Prose on Pixels’ Paul Ward on ‘joyful creative excellence’ and the Vermeer.ai platform

Paul Ward of Prose on Pixels, Havas’s content network, argues that people who do not enjoy their work will struggle to do it well, and says that belief shapes how the studio operates.

The business works to keep staff happy and its global culture consistent, he says, because good work should feel good to make. Ward describes its approach as ‘joyful creative excellence’, combining intensity, an obsession with craft and real enjoyment to produce “world-class, impactful work, delivered with a smile”.

Craft at scale

As channels multiply, Ward says, serving them all poorly just means doing bad work at scale. Prose on Pixels was set up to offer sharper targeting, greater relevance and more impact while keeping standards of craft high.

He describes it as a creative studio at heart that combines its creative work with insight built around audiences, a studio set-up without borders and, lately, workflows supported by AI that let teams move as fast as marketers now demand.

‘Borderless’ refers to the operating model and how work is pipelined through the business, not just geography, he explains. Its main origination studios are in Singapore, the US, France and the UK, backed by nearshore and offshore centres of excellence, which Ward says keeps output consistent, scalable and locally relevant.

The studio wants to avoid adding to the flood of low-impact, high-volume content, and pushes creative partners and client teams to think about the impact and return of every asset. Content must work hard and make full use of the platform it appears on, he says, but also be beautiful, and the team should enjoy making it.

His advice is not to accept compromise but to choose both craft and performance, producing content that earns its place: the best-told story, in the most relevant format, for the right audience at the right moment.

The AI stack

Ward says Prose on Pixels moved early and quickly into generative AI, starting with an Adobe partnership to create a content supply chain powered by a platform. It then broadened its technology, building around Adobe to connect many interchangeable platforms and developing its own proprietary AI stack, Vermeer.ai.

The result, he says, is a creative origination and distribution platform that sets the studio apart. Vermeer.ai has since been made available to all of Havas’s creative agencies so they can produce more high-quality content themselves, and it is built so Prose on Pixels can wrap its own workflows around it for repeatable, brand-safe production at scale.

Ward says the studio will not help clients flood the market with poor content, but will help them create and deliver effective work at scale, aiming to make it beautiful and efficient while pushing clients to make less of it and ensure it works.