Myriad started in 1993 with a simple conviction: there are better ways to do things. At the time, that meant betting on digital editing when the industry was still cutting tape-to-tape. The skeptics were loud. We moved anyway.

That instinct has defined us ever since. Not restlessness…something closer to paying attention. When the moment changes, we believe it’s our job to read it honestly and respond with intention.

This moment has asked more of us than most. Not because change is unfamiliar, but because the stakes are different. An industry flooded with content. Audiences increasingly immune to it. The gap between what brands are making and what people actually need, growing wider by the day.

We’ve watched good work — technically sound, strategically approved — land without impact. We’ve felt it ourselves. And we kept coming back to the same question: who was this actually made for?

Too often the answer was the process itself. The brief got written, the work got made, the project got closed. The audience was assumed rather than known. That realization took time to fully reckon with…and it wasn’t comfortable. But at some point the three of us looked at each other and made a commitment: every project we take on will start with the audience and be held to the standard of what it does for them. That became the thing we couldn’t unknow.

We’ve stopped making video for those other reasons and started making it for the audience. Not as a creative preference. As a foundational commitment to what video is actually for.

We’ve been building toward this for three decades. We’re more certain of it now than ever.

Audience First isn’t a research methodology bolted onto production. It’s a lens we put over every project; one that starts with real people and stays there.

What that looks like in practice depends on what the project needs. Sometimes it’s three empathy conversations with people who’ve lived the experience the video is trying to reach. Sometimes it’s a survey shaped to surface emotional truth rather than program data. Sometimes a client already has audience research. What’s needed then isn’t more research — it’s someone to put a creative video lens over what’s already there. To find what’s usable, what’s missing, and what the brief should say that it doesn’t.

The scope can scale to meet the budget. The commitment doesn't.

We work with a small group of what we call audience advocates wherever possible: real people who represent the audience the video needs to reach. We bring them in early, before the brief is written or a concept is formed. We ask them about their lives, their fears, their workarounds, their language. Then we bring them back at key moments in production to sense-check what we’re making. Not to direct the creative. To keep it honest.

What comes out of that process isn’t just better creative direction. It’s creative direction you can stand behind, because it came from the audience.

Two recent examples:

An insurance client brought us in to produce a video for their employee giving program. Their brief was thin. We pushed to talk to the audience directly. The client agreed, but only through a survey. We shaped the questions to surface emotional truth, not just program data. What came back told us the audience valued the program because it let them give to causes they personally believed in. That changed the video completely.

A pharmaceutical client needed patient testimonial videos for a cancer detection test. Before a single camera rolled, we conducted empathy interviews with three breast cancer survivors. What they shared — the terror of waiting, the ongoing weight of survivorship, the unexpected sisterhood — didn’t just inform the creative. It became the creative. The concept that emerged from those conversations was specific, emotionally grounded, and impossible to arrive at from a standard brief alone.

Neither of these required a large research commitment. A few conversations. Carefully shaped questions. A willingness to let what we heard change what we made.

Thirty years changes how you see a project.

Not because experience makes things easier. Video production is genuinely complex and the variables multiply fast: scope, budget, crew, timeline, format, distribution. Almost nothing has a fixed answer. What thirty years gives you is the ability to help clients spend wisely — to find the approach that delivers the most impact given what they actually have to work with.

That starts with asking the right questions early. What does success actually look like for this project? What’s the real budget, not the aspirational one? What are the constraints nobody’s named yet? And increasingly, it means bringing audience knowledge into production decisions directly: knowing how and where people actually watch changes what you build and where your resources are best spent.

On the creative side, we match directors, producers, editors and animators to each brief specifically. By sensibility, by subject matter experience, by fit with the audience the work needs to reach. We curate a small set of tailored options for each project and make that selection together with the client. It’s a more considered approach than defaulting to a familiar roster, and it produces better work.

We’ve worked at budgets from $5,000 to $350,000. With Fortune 50 companies and struggling musicians. On broadcast television and at film festival premieres. The range isn’t a flex. It means the question is not whether we can work with your budget. It’s what we can make with it.