We're the creative agency for brands that ratchet up the cultural baseline.

Anything from a one-day portrait shoot through to a full multi-channel campaign running across brand film, photography, and design.The scope ranges from single deliverables built around a specific moment to multi-asset campaigns that roll out across channels over months.

Video covers brand films, campaign content, brand documentary, live event coverage, and music industry work, including live performance films for (previous clients include Amazon Music Originals with Gretta Ray and Charley) and the major record labels.

Photography covers brand, portraiture, editorial, campaign shoots, music photography, and product.

Design covers campaign visuals, digital, print, motion graphics, and editorial work like annual reports, investor decks, and IPO documents.

The common thread is brands that want the creative to hold up next to the best work in their category and the best work in culture. We work as a creative agency across Australia and internationally, on projects that ship in Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, and beyond.

We’re competitive people who treat creative as a competitive act. The work should always ask: how does this creative help a brand win?

We’re not a content agency in the volume sense: no monthly content calendars, batched social posts, or ongoing production retainers. We do campaign creative, brand films, and brand photography for moments that matter, not the calendar-content that fills the gaps between them.

If the brief is “we need 30 reels a month,” we’ll point you somewhere good. If the brief is ‘we need a hero piece of creative that is going to signal something important,’ that’s the work we’re built for as a creative agency in Sydney and Canberra.

Three different jobs that often get conflated, and the labels themselves are not used consistently within our industry.

An advertising agency (or ad agency) is built around concepting and producing campaign creative, usually for paid channels. Historically ad agencies did media buying too, but that’s mostly split off to separate media agencies these days.

A production company (sometimes a video production agency or content production shop) is built around the craft of making the thing, so the filming, photography, post-production, animation, sometimes executing an ad agency’s idea or an in-house team’s brief.

Creative agency is a fuzzy term. It gets used to describe anything from a design studio to a content shop to a digital agency to a digital creative agency to a brand and creative agency. The way we use it: enough brand and strategic depth to come up with the creative, enough production capability to make it too.

Mude is an Australian creative agency in Sydney and Canberra that comes into the picture when the brand thinking and the production craft need to be handled by the same team, and the work has to earn its place as both strategy and craft.

Yep. In some ways a natural outcome of being founded in Canberra. As one of the few creative agencies in Canberra working with federal departments at this scale, public sector work finds its way in when the studio sits in the same city as half of them.

We’ve done work for the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, Department of Education, Department of Defence, the Civil Aviation Safety Authority, and BreastScreen Australia, among others.

Some of it is public-facing campaign work like health promotion, behaviour change, and awareness campaigns. Some of it is the internal departmental work that never lands on the evening news. Government creative has its own rhythm: accessibility requirements, multi-stakeholder sign-off, public sensitivity, panel-based procurement. We’ve been doing it long enough to know where the friction points are.

For Commonwealth procurement, we’re on the Digital Marketplace Panel 2 (DMP2) as a foundation supplier, and on the buy.nsw Supplier Hub. Any Commonwealth agency can engage us directly through BuyICT under panel terms. The full panel detail is in the homepage FAQs.

Mood on the Roof is our international tastemaker live music series, shot on the rooftop of our Sydney studio. We started it ourselves more than half a decade ago — nobody briefed it, and nobody told us to keep running it.

The format is live performances (often striped-back) filmed on a moody rooftop in a single take, designed for brands to tap into the cultural cachet of emerging music, and that format alone has been enough to attract artists including Benson Boone, Griff, Alec Benjamin, Keli Holiday, and dodie.

Brands partner with Mood on the Roof when they want to associate themselves with a tastemaker platform. It’s closer to cultural patronage than advertising, and the brand association builds over time rather than landing in a single campaign. Mood on the Roof is the kind of asset most creative agencies don’t bother building, and running it teaches us things about music culture that no client brief would.

Yes. Brand photography is regularly a core component to most engagements, covering everything from shooting sitting Prime Ministers to founders, leadership teams, and artists.

Portrait photography for executive teams, founders, and editorial profiles.

Campaign and editorial shoots planned around the brand’s visual identity and art direction.

Product, e-commerce, and food photography for brands where the way the product is shot is part of the brand’s story.

The full breakdown of the photography work is on our photography page.

Most of our creative production runs end-to-end through Mude. As a brand and creative agency with an in-house creative team — creative directors, photographers, videographers, designers, animators, and a post-production team — the work is usually made by the people who concepted it.

We’ll also bring in exceptional outside creative talent when the project calls for it. If the feeling a campaign deserves is a fit for a specific director, cinematographer, or external creative director in our network, we’ll tap them. The point is that the right person makes the work; whether they’re on our payroll or in our network is a logistical detail that at the end of the day most clients don’t care about.

For larger campaigns that also need specialist crew — stylists, hair and makeup artists, drone pilots, gaffers, sound recordists, casting directors, and talent — we bring in trusted production partners we’ve worked with for years.

The same goes for specialist post-production: colourists for high-end colour grading, composers for original music, and sound designers when the audio is doing real work.

The creative direction and project management stays with us, so the partner crew slots in alongside our team rather than running their own parallel process.

There are production companies doing concept-level thinking that most creative agencies couldn’t match, and creative agencies with more brand context than most production companies. Among Sydney and Canberra creative agencies, the gap between what gets pitched and what gets delivered is wider than most clients expect.

What’s worth looking for is a clear point of view about why the work is made the way it is, and evidence the creative company understands the commercial context and not just a creative context.

Usually because the brand hasn’t committed to a point of view. Cultural relevance is an outcome of a brand having a clear stance, and the work expresses it consistently. It’s the question we come back to most often as a creative agency working across brand and creative: which culture does this brand actually orbit, and is the work signalling it?

Culture precedes brands (they’re very rarely inventors of culture). Good brands orbit existing subcultures and they borrow their rituals, their heroes, their aesthetics, and their moral codes, then package those signals into a brand posture. Sometimes that’s obvious such as Supreme orbiting skater culture, RM Williams orbits rural Australiana and lets you borrow rural legitimacy without actually living a rural life.

But subcultures aren’t always street-level. McKinsey orbits executive culture and hiring McKinsey is a declaration of posture that says “this is a very, very serious organisation doing very, very serious things” and it does that regardless of what the eventual recommendations are.

The culture a brand belongs to doesn’t have to be archetypically cool, but it should know who it’s for and what culture it intends to orbit. Brands that constantly chase new postures end up signalling the only truly universal message: we don’t really know who we are.

Work where the brief is pure churn such as content calendars, production retainers, volume social content. As a brand and creative agency, we take on creative where the brand has something at stake and the work needs to earn its place.

The churn work is better served by a studio set up for it, and we’d rather send you somewhere good than pretend that’s what we do well. We take on creative where the brand has something at stake and the work needs to earn its place.

As far as sectors we won’t work with for ideological reasons, we’re politically agnostic and we’re not ideologues, other than the ideology of making things where we get to imbue culture into the work. We won’t work with tobacco, pornography, extreme / fringe political organisations.

Mostly project-based, with some panel work for government. Most engagements are scoped to a specific project with a clear start, end, and outcome. We’re not Agency of Record in the traditional sense (full-year exclusive marketing partner on monthly retainers), partly because that model usually means an agency saying yes to a lot of work outside its core capability to keep the retainer warm.

For Commonwealth and federal work we sit on the Digital Marketplace Panel 2 (DMP2) and the buy.nsw Supplier Hub, so government departments can engage us directly through procurement panels. The full panel detail is in the homepage FAQs.

Yep, especially in the music space. We work with the major record labels in Australia and have ongoing partnerships with music-coded culture brands and music technology platforms including Amazon Music and DistroKid.

A lot of the music industry work has come through our own Mood on the Roof series — an international tastemaker live music series shot on our studio rooftop — which has hosted artists including Benson Boone, Griff, Alec Benjamin, Keli Holiday, and dodie.

The work covers music videos, artist brand films, live performance films, album and EP campaigns, music photography, and brand partnerships where non-music brands want to show up in music culture credibly.

We’ve shot live performance music videos for Amazon Music with artists like Charley and Gretta Ray, plus campaign work for labels and music tech platforms across Australia and internationally. Most of the entertainment industry work finds us through being a brand and creative agency that runs its own cultural assets rather than just selling them to others.

Yes, brand films and campaign films are some of our favourite work. The brand film is usually the hero piece, so a 60-90 second anchor that captures who the company is and why it should matter.

We also produce brand documentaries for companies whose story is too good to compress into a hero piece (a recent example: a documentary capturing Tonga’s recovery after the 2022 eruption and tsunami), and live event films when the brand is doing something culturally significant. The full breakdown of the video work — including commercials, product videos, hero content, animation, and music industry work — is on our video production page. As a creative agency rather than a pure production company, we do the strategy and creative direction in-house, then ship the work without handing it off.

Yep, including:

Campaign and digital design across web, print, OOH, and motion. Hero campaign visuals, digital ads, EDMs, social systems, OOH executions, the lot. Most campaigns we work on combine graphic design with photography and video, but plenty of strong campaign ideas live entirely in design.

Presentation design is a big chunk of the work: investor decks, IPO decks, board decks, pitch decks, sales decks, and capability decks for new business and tender work. The graphic design for a deck has to make the financial case clearly, hold up to investor scrutiny when it’s circulating as a PDF in inboxes you’ll never see, and still work in the room when someone’s actually presenting it live.

We also do the odd editorial and publication design for annual reports, ESG reports, impact reports, sustainability reports, and AGM packs.

Campaign and digital design across web, print, OOH, and motion. Hero campaign visuals, digital ads, EDMs, social systems, OOH executions, the lot. Most campaigns we work on combine graphic design with photography and video, but plenty of strong campaign ideas live entirely in design.

Environmental design covers wayfinding, signage, exhibition stands, and brand environments. Environmental work has the longest tail of any design we make, once it’s installed it tends to stay there for years, which is also why it has to be designed properly the first time.

Motion graphics and 2D animation for brand idents, social motion content, animated explainers, and campaign work. A recent example: designing Australia’s cultural presence at COP29, a motion design story grounded in Country.

The full breakdown of our work as a graphic design agency in Sydney and Canberra is on our graphic design page.