Slatehaus™
A quiet studio for loud productions.
Smart Briefs. Human-Made.
How it worksNew delivery planListen
The brief is where the work is won or lost.
Get it right, and everything after it flows.
Get it wrong, and no amount of clever fixes it.
So why does it still take three weeks?
Five meetings. A dozen email threads. And at the end of all of it, no one quite agreeing.
It is not a scheduling problem.
It is a silo problem.
The money, the brand, the law and the people are owned by four different rooms, and those rooms are never in the same one.
Slatehaus fixes the reason, not the symptom.
The rules are agreed once, up front, by the people who own them.
After that, the brief builds against those rules.
It sharpens into strategy. Above the line, below the line, and through it.
Then it renders the work.
Costed as it goes. Benchmarked to industry standard.
No one is asked to approve a number they have not seen the basis for.
No one finds out what it cost a month later.
From blank page to briefed, in minutes.
Not because a machine skipped the thinking,
but because everyone already agreed.
This is Slatehaus.
Smart briefs.
Human-made.
Tap any line to jump to it.
The problem
Brand and comms are the first lines cut. Not because they don't work. Because they can't show their work.
The brief lives in one place, production in another, approval in an email thread, budget in a spreadsheet. Five boundaries, and at every one the truth degrades and somebody gets to shade it. The evidence does not exist because nothing ever met.
And every boundary is also a person
Four owners, and on most briefs three of them are not in the room. So the work waits, found one at a time, briefed one at a time, or shipped without them and corrected in public. The delay is not a scheduling problem. It is a silo problem, the brief waiting on whichever owner is not in the room.
Slatehaus does not remove the human. It removes the waiting for the wrong one. What those four own is agreed once, at the start, so most work flows without a queue. The only slow moments left are the ones that genuinely need a named person to decide, and those are supposed to be slow.
How it works
See what your idea costs and looks like, while it's still warm.
A plain-language brief goes in. A structured brief, a ZAR budget, and directional collateral come out. Every figure stays in your hands.
Write it the way you'd say it. Rough is fine.
A structured brief with a live ZAR budget you can adjust.
Directional concepts across formats. You choose, you approve.
The traditional process is worth every week for flagship work. Slate removes the slow first mile for everything else. It proposes; the Marketing Manager adjusts, chooses, approves.
From first-time briefers to in-house teams shipping work at scale.
Watch a brief become a campaign
Flock & Flame, the weekend starts in the kitchen. A real run, start to finish.
Typed in under two minutes. Typos and all.
Flock & Flame brief. We are launching a retail range of flame-grilled marinated chicken wings, chilled and frozen, heat and eat, in three heat levels, Mild, Hot and Inferno, plus a dipping-sauce line. Audience is 18 to 34, urban, social, value-led but flavour-hungry, the Friday-night-in crowd who want the takeaway hit without the takeaway spend. The idea is that the weekend starts in the kitchen, so reposition staying in as the better night out and drive trial of the range as the centre of an easy, generous, shared meal at home. Tone warm, bold, a little cheeky, appetite first, all heat and gloss and sizzle. The food is the hero, glossy flame-grilled wings, a sauce drip, a curl of smoke, hands reaching in around a table at home. Big flavour, low effort, made for sharing. Brand name in the headline, a made-for-sharing line in the set, and a price cue from R59.99 a pack. Formats: billboard, squeeze-back, social, press and a radio spot.
Comms showcase · Acacia Bank
One Platform, One Bank change brief · internal · 22,000 employees across nine markets · ZAR 12m
The idea
It's already yours.
What was always theirs, now where they can reach it.
The work · one idea, eight formats
Leadership message
Your payslip has always existed. Now you don't need to chase it.
Culture narrative
We bank for people. We should work the same way.
Change story
Not a new tool. A better address for things you already own.
Town hall
Open the vault.
Line-manager pack
Your team won't follow a platform. They'll follow you.
Onboarding kit
The platform already knows your name.
Adoption email · trackable
Claim your place. It's already yours.
Signage
Your name is already on the door.
The budget · ZAR 12m, internal weighting
Quality benchmark · self-scored
Each piece of work is scored against best-practice standards for idea, strategy, execution and measurement. A check on craft, not a reach or engagement figure.
77 / 100
Idea and measurement are scored lower because the work leans on platform and data-access assumptions, each flagged as proposed rather than agreed. A proposed plan, not yet deployed.
Delivery showcase · Flock & Flame and Acacia Bank
One plan. Three people. Nobody sees the same page.
The run above stopped at Approved. This is what happens next. A gate that will not let the work go live until both halves are ready, the page their marketing lead opens, and the page their board reads. Same object, three altitudes.
A launch is two pieces of work. What the country sees, and what four hundred people behind the counter are told. Usually two agencies, two approval chains, two dates. They meet for the first time in public, and the staff hear it from a customer.
Here they are one plan with one gate. Try to send it live.
- ✓Launch film, 30 seconds
- ✓Radio, 30 seconds
- ✓Six-sheet, outdoor
- ✓Social cutdowns, four
- ✓Menu board artwork
- ✓Press, full page
- ✓Team announcement
- ✓Manager brief pack
- ✓Kitchen wall poster
- ✓WhatsApp broadcast
Watch the figure. Capital at risk is rand already spent on work nobody has approved, measured per lane, not per item. Approve one of the two and it will not budge. The whole lane is exposed until the whole lane is approved. That is the no-partial-credit rule, in money.
Flock & Flame and Acacia Bank are the runs above, carried forward. The figures are shaped to demonstrate how the gate and the capital read behave, not drawn from a client's book. A demonstration, not a deployed plan.
What we refuse
We shall never ask you what your budget is.
And we shall never claim to prove a return.
Almost nobody tells you what their product refuses to do. In a market where every claim is made by everyone, refusal is the only signal left. So here are the rest of ours.
Return lives outside the object, in outcomes we do not own. One invented number turns every honest one on the page into a claim.
Both lanes, strict, every deliverable, or the lane is not approved. A gate that can be mostly closed is a door.
An expiry stops nobody who already holds the link, and its one guaranteed effect is your document failing in front of you on a date we chose. A pack ends when we delete it.
A board pack freezes the moment you cut it. The instant you can edit a frozen figure, nothing on the page can be trusted, including the figures nobody touched.
Sum returns across programmes and you have built the exact claim the rest of the product refuses to make. So there is no total, on any page.
A document built for a board has to open for a board. The link is signed, so it cannot be guessed or edited into. That is the safeguard, and it asks nothing of the reader.
Smart Briefs. Human-Made.
Slatehaus™