Before a film gets its opening weekend, it gets an image. A face, a title, a color, a promise. The viewer may give it a second. WC+A has built its business around that small, consequential encounter: making entertainment look like something worth choosing.
Consider its work for The Fantastic Four: First Steps. The 2025 Clio Entertainment program awarded Silver in graphic design to the film’s 4/4 key art, naming Williams Creative Associates, or WC+A, as the entrant. An animated version also made the motion-poster shortlist. Those are specific credits for specific pieces of a much larger movie campaign. They place the agency in the business of giving a story its public face.
Now the agency has changed its own. WC+A and …and company announced a shared new chapter as MACH27 in 2026. Type the old WC+A web address into a browser and the new identity appears. For a company paid to help other businesses introduce themselves, it is an especially interesting moment to look behind the artwork.
A kitchen, then the wiring
Kevin Williams’s account of the beginning is pleasingly domestic. He recalled “co-founding WC+A out of my kitchen in 2015” in a 2020 interview. His route there included the University of Michigan’s art and design school, freelance assignments for studios and a creative-director role at Disney. He had worked on both sides of the relationship that his own agency would depend on.
Williams and co-founder John Corsi then found a brick building near USC for an early office. A photo essay by studio manager and photographer Steven DeTray records the build: electrical work, wall finishes, magnetic paint and the practical mess of making a place to work. The interior took about three weeks to complete. An agency origin story rarely needs a metaphor when it already has conduit.
The photographs documented creative discussions and the founders at work. They also supplied a useful correction to the usual mythology of a design business. Before the portfolio can look effortless, someone has to decide where the desks, outlets and walls go. Here, that less photogenic work actually got photographed.
By the 2020 interview, WC+A was at ROW DTLA. Williams liked the campus’s creative neighbors and relaxed setting; he also had opinions about lunch and coffee. Culture, in this telling, included the everyday conditions in which people spent their working lives. It is a more recognizable picture than an abstract declaration that everyone loves ideas.
The thing before the thing
WC+A’s core work is advertising creative: key art, print and digital campaigns, photography, retouching, branding and video production. Its public client roster includes Netflix, HBO, Disney, NBC and Pluto TV. These are organizations with plenty of entertainment to promote and a recurring need to make individual titles recognizable.
The phrase “key art” can make the work sound more obscure than it is. Think of the central image that tells you what a film or series feels like before you see it. It must suggest a world without explaining every plot turn. A campaign then needs related material for different placements. The central idea has to remain legible as the available space changes.
This makes production skill part of the creative offer. WC+A’s trademark registrations cover advertising across media as well as film, video and multimedia production. The scope is broad, but the underlying task is concrete: develop promotional material and carry it through to usable assets. A concept that cannot survive delivery is unfinished work.
A WC+A freelance video-editor posting makes the production side unusually tangible. It asked for work on promotions, trailers and brand spots, from the start of the editorial process through final delivery. It also called for collaboration on motion graphics and assets that fit the client’s creative strategy. The initial assignment was one week and fully remote. That is a compact portrait of agency work: a defined job, a short window and several people whose contributions need to fit.
Four heroes. A very specific credit.
The Fantastic Four recognition helps explain the agency’s position without resorting to a wall of famous logos. The Silver was for the 4/4 key art’s graphic design. The animated entry was shortlisted in a separate motion-poster category. One campaign idea could be considered both as a composition and as something that unfolds over time.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps
Silver · Key Art Craft / Graphic Design
Shortlist · Key Art / Motion Poster
That distinction matters to a prospective client. Someone commissioning a campaign should ask what the agency made, which disciplines were involved and how those pieces relate. An award entry answers a narrower, more useful question than the suggestion that a single vendor was responsible for a film’s entire marketing success.
The same awards gallery contains work by entertainment specialists including AV Print, GrandSon, BOND and Art Machine. That is a relevant comparison set for WC+A’s key-art business. Its combination of design and production puts it among agencies a studio might consider when the brief calls for a recognizable visual idea and the assets needed to put it into circulation.
For a buyer, the practical comparison is therefore a portfolio comparison. Look at the actual assignment, the type of image and the finished formats. A beautiful theatrical poster may tell you something valuable about composition; a motion-poster entry adds evidence about a different execution. Neither removes the need to write a clear brief.
Pluto TV makes the collaboration visible
Public comments from Pluto TV creative professional Caspar Nonner provide another view. Looking back on 2023, he thanked WC+A alongside Pluto TV Creative and Paramount Streaming for work on on-air and nationwide promotions. His posts describe channel branding and the challenge of bringing older entertainment to a contemporary audience.
That is a different problem from introducing a new superhero film. A library title comes with existing associations. The task can involve helping viewers discover a familiar show in a new setting. In discussing a Dynasty channel promo, Nonner emphasized the value of embracing the fun and silliness the project needed. Taste, here, includes knowing when solemnity would miss the point.
These acknowledgments show an agency working alongside a client’s creative staff. They make a useful distinction between access to a famous brand and participation in a working team. For businesses considering outside creative help, the example suggests a sensible question: how will the agency’s designers, editors and account people collaborate with the people already inside the company?
The estimate needs a design, too
The operating story is less glamorous. A Scoro customer account describes disconnected project, time-tracking and billing systems, with estimates relying too heavily on guesswork. WC+A began moving to Scoro in 2022. Historical costs could then inform quotes; account managers could prepare invoices from existing project information.
The implementation used a cross-department team and phased adoption, beginning with time tracking. The business supported both retainers and individual projects. The useful lesson is procedural: connect the work you actually performed to the next promise you price.
A beautiful deliverable still has to fit inside a workable agreement.
THE BUYER’S QUESTION
For a client, that means defining approval rounds, delivery formats and responsibility for changes before production begins. For an agency, it means treating a previous job as evidence. A historical estimate is useful only when the next assignment is comparable. New creative demands still require judgment; a spreadsheet cannot decide how difficult an unfamiliar idea will be.
A property company enters the picture
The current MACH27 portfolio reaches beyond entertainment. Its Irvine Company case study describes work on the company’s overarching brand and across apartments, homes and office communities. The agency says it helped refine the brand’s mission and principles and align messaging at corporate, divisional and individual-brand levels.
Its account of office-property work emphasizes a shift toward workplace communities. The broader Irvine Spectrum story connected offices and apartments with retail, lifestyle and entertainment. The point was to make related places read as a whole. This is work presented by today’s MACH27; it should be understood as evidence of that portfolio’s breadth.
The comparison with entertainment is revealing. Both assignments concern recognition, but the subject and timescale change. A film image introduces a story; a property brand must give a collection of places a coherent meaning. A buyer can use that distinction to evaluate whether the agency’s experience matches a brief about a launch, an ongoing identity or both.
A new name with an old conjunction
MACH27 explains the number in its name through the ampersand, which it describes as the alphabet’s former 27th letter. The chosen meaning is connection. After the plus sign in WC+A and the conjunction in …and company, the punctuation theme has survived the change of name.
The current agency lists branding, strategy, campaigns, content, experiential, digital, social and motion among its capabilities. Its stated values include discipline, curiosity and humanity. Those claims become useful when a buyer brings them back to a real assignment: what needs making, who it must reach and what a finished piece should accomplish.
WC+A’s record offers several ways to begin that conversation: a precise key-art credit, a client’s account of collaboration, a production brief and a documented change to estimating. Each reveals a different part of the service. The next entrance belongs to MACH27. The sensible place to judge it remains the work.