Ludus Interview #6: Hugo Dubs from Saatchi & Saatchi

Hi Hugo, could you tell us a bit more about you and what you do at Saatchi & Saatchi?

I’ve been working for Saatchi & Saatchi as a Creative Technologist for almost a year now. My daily job is to drive innovation in campaign design by working with both strategic planners and creative directors to integrate technological perspectives within creative briefs. I provide our creatives with new ideas and prototypes, and on the other end, I support them by doing feasibility studies and by finding the right partners to work with once the campaigns move into production.

To work around this, our artists create slides from scratch using Photoshop. The results are stunning, but this process adds up extra work layers that slow down our progress. This creates unnecessary back and forths between project managers and artists who need to export new slides to be integrated in PowerPoint every time an update is required. This is why Ludus seems to be the right solution for us as it appears to be a good mix between classical presentation software and graphical crafting tools. Everybody can use it at the same time and work together to build efficient decks for our clients.

How do you use it in your daily life?

Ludus’ feature set is close enough to Photoshop basic layering and blending system. So creatives can easily import assets and create stunning slides to support campaign showcases: logotyping, mockups, etc. This means that the people who are building the presentation content can directly work with the assets provided by the creative team. Our assets are saved in shared folders and updates are automatically available to everyone working on a presentation. Account managers don’t have to think about versioning anymore, they can directly edit the presentation content or make some last-minute corrections.

Ludus increases our efficiency but also makes people less stressed about potential human mistakes in an environment where the pressure can quickly rise up.

Project for VISA: First floating distributor equipped with contactless technology.

How precisely is it helpful for you to use such a tool? What features made the difference for you?

Besides our existing workflow, using Ludus feels like having access to a modern tool made for modern people: working as a team with the collaborative mode, integrating assets from a centralized cloud folder architecture, integrating all kind of assets with so much ease. This is really refreshing and we want more!

That being said, the one feature we really like is the Smart Block system. This is a new kind of master slide — a bit like Prefabs in Unity — which allows you to create small visual components.

You can add, remove and update them across all your presentations at once, but you can also make local overrides when you need to. This is what made our creative team really happy 😊.

Are you still using other presentation softwares now? Why?

Clients are still expecting to work with PowerPoint and we cannot force them to use Ludus. At the moment, we are forced to comply with them and we will keep playing the game. However, I’m confident Ludus is a product which is evolving very fast and will become a new standard quite soon!

We’d like to thank Hugo for his time and all the feedback already provided to help us to make Ludus even better!