05:37 on Why It’s Time for a New Shape of Studio

When Catherine Peacock and Christopher Keatinge launched 05:37 at the end of last year, their intention was simple: to build an independent ideas company where creative thinking is placed at the heart of business. ‘One brand world’ is an expression of that belief. A way of bringing branding and advertising together so creativity sits as close as possible to the challenges clients are trying to solve and the aims they’re trying to achieve. 05:37 is looking to the future from a foundation of time-tested thinking gleaned from many of the brilliant studios that have come before. By resisting silos and uniting disciplines on every brief, the studio aims to create clearer, more powerful ideas in a space that can test, evolve and refine how those ideas show up in the world.

“The pressure marketers are under today is enormous, and only increasing. They’re expected to balance short-term demand with long-term growth, build strong relationships with the C-suite and CFO to determine how and where budgets are spent, and service an ever-expanding mix of channels with fewer resources and even less time,” says Catherine, explaining the vision behind ‘one brand world’. Additionally, marketing is still sometimes seen as a “a cost, not an investment”, but that’s changing now. “The recent decision by Disney CEO Bob Iger to appoint the company’s first-ever centralised chief marketing and brand officer underscores a clear belief in the need for a single, coherent brand vision,” Catherine adds.

The word brand needs an expansion too as it has become, according to Christopher, “a shorthand for visual identity, but it’s so much more than that. It’s an amalgamation of what a business produces, what it looks like, how it speaks, acts, shows up in culture, and how it treats its people. When we get this right, the words ‘brand’ and ‘business’ can become synonymous.”

Marketing Necessities

When conceptualising of 05:37, Christopher and Catherine started with a blank slate to be “able to reflect on what is working, and moreover, what is increasingly necessary for today’s marketers,” Christopher says. “An approach that transcends the traditional silos of strategy, brand design and advertising to place a cross-disciplinary team around the same business problem, allowing us to solve it more creatively, and more meaningfully for the long-term.”

They are evangelical about the generative power of the “right idea” when embedded across a business, adding “We’ve seen first-hand the power that the best ideas have to unite, and excite, every part of a business, becoming true catalysts for growth at every touchpoint.”

Despite the encroachment of AI, the duo believes that creativity "remains our greatest competitive advantage, and adopting a powerfully differentiating brand idea can be the most efficient thing a business can do, empowering their in-house teams, and allowing AI to scale something brilliant rather than optimise something average.”

In practice, 05:37 offers an anti-silo framework designed to put an end to clients going from “a brand strategy agency, to a design agency to an advertising agency,” says Christopher, to minimise what inevitably gets lost in translation. This ensures that everyone is working together and understands, from the start, the value of every decision.

“Our goal is to help our partners spend less, achieve more, and build compounding, competitive advantage at every opportunity. We’re not prescriptive about where we begin though: it’s about meeting clients where they’re at. This can be built from scratch, or more often, elevated from the best of what already exists,” Catherine adds.

Defining the Challenge

The One Brand World offering will help the young studio cement its positioning as a true strategic and business partner, starting with aligning around a “clearly defined challenge” together with clients. “True to our time-based name, we look at the past, present and future of a business, and agree on a clear ‘this time next year’ definition of success,” says Christopher.

“That means setting expectations upfront – not just creatively, but culturally and commercially too, from shifting how internal stakeholders see the brand to delivering against tangible business goals.”

Crucially, 05:37 doesn’t arrive with any existing, rigid frameworks to impose. “We believe the best creative solutions come from fully immersing ourselves in our clients’ worlds, getting laser-focused on the problem we all agree to solve, and holding ourselves to the standard our name promises: to chase moments of real creative breakthrough with everyone we work with,” says Catherine.

Investing in Creativity

Tireless champions of the power and potential of creativity, Christopher and Catherine “genuinely believe that when creativity is woven through an entire business, it becomes one of the most powerful growth drivers it has. Ultimately, we’re partnering with clients who see creativity not as an expense, but as an investment that can truly transform their future and fortunes,” Christopher adds.

Catherine, who’s an advocate for a radically different style of client relationship, adds “It’s fair to say that the quality of work and our client relationships are inextricably linked. If we start from the premise of solving their business challenges in creative ways, we can better build trust and transparency. For us, the ultimate dream isn’t just brilliant creative work – though of course we want that to become our calling card – but truly helping our partners grow their businesses, and pursue more exciting opportunities.”

Beyond the positives that clients will reap from the silo-less offering, there are benefits to the people executing the work too – an equally important factor for Catherine and Christopher. “We recognise that designers want to create work that genuinely reaches real people in the real world rather than existing in a hermetically-sealed case study, and advertising creatives don’t just want to be stuck in the purely reactive, fleeting moment. They want to build more lasting partnerships and help businesses grow in ways that become reference points,” they explain.

05:37 is making a stance; on the power of creativity, on a new style of client relationships, and on what outcomes are possible to achieve. It’s bold – and Catherine and Christopher know it – grounded by a mantra they repeat often: “We believe ideas are only as good as the problems they solve.”