Today’s brands demand ad producers be data driven, results oriented, agile, and able to handle creating a steady supply of fresh, top-notch content at scale.
Consumers want authenticity, especially where they spend so much of their time—on social media platforms. They are increasingly suspicious of anything that feels like ad content or a hard sell. User-generated content creators are the new celebrities for a reason.
Ready Set is a social media ad agency that has embraced the new model of using legions of content creators to produce platform-native content at scale—and has become the top choice for brands like DoorDash, MeUndies, Mercari, Coinbase, and Rocket Money for results.
Ready Set found the source of digital content creators they needed with Backstage, the all-in-one platform for hiring creative talent of all kinds. Backstage empowers creative agencies with advanced casting management software built on top of the world’s largest database of performers and creators.
A partnership with Backstage has resulted in Ready Set being able to:
- Cast 350-500 roles each month (5000+ annually)
- Grow their business more than 10x in under two years, going from fewer than 20 employees to over 200
- Deliver clients like DoorDash some of their best-ever performing content
Ready Set is committed to producing content that performs well and constantly seeks “to offer clients the best possible talent in the market to represent them,” explained Alex Stiegwardt, Ready Set’s head of casting and talent management.
And “Backstage has proven to be the ally that is always up to the challenge” to help Ready Set meet these goals in a market where change is the new norm.
How Ready Set thinks about UGC creators and talent
“The talent we hire has a direct impact on the performance of the ad creative,” Stiegwardt said. Explaining that casting at Ready Set considers not just talent demographics, age, and the way they look “but also their charisma, authenticity, and how believable they are.”
“When you’re trying to make creative that doesn’t look like ads, you need to cast people who don’t look like they’re acting. We are always on the hunt for open-hearted, enthusiastic people who just want to tell the story.”
His team has found that Backstage has the deep source of talent they need to create persuasive content for dozens of branded projects each month. Their success relies on being able to identify who might have the potential to be a breakout content creator.
Backstage talent Jessica Liz Adams, cast by Ready Set
Branded content means more options for actors
Matias Pellegrini Sanchez, Ready Set’s senior casting director for content creators (and actor, acting coach, and casting director with more than a decade of experience) said he has found great satisfaction working with talent without much previous experience and “achieving impressive results together” through their dedication and commitment to learning how to create social media content.
He has also found great success working with experienced actors open to new avenues for performing, who were typecast, had only worked as stage actors, or were otherwise looking for new opportunities—and found new success as content creators.
He credited Backstage’s intuitive and easy-to-use all-in-one platform with connecting his team with thousands of content creators and “giving us all the necessary tools to find what we were looking for.”
Rethinking how to judge talent
Fernando Navarrete, Ready Set’s Videographers Casting Director and experienced director, screenwriter and producer, agreed that casting requires understanding that “talent is much more than performing in front of the camera. It transcends that. Real people have much more to offer and I understood that this can be taught and learned.”
The current creator trend has required casting directors like him to rethink how he judges talent in terms of “the concept of content creator that is used in the digital universe.”
His team relies on Backstage for its deep roster of reliable talent they can access fast and encourages talent of all kinds to continue to share what they have to offer—because at Ready Set “there is a world of opportunity for them.”
Ready Set casting team
Ready Set’s fast path to high-caliber social media content
Backstage helps power Ready Set’s success with a pipeline of high-powered, professional talent, enabling the agency to create faster, save money, and meet client expectations.
Ready Set relies on Backstage for:
- The largest community of creative talent on the planet, built on a legacy the entertainment industry has trusted to find talent for more than 60 years
- Tools like advanced filters that enable casting teams to quickly narrow down thousands of detailed profiles to just the person who is exactly the right fit for their project
- Find thousands of content creators with experience making branded content remotely, anywhere in the world
- Direct recruitment of UGC creators, actors, videographers, voice artists, and more without any intermediaries to slow the process
- An all-in-one platform that makes managing dozens of projects simultaneously easy
- Posting jobs, searching for talent, managing remote auditions, team collaboration, and more—all in one place.
Virtual casting has changed the game for agencies like Ready Set. A fully remote casting process with virtual audition tools boosted success for an agency that has grown exponentially over the last two years.
But for Ready Set, being able to bring talent to the table that might not otherwise be discovered remains key to their success as an agency that needs all the high-quality content creators they can find.
“It's not just about what Backstage does for us, but what it does for talent,” Stiegwardt said. “The talent has their own visibility to show and share their talent. And that is how Backstage is building this network of creators that we, as casting directors, can work with.”
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