Why use one company for the app and the content?
Ricky O'Donnell · Founder & CEO
Why should the same studio build the software and produce the creative content?
When one studio builds the software and produces the creative content, the two are designed for each other: the app is built around the content it must deliver, the content is produced in the formats the app actually needs, and there is one accountable team when anything changes. Splitting the work between a dev shop and a content agency creates a gap in the middle — mismatched formats, duplicated project management and slower iteration — that the client always ends up paying for.
Most projects that involve both software and content — a training platform and its films, an app and its animations, a product site and its videos — get split between two suppliers. A development company builds the container; a creative agency fills it. It sounds sensible. In practice, the gap between the two is where projects go wrong.
The gap in the middle
The dev team builds a video player; the agency delivers films in the wrong aspect ratio for it. The platform launches before the content is ready, or the content sits finished while the platform slips. Each side's project manager coordinates with the other side's project manager, and you pay for both. When something breaks — a film that won't play, a page that loads slowly under video — each supplier points at the other. None of this is malice. It is what happens when two companies each own half of one experience.
What changes when one team owns both
When the people animating the content sit with the people building the platform, the decisions interlock. The app is designed around what the content needs to do — chaptering, captions, interactive moments — and the content is produced in exactly the formats, lengths and structures the platform serves best. Compression, loading, accessibility and analytics get decided once, together. And when the inevitable change lands ("can module three become two shorter modules?"), one team reworks both sides in one motion.
It compounds after launch
The bigger payoff comes later. Platforms with content need feeding: new modules, seasonal campaigns, updated films when the product changes. A single studio already knows the system and the style, so month-two updates cost a fraction of what re-briefing two suppliers costs. Most of our client relationships at RJDM span years — some decades — largely because this compounding gets more valuable every year.
Doesn't a specialist do each half better?
The fair challenge is that a dedicated dev shop or a dedicated content house is deeper in its one craft. Sometimes true. But most studios pick a side, and the experience your users get is not two halves — it is one thing. RJDM has run animation and film alongside systems and applications under one roof since the studio grew out of its 2001 founding: animation and film from 2006, systems and applications from 2015. The senior person who scopes your platform and the senior person who directs your films sit in the same room, and that room is the thing you are actually hiring.
When splitting still makes sense
If the two halves genuinely never touch — a brand film for TV and an unrelated internal tool — separate specialists are fine. The one-studio argument applies when content lives inside the product: training platforms, product configurators, patient information systems, learning apps. If your content and your software share a user, they should share a team.
