solution to that budget compression. If we didn’t do it someone else would,” Howatson said.
So how does it work?
Unicorn, as Nguyen explained, is built on a proprietary model that takes the lessons from the “hundreds of thousands” of roll-outs completed by Plus Also studios and distils them into a “learning layer” on top of a frontier large language model, though Nguyen wouldn’t specify which.
Unicorn plugs into existing design tools, including Figma and Adobe Creative Cloud. From there designers, agencies or brands upload a CSV to unicorn, containing details of the proposed asset rollout. Then, the AI gets to work creating the assets. As it plugs into the design software, assets are rebuilt — rather than simply resized — accounting for each layer, brand guidelines and more.
“Often when you use AI to roll things out, it gives you a random result. What we guarantee is that the brand guidelines, all the different constraints — for example logo placement in relation to other aspects of the asset — all follow. It uses AI to think around those constraints and then make sure that the roll out is as expected rather than getting a different result every time,” said Nguyen, who recently topped B&T’s Best of the Best AI, Innovation & Technology Leaders.
“A lot of similar solutions on the market require brands to update their existing workflow and existing spreadsheets to match a template that the software requires. You don’t need to do that with Unicorn. You can literally upload any spreadsheet that you currently have. And if there’s anything it doesn’t understand, it will ask you or it will suggest a solution and ask you to approve.
“It’s a perfect combination between an agentic model using AI to read something incredibly complicated and then using the things that designed know and love, having the brains to roll things out as expected,” Hoang said.
Howatson said that his agency has been using iterations of the tool for the past couple of years and that it was important in its pitches for Endeavour Group and Myer. It has also been licensing the tool to brands including Foxtel, News Corp, Qantas Frequent Flyer, Snooze, Allianz and Petbarn for use in their internal studios.
A few months ago, it started offering unlimited asset roll out for a flat $5,000 fee. This is the natural evolution of the product’s availability.
“We’ve been working on the agentic interface, ironing out any bugs and now we’re ready to make it a proper SaaS product that anyone, anywhere in the world can use,” said Howatson.
“According to the ABS, there are around 200,000 designers in Australia. In the world, there are 2 million. Our ambition is to be the global rollout standard for the 2 million designers across the world.”
The tool is also be used by other agencies, too, though Howatson and Nguyen weren’t at leisure to say which. They did however, say they were “global” in scale. Unicorn, Plus Also Studios and Howatson+Company all operate independent businesses with separate ABNs and profit-and-loss sheets.
“At first, some agencies thought that because we’re an agency, they shouldn’t buy a tool from us. But that’s why we’re separating the businesses,” said Howatson.
“We really hope, whether you’re Droga5, Omnicom, a small independent down the road, or a brand studio, or you’re in Korea or Australia, that this is a solution for everybody. We’re spending a lot of money to promote this. We’re going to launch a campaign next week across Meta, Reddit, LinkedIn so those 2 million designers can be liberated from rollout.”
Crucially, any user information — including Figma or Adobe files — stays within Figma or InDesign.
“We don’t touch them,” said Nguyen.
Metadata is momentarily uploaded into the platform to be parsed by Unicorn’s model, returned and then deleted.
It is, Nguyen conceded “compute intensive” but argued that compared to the power required to manually roll out thousands of assets over a period of days, would still be greater than this 10-minute solution.
It’s a bold gambit to pivot into the world of SaaS products from the team behind Howatson+Company. Though they’ve rarely been known for their meekness.
