The Process Is the New Premium — But Most Brands Have It Backward

There's a quote Chris Marcus dropped mid-conversation that stopped everything:

"The process is the new premium."

Chris is the CEO and Director of Colormatics, the agency behind national campaigns with Stephen Curry, Shaquille O'Neal, and Druski. He has seen both ends of the production spectrum perform — and his conclusion is consistent: budget is not the variable. Story, authenticity, and platform fit are.

"The process is the new premium," is the kind of line that sounds simple until you sit with it. In a world where AI can generate a cinematic visual in seconds, what actually makes a brand worth paying attention to? According to Chris, the answer isn't better gear, bigger budgets, or more polish. It's showing your work — the handcrafted details, the behind-the-scenes process, the proof that a real human cared enough to make something.

In a recent episode of the Goodfirms Podcast: Conversations That Matter, Chris unpacked what makes audiences stop scrolling, why agencies keep getting in their own way, and what the rise of AI actually means for human creative judgment.

Who Is Chris Marcus?

Chris Marcus is the CEO and Director of Colormatics, a video production and advertising agency known for blending strategy with creativity across every budget level. With a portfolio spanning celebrity-led national campaigns and scrappy grassroots content, Chris has built a reputation for making work that actually performs — not just work that looks good in a reel. Colormatics also runs a dedicated AI lab, giving Chris a front-row seat to where AI genuinely helps and where it falls short.

Connect with Chris on LinkedIn.

1. When a Viewer Sees a High-Gloss $200K Commercial, What Is the Immediate Defense Mechanism That Kicks In?

It depends entirely on the platform — and brands keep getting this wrong.

"If you see a high-gloss commercial on social, you're going to totally check out. We've tried doing really polished things on social from a paid perspective, and people just do not engage. They flip right through it," says Chris.

The mistake is treating polish as a universal standard. On broadcast or CTV, production quality is expected and appropriate. On social, it signals inauthenticity. The viewer's brain registers "ad" before the first second is over — and the skip instinct takes over.

Chris reframes what polished actually means: "It's making the right content for the right platform. If you overly produce something for social, it's just not going to work."

Many brands working with modern video production companies are starting to realize that audience attention is now tied more to authenticity and platform fit than cinematic polish alone.

2. Why Did a Functional How-To Video About Roundabouts Outperform Traditional Brand Storytelling?

Because it was built around what the audience needed, not what looked good in a brief.

The Montana Department of Transportation did not ask Colormatics for something creative. They just wanted something people would watch. Roundabouts were being installed across the state, residents were frustrated, and every existing how-to video on the subject was — as Chris puts it — "very basic, not engaging. It seemed like no one really cared."

Colormatics brought in toy cars and a model railroad. They leaned into a Mr. Rogers-style warmth. The result stopped people, made them smile, and actually delivered the information.

"Our idea was to make something fun and engaging that would really help people stop and see something different. We dove into people's psyche and tried to find something creative. It turned out to be really fun to make — and I'm still super proud of that project," Chris reflects.

The bigger lesson here is that utility-driven storytelling often outperforms polished brand messaging — something many content marketing agencies are now prioritizing across digital campaigns.

3. Is the Real Strategy Less About Rejecting Polish and More About Putting the Audience Before the Brand?

Yes — and the failure to do this is more common than most agencies will admit.

"It could be the brand. It could be the agency. The agency might want to win awards and push for something that is outside of what the brand even really needs," says Chris.

When a new CMO arrives wanting to make a mark, or when an agency is optimizing for its own portfolio, the audience becomes secondary. The brief starts serving the people in the room instead of the people watching at home.

Chris's approach is to anchor every creative decision to a simple question: what would make this audience actually stop and watch? "We see so many ads. We have to do something that really cuts through the noise — and that means understanding who the consumer is and making something that's interesting to them."

4. Do Platforms Like TikTok and Reels Actually Punish High Production Values?

The algorithm may not penalize it directly — but the people on those platforms absolutely do.

"I would love to get behind the scenes and see what really happens on the algorithm side. But I definitely know people punish that and they skip it. People on TikTok and Reels are really looking for influencers, real people they can engage with," Chris explains.

He sees the same instinct at home. His kids flag anything that feels AI-generated or over-produced immediately. "They just call everything AI."

The broader shift, though, is being driven by the brands people actually respect. Apple is making handcrafted content and showing the process behind it. Coinbase produced an 8-bit style commercial filmed entirely practically — all that effort just to signal: we made something real.

"Audiences can feel that and engage with that. It's something that's very interesting to people's minds," Chris says.

The shift toward platform-native storytelling is also changing how social media marketing agencies approach short-form content across TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts.

5. If Budget and Gear Are Not the Deciding Variables for ROI, What Is? Story, Recall, and the Right Match Between Tatlent and Audience.

"It's figuring out what is the story you want to tell," Chris says. A celebrity brings a world of cultural relevance that a traditional commercial simply cannot replicate. An influencer brings the kind of personal engagement that a studio shoot cannot manufacture. And sometimes, neither is needed — the Montana roundabout video had no spokesperson and no budget to speak of.

What ties every successful project together is whether it creates memory. "How many times have we said, 'I saw this commercial and it was amazing — who was it for? I don't remember. Having that recall is really important so audiences can go download the app or make that purchase."

The brief is not "how do we make this look good?" The brief is "how do we make this impossible to forget?"

6. When Casting for a Project, How Do You Spot a Manufactured Personality Versus Someone Who Will Genuinely Connect?

Chris looks for people who bring something of their own — not people who can execute someone else's vision cleanly.

"We want to see someone that is interesting in themselves, someone who can riff and do something unique. We're not looking for someone who can just execute on our exact vision. We want someone that has a personality that embodies something interesting," he explains.

With established creators like Druski, the approach is to hand them the concept and step back. "I'll be like, 'How would you say this? Let's make this come to life by your voice.' That really resonates with the audience — and with him, too, because he wants to be himself."

The same principle applies to matching talent to brand. The question is not just who is popular, but whose audience naturally overlaps with the brand's customer — and whether the partnership feels genuine rather than transactional.

Chris’s point about creators sounding authentic rather than scripted also reflects a broader shift happening across the influencer marketing services.

7. Is It Actually Harder to Make Something Look Effortlessly Raw Than It Is to Make It Look Expensive?

Often, yes — and the Hotels.com story makes the point perfectly.

Chris describes an editor friend who spent three weeks on a single 15-second pool scene for a Hotels.com commercial. The beginning and end looked nearly identical to most viewers. The effort was invisible. "And I think sometimes you get so many people in the room that they have to put their mark on all this stuff — and it kind of just dilutes it."

Making something feel effortless requires genuine craft: a director of photography who understands natural lighting, talent who can be authentic on camera, and an edit that gives the whole thing energy without looking touched.

"There's a lot of cheesy commercials out there that look polished but nobody cares. If you watch TV during the day, you see a lot of that," Chris notes.

The good news: a lot of that craft now lives in post. "You can really make something visually interesting in the edit. We have so many tools — stock footage, AI, creative thinking. You might be limited by budget, but you can make something come together that's unique and different."

8. What Boring Industries Are Sitting on Untapped Content Opportunities Right Now?

Almost every industry — but the biggest gap is in how companies use their existing assets.

"Most industries try to have the testimonial or the case study live on their site and use them in ads. And I think there's a lot of room to do something better," says Chris.

Healthcare, finance, and fintech are the sectors he flags most often — not because they are inherently boring, but because they default to the safest, most generic version of video content. The format is predictable. The faces are stock. The message lands flat.

"Something that tells an interesting story in a way we haven't really seen before — pushing those visual bounds — that's what's available to these industries. Having content out there is no longer worthwhile. You have to have content that's engaging and interesting."

Eight hundred views on a video you put real money into is not a content problem. It is a creative brief problem.

9. How Does Colormatics Help a High-End Brand Lower the Wall Between Itself and Its Audience Without Compromising What Makes It Premium?

By finding the right version of authenticity for each platform, not applying the same approach everywhere.

Chris uses a jewelry client as the example. Past work had leaned too lo-fi. The product suffered. "Someone's going to spend $20,000 or $30,000 on a ring. You want beautiful imagery of that. The product deserves that."

But the same brand does not need to show up identically on social. “On social, maybe we have an influencer casually walking through — the content feels more organic, but the fundamentals still matter: proper lighting, clear audio, and strong visual quality.”

The floor of quality is non-negotiable regardless of format. Above that floor, the approach shifts by platform and audience. "Any brand, whether premium or a mom and pop shop, you want something that represents them well and connects with the audience. That's the main goal."

Premium brands are increasingly working with branding agencies to find more human, process-driven ways to connect with audiences online.

10. When Stripping Away Cinematic Filters, What Is the One Production Element You Refuse to Compromise On?

For Chris, it happens in the edit.

"No matter what level you're at, having something that is different from what people have seen will be helpful. Give the audience something new and fresh — maybe it's a new edit or a new style."

He points to an Acorn ad as a recent example that impressed him: a simple talking head testimonial elevated by a photo montage effect that made the subjects appear to animate. "That made me want to watch it. It was a simple thing that happened in the edit. They could have done something typical and they chose not to. That kind of stuff stands out."

The host added their own answer: audio. "You can't compromise on audio. That signals right away."

Both point to the same truth: the details no one consciously notices are often the ones doing the most work.

11. How Has Building With AI Shifted Your View on Where Human Judgment Still Matters Most?

Colormatics has made fully AI-generated commercials. Chris is not impressed with the results — and he is building the tools.

"It's really difficult to make it feel authentic. Typically you're working with a client, you want to do different versions and iterations — and making that feel real is huge," he explains.

The deeper problem is creative. Ask any large language model to pick a number between zero and ten. It picks seven. Ask again. It picks three. "Most of these platforms are falling to the middle range. They're falling to the average."

Human creativity is not average. It is not constrained by what has worked before or what statistically tends to perform. "Our minds can think innovatively. We can think of something new and fresh. We're not locked into what everyone's doing."

Colormatics uses AI to enhance — filling in footage they could not afford to shoot, elevating work in post, exploring visual options faster. But the creative brief, the judgment call, the instinct about what an audience will feel? That stays human.

As more brands experiment with generative content workflows, many are also turning to AI consulting companies to understand where AI genuinely improves production efficiency — and where human creative judgment still matters most.

12. As AI Makes Perfect Visuals Easy for Anyone, Does the Value of the Unpolished Human Moment Become the Only Thing Worth Paying For?

The novelty of AI-generated content has already started fading.

"It was interesting last year when that stuff came out. Kalshi was doing some big AI ads. But I think it kind of lost its luster. You can make great imagery, but you're still dictated by the computer. It's really hard to make it exactly on brand and tell that story," Chris observes.

What cannot be replicated — not yet, and arguably not ever — is the cultural moment a real person creates. "You can't go replicate a Druski. You can't go replicate a Stephen Curry. They might have just done something in a basketball game that caught fire for culture. That is new and fresh. AI is not going to be able to do that."

The process is the new premium. Showing the work, the craft, the human hands behind the product — that is what audiences are increasingly drawn to. Not because lo-fi is trendy, but because it signals something AI cannot fake: that someone cared enough to actually make something.

13. If You Could Stop Every CMO from Making One Specific Mistake With Their Video Strategy This Year, What Would It Be?

Stop letting fear drive the brief.

"CMOs have one of the hardest jobs. Eight months to three years — they have a short shelf life. Some come in fearful. They want to keep their job. They bring in a big agency and find comfort in that agency," Chris says.

The result is predictable, safe work that protects the CMO's tenure without actually moving the brand forward. His advice: keep the big agency for the standard work, but carve out space to take a real creative risk. "Have a spot where you can say, 'Let's try something new and different.' You have to be innovative. It's easy to get lost in the idea that your job might be on the cutting room floor — but it's important to push those creative bounds."

Playing it safe is not safe. It just fails quietly.

14. What Is the One Non-Negotiable Element Every Brand Needs in 2026 to Actually Move the Needle?

Interesting.

"It has to be interesting. It has to be creative. As soon as it starts feeling AI, as soon as it feels cheesy — like go back to that pharmaceutical ad where nobody would ever dance in a field with flowers everywhere — that starts to erode a brand," Chris says.

Virality is hard to manufacture. But the conditions for it are consistent: authenticity, a fresh angle, and the willingness to take a creative risk that a more fearful team would have talked themselves out of.

"You want something that builds the brand. That makes people want to share it or talk about it. Sometimes you've got to take chances — and be okay with some of the ramifications of that."

Rapid Fire Round with Chris Marcus

Q. One word for the current state of Super Bowl ads?

A. Meh.

Q. Better for conversion — 8K cinema camera or iPhone 16?

A. iPhone 16, for sure.

Q. Most overrated trend in video production right now?

A.The UGC person sitting behind a microphone talking. Especially with all the fake AI versions flooding in — it has just been done to death.

A brand currently winning the ad game? Apple. They lost some Steve Jobs luster, but they have come back in a different way. Even the handcrafted Apple TV logo — knowing the story behind how they made it — makes it land differently every time.

Conclusion

The brands that win the next decade will not be the ones that spent the most on production or moved fastest to attach a celebrity to their product. They will be the ones that asked harder questions about what their audience actually needed — and then made something genuinely worth stopping for.

As Chris Marcus makes clear, that kind of creative discipline is not a budget question. It is a clarity question. Clarity about who you are talking to, what platform they are on, and what would make a human being pause instead of scroll.

Sometimes the most sophisticated creative strategy starts with a toy train set and a simple question: what would actually make someone watch this?

Where to Find Chris Marcus and Colormatics

Website: colormatics.com
LinkedIn: Chris Marcus
Social: Instagram and TikTok @colormatics

Conversations That Matter is the Goodfirms podcast featuring the practitioners, founders, and operators behind some of the most interesting companies in the world. Subscribe wherever you listen.