About
Most agencies sell a team. This is four people who each run their own.
Walu Chisenga · Founder
I trained as a civil engineer and never practiced a day of it. I went into marketing in 2018, and spent the years since running demand for manufacturers, hospitals and software companies.
Engineering leaves you with one useful habit: you assume the thing will fail, and you go looking for where. It turns out to be a decent way to read a marketing brief.
Most B2B films fail in the same place. The tool got cheaper; the brief didn’t get better. A film nobody directed is an expensive slideshow — and the cost of making one just collapsed, which means a great many more of them are coming.
That’s the bet. Generation is the commodity now. Direction isn’t, and won’t be soon.
I work between Manchester and Lilongwe. Most of the time that’s just biography. Once it meant we could go and ask five districts what they actually thought.
Two halves
Pixel Flares is two halves.
The Content Studio decides what the work says and then makes it. Growth decides where it runs, who it reaches, and what it returned.
Most clients buy one and then the other. A few buy both at once, and those are the engagements this site is built on.
The structure is an answer to one specific failure: a campaign that was well made and badly aimed, or well aimed with nothing worth looking at when it arrived. Each half is a full practice and each is worth buying without the other. What they share is that nothing gets produced until somebody has written down what it is arguing.
The collective
Three people I build with, each running their own practice.
Visual communication designer. Built donor-facing knowledge platforms and brand systems for USAID programs, UNDP Malawi and DAI across Malawi and Zambia, where compliance and clarity had to survive the same page.
·US··MWBrand designer working in technology and B2B. Currently creative lead at Mastercard on contract, and founder of Black Design Circle, a design network spanning the UK, US and Africa.
UKUSEU··Marketing and analytics consultant. Founder of Luanno Analytics, currently working in population health analysis for an NHS trust. Previously Stepstone, Convera and FactSet. Lancaster University Management School.
UKUSEU·MWThe question under a page like this is usually how big the company is, and it is the wrong question to ask a studio. What matters is who directs the work. That is the four people above, each running their own practice rather than occupying a box on an org chart. Production is the part that got cheap and fast. Direction is the part you are buying, and there are four names attached to it.
Markets
- United Kingdom
- European Union
- United States
Clients in all three, including an engineering nonprofit in Gahanna, Ohio whose product launch runs across sub-Saharan Africa. That one is written up in full.