It’s easy to see how a spread this lavish can produce a wide range of marketing material. Harder to discern is how it’ll save money. Yet the economies of scale are here.
A corkboard in the main corridor features photos of creative staff clustered below the shoots scheduled for the next three days. Teams are in constant rotation through 25-30 weekly projects. The 7-person crew assigned to the Everbuilt shower video today will move over to a cabinetry shoot tomorrow.
Expensive models? There are none. The people in the shots are what officials call “friends and family talent”—ordinary folks who look “relatable” to customers. In fact, only the trained animals have agents. (It will take Rigby the dog, one pig, a llama, and a baby cow to demonstrate the resiliency of Lifeproof flooring.)
But physical size seems to be the principal advantage. Studio Orange is in fact five studios, each so cavernous that entire houses can be erected inside, their roof beams slung from the roof trusses overhead. Living rooms, kitchens, and bathrooms in various states of assembly loom in the shadows. Three garage sets sit ready for shoots featuring riding mowers and tools. A soundstage contracted by an advertising agency would build, use, and then tear down a set within days. “They can’t keep your stuff up forever,” Wiles said. But here, “we can keep it up for as long as we want.”
Once the in-house carpenters and decorators finish a set, it can—with a bit of stage management—serve indefinitely. Project Orange’s senior manager of creative production Jennifer Hudson shows off one set that’s between takes. A few days ago, it was a living room featuring a Home Depot sofa, rug, and lighting fixtures. Photographers snapped off all the needed assets—product shots and silhouettes for the website, lifestyle shots for social media, vanity pics for in-store signage, and so on—and then another team moved in. After adding a wall and sliding in a checkerboard floor, the set became an entryway for a shoot highlighting a hall tree.
And then the set mutated a third time. “We need to shoot a video of a young woman organizing her closet,” Hudson explained. “So the entry door goes away, an interior door goes in its place and we make a closet.”
Home of the house brands
It’s no coincidence that the featured products in these shots are nearly all Home Depot private-label brands. Home Depot wants its house brands to have the same relevance and appeal that national brands enjoy; Studio Orange will streamline that effort.
A marketing and art direction team in the Atlanta headquarters will select the products to be featured and conceptualize the shoots, then turn it over to the Studio Orange team to stage it all. One private-label brand will typically take center stage, but the shoots are also models of cross-promotion.
