MENU
About Mashup
In the world of music, a mashup is a new song created by combining often unlikely snippets, samples, and themes from other bits of music and audio sources like film dialogue to create something entirely new. It is the creative sum being greater than the parts.
That’s what Mashup Creative Strategy is all about. Originally founded as Ripple Creative Strategy in 2013, Mashup is a collection of carefully selected freelancers coming together to create something incredible for your brand.
What We Do
Building a truly integrated and ongoing strategy across multiple channels is no easy task in today’s fast-moving and noisy marketplace. To do this successfully requires ongoing effort from extended teams, often with many moving parts.
Mashup helps streamline this essential work, increasing output, quality, and efficiency by providing an extended, highly coordinated team of strategists and creatives on an as-needed basis, allowing you to concentrate on steering the brand “ship” instead of shoveling brand “coal.”
Here’s how we can make your life easier, your creative output more effective, and your team less stressed out:
- Easily scale up and down your marketing, communications, and creative efforts with a single phone call or email while knowing the associated costs in advance. Busy time of year? Double or triple your team and output instantly.
- Access to a strategic partner with a creative/multimedia/content development house built in, made up of countless pre-qualified creatives, all collaborating with one goal in mind: to build awareness, affinity, support, conversion, and retention for your brand.
- Work with a single point of contact. Even with the ability to significantly increase the size and output of your team across disciplines, you’ll deal with one person, your Project Lead. One person to email. One invoice. Share your feedback once, we’ll do the rest. We do the “cat-herding,” in other words.
- Connect the dots. Rather than a handful of different freelancers managing different creative work independently, hire from one pool led by your internal contact. Enjoy fewer meetings and iterations, and a more cohesive brand message in less time.
Top-tier strategy and creative output. On time, on budget, on brand. Sound good? Read on, friend…
How we can help
- Audio production (podcasting, voice-over, etc.)
- Big ideas and leading brainstorming/ideation
- Branding identity/hierarchy/visual
- Consulting and strategy:
- Audiences/journey
- Communications/crisis
- Content
- Digital ecosystem
- Long-term marketing planning
- Team structure, operations, workflows, etc.
- Content creation
- Copywriting, copyediting, and translation
- Creative direction
- Graphic design, illustration, animation, and motion graphics
- Measurement/data: SEO, UX, and IA
- Naming
- Newsletter/email management
- Print-ready production
- Project management
- Social media and community management
- Videography and photography
- Website planning, design, and development
- Workshops and facilitation
Happy creatives make great work
If you’ve ever worked with large ad agencies you might have noticed that their internal creative teams often aren’t a happy bunch. With good reason: they’re often worked to death on projects for clients they have very little interest in or affinity for. And they don’t get a seat at the “strategic” table, either; instead, they’re given watery briefs and asked to weave garbage into gold.
Mashup’s freelance creatives actively choose to collaborate on the projects they work on. They’re engaged and respected as valuable members of the team. They are delighted to be involved with the project — or they wouldn’t have accepted the gig.
We’re picky when it comes to the freelancers we work with. They need to have been working as a full-time freelancer for a minimum of two years and they need to have a portfolio that blows us away. And that’s just to get a first meeting.
You won’t be assigned a random creative person who may not have background and knowledge in your brand niche. We hand-pick customized teams specifically for your brand and project. This means we work with seasoned freelancers who know your area of expertise and are happy to be working on the project. Happy creatives make great work.
Fair and Transparent Billing
Like everything we do at Mashup, our fee structure is designed to build long-term, trusted relationships with our clients. Here’s how we’re different where billing is concerned:
We work in the way that suits you best. Is a flat-rate monthly retainer fee easiest for you so you can stay within a given budget? Or do you prefer short-burst projects? We build our projects — including billing — custom to our clients.
We don’t fake you out. If you’ve been in this business any length of time you’ll likely have experienced a vendor coming in low on the estimate and then adding fees for stuff you didn’t expect later. We think that really stinks. So even if we may not come in as your lowest estimate, we will be very specific and accurate when we put it together. In fact, for larger projects, we like to have a scope assessment meeting — at no charge to you — so we can make sure we really understand your goals and budget and are very specifically preparing the estimate for your unique project.
We give NFP’s a break. While we work with all sorts of organizations, one of our primary areas of specialty is with not-for-profit organizations. NFPs often don’t have the same available budgets as for-profit corporations, and we offer reduced pricing for our clients who are dedicated to making the world a better place.
Localized: Canadian clients are billed in CAD. US clients are billed in USD.
Different Inside and Out
We believe in doing the right thing, even when no one is looking. We value kindness, respect, compassion, creativity, humor (that’s “humour” to our Canadian friends), diversity, and an innovative spirit. We seek people with these qualities to join our extended team.
Oh, but full disclosure: our founder has a fondness for bad puns and disco music — sadly, no workplace is perfect.