Two time zones, one studio

Marcel™ runs on two clocks. One hangs in Davis, California. The other hangs in Accra, Ghana. They disagree by seven or eight hours, depending on the season, and that disagreement is one of the most useful things we own.

The practical version: while a client on the American west coast is asleep, work is moving in Accra. Feedback given at the end of a California afternoon is often resolved before the next California morning. The studio never quite closes; it hands the baton across the Atlantic and keeps going.

The deeper version matters more to us. Operating from both continents means the work is never provincial. A campaign for a Ghanaian bank benefits from Silicon Valley product discipline. An identity for an American client picks up a point of view that did not originate in the same five cities every agency draws from. Our VYSN Labs work called it the African future; we would call it simply the future, arriving from more than one direction.

The client list reads that way too: a bank in Accra, a cruise line in Miami, a ministry in Jerusalem, a forum in Geneva. Different rooms, one standard.

Two time zones. One studio. Always awake. — with Marcel.