Pereira O’Dell is an independent creative agency that provides services such as branded entertainment, digital and social media marketing, brand and business strategy, integrated production, and more. They work with some of the biggest brands out there such as Coca Cola, Levi’s, and Adobe among others. Pereira O’Dell also created an AI innovation incubator called Silverside AI that connects brands with AI-first startups.

Our team at Pactto sat down with PJ Pereira, Founder and Chairman of Pereira O’Dell, Johnny Rohrbach, Director of Partnerships & Operations at Silverside AI, Rob Wrubel, Founder and Managing Partner of Silverside AI, Charlie Postman, Business Development Operations Manager, and Susanna Limb, Program Manager, Business Development Operations to discuss how they have been leveraging Pactto in their feedback process internally and with clients.

“Your facial expressions, your hand movements, view enthusiasm or where you’re angry says so much about what’s important and what you really want to achieve. The written word can never get there.”
– PJ Pereira

The Current Way Of Getting Creative Feedback is Broken

Pereira O’Dell’s teams were facing the same challenge a lot of creatives face when it comes to exchanging feedback. There is an inherent disconnect in the feedback someone writes down and how the reader perceives it while reading.

Sometimes, writing that you need the size of something reduced by 10-15% may not get you what you were picturing in your head. Other times, the feedback is too vague. There’s a lot that ‘make the video shorter’ could result in.

Every time feedback was misunderstood, it wasted a huge amount of time setting up meetings, and back and forth emails about where things went wrong. Having to attend these meetings slowed the already busy teams down tremendously.

Plus, creative feedback can be tricky. There is nuance in every non-verbal cue. This is something PJ Periera believes wholeheartedly.

Raw feedback is so important when developing any type of creative asset, be it a video or an image. When you read the feedback later on or get on a meeting after a few back-and-forth communications, the essence of how the reviewer felt while interacting with the asset is lost. Each second of silence, each gesture and tone of voice holds a lot of feedback that just does not get translated into text.

How Video Feedback with Pactto Changed the Game

When Pereira O’Dell discovered Pactto, they could see the ‘future of creative feedback’ come to life. The fact that you could screen record the creative asset and a video of yourself giving feedback on it simultaneously is what unlocks a level of clarity that agency teams never had before.

“What Pactto has developed is a way that actually allows creative feedback to be given with nuance and feeling which is how creative work should be seen and evaluated and talked about.”
– PJ Pereira

The Pereira O’Dell team found that working with Pactto was extremely intuitive. You would go to give feedback on something and all the tools required to give feedback, such as drawing on the screen, going back and forward in the video, and pausing the video, are right there. 

The reviewer and implementer are also able to communicate about the asset in the same session.

PJ now loves to give feedback from his mobile phone where he can access Pactto easily.

“Pactto completely eliminates ambiguity. The way we gave feedback traditionally was in Google slides on those little comments on the side where you’re not totally sure what’s being referenced or if it applies to the rest of the slides. We had the same issue with video. But Pactto organizes the chaos of our minds and allows us to eliminate that ambiguity so that we can understand exactly what the reviewer is talking about while he’s in his creative flow.”
– Johnny Rohrbach

How Pereira O’Dell’s Feedback Process Has Improved With Pactto

After implementing Pactto, especially in their recent campaign with Coca Cola, Pereira O’Dell uncovered some mind blowing results.

They no longer had to schedule needless meetings to go over misunderstandings about the feedback, saving their busy teams precious time so they could stay on track with their projects.

Thanks to Pactto, POD got more than 30% faster! For every 3-day feedback cycle, at least one day was cut down.

While Pactto has helped remove ambiguity, it’s also helped embrace ambiguity at Pereira O’Dell. Sometimes in a creative flow, it is not possible to be entirely sure about something. The video feedback process has enabled teams to catch moments of doubt when their clients or stakeholders aren’t 100% sure about certain things.

Having a tool like this has also proved invaluable to account managers and project managers whose goal is to keep things on track and the creative and client teams in sync. Pactto helps to keep all the feedback coming from various stakeholders from the creative team, the clients, the production and post production teams and so on in one place. It serves as an easy ‘feedback hub’ to go to in large scale projects such as the ones Pereira O’Dell handles on a daily basis. 

“Pactto eliminates the phrase ‘that’s not what I meant’”.
– PJ Pereira

Pactto was a huge part of Pereira O’Dell’s latest Coca Cola campaign. Watch the making of video here.

If you’re an agency struggling to keep up with all the feedback you’re handling, Pactto may be the perfect solution for you. 

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