I’ve taken a lot of first calls over the years. The senior producers who eventually become great clients have one thing in common: they’ve usually made every mistake on this list at least once, and they’ve stopped making them.

These are the three.

Mistake 1: Confusing the deliverable with the outcome

The most common opening line on a producer call is some version of “we want a projection mapping” or “we want an LED tunnel” or “we want a metaverse experience.” Each of those is a deliverable. None of them is a brief.

The brief is the outcome the deliverable is supposed to produce. The mistake is skipping past the outcome to the technology, because the technology is concrete and the outcome is harder to articulate.

When the team behind Top of the Town came to us in 2017, the request started as a projection cube for the Dairy Block. The actual outcome they were buying — once we got past the deliverable — was a recognizable photo moment that would extend the magazine’s brand into a place where its readers were already gathering. Once the outcome was named, the design choices got obvious. The cube wasn’t important. The angle of capture was.

When Google came to us via Imprint Group for their 2019 Holiday Party, the request was “a VR surf experience.” The outcome was a moment of collective wonder among employees who were used to being the most technologically sophisticated people in any room. Different brief. Different design choices. Different success metric.

The fix: before the studio call, write down two sentences. “We are doing this project because of [outcome]. The deliverable will be whatever achieves that outcome.” Then bring both to the call. The studio’s job is to challenge the deliverable in service of the outcome.

Mistake 2: Treating the studio as a vendor when you need a director

The second mistake is structural. It happens when the producer has already worked through the creative direction internally — usually with an in-house team or a separate creative agency — and arrives at the studio with the project fully specified. They want a build, not a brief.

The studios that bid on those projects as builds will give you the lowest number. They will also produce the project that’s been specified, including the parts of the specification that are wrong.

The producers who consistently produce work I’m proud of treat the first studio call as a creative direction conversation. They bring constraints, references, and outcomes — not solutions. They ask the studio to push back. They reserve final creative authority but don’t pre-resolve the design choices the studio needs to be inside of.

When Excision’s team came to us for Lost Lands Music Festival, the brief was open. We landed on the eight-foot projection-mapped boulder partly because the team was willing to let the design choices come from the production side. If the brief had been “build us this exact boulder,” we would have built it. The work would have been less specific to the festival’s actual audience.

The fix: if you’ve already specified the project completely, you’re hiring a fabrication shop. That’s a legitimate hire — but don’t pay creative direction rates for it. Conversely, if you want creative direction, leave room for it. Bring the outcome and the constraints. Let the studio do the work you’re hiring it to do.

Mistake 3: Underweighting the design phase

The third mistake is allocation. A typical project schedule allocates ten or twelve weeks to design and twenty-plus to build. For most immersive work at the flagship tier, this is upside down.

The design questions — what is the threshold, what is the central moment, how does the integration work, who is the curated team, what is the second life of the asset — are the questions that determine whether the project lands. Once those questions are answered well, the build is almost mechanical. Once they’re answered badly, no amount of build quality recovers the project.

When we produced Soundscape at the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery in 2017, the design phase took longer than the build. The interaction model — how a visitor’s body position triggers audio and visual response — required iteration that couldn’t be compressed. The hardware install, by contrast, was fast. We knew exactly what we were building because the design had been resolved.

The producers I’ve worked with who consistently get good outcomes pay for design hours like they pay for build hours. The producers who don’t tend to push the design phase into the build phase, where it gets resolved under deadline pressure and rarely as well.

The fix: plan and budget the design phase as if it’s at least equal to the build phase. For flagship-tier work, plan it as if it’s larger. The hours allocated to thinking are the hours that determine the outcome.

What changes when these are fixed

The producers who avoid these three mistakes spend less money for better work. The cost difference is real. Projects that get briefed well need fewer revisions, hit fewer scope-creep moments, and don’t require the expensive emergency redesigns that happen when the design phase is too short.

More importantly, the work is better. The projects I’m proudest of are the ones where the producer brought the outcome instead of the deliverable, hired me as a director instead of a vendor, and budgeted the design phase like it mattered. That’s the entire pattern.

Alt Ethos works with a small number of producers each year on flagship immersive projects. To start a conversation: [CTA link]