Campaign Brief Q&A with BMF’s Alex Derwin and Tara Mckenty: “Creativity and innovation are inseparable endeavours. They go hand in hand”

Campaign Brief recently sat down with BMF co-ECD Alex Derwin and chief innovation officer and co-ECD Tara Mckenty to chat about the agency’s creative output, its strengths in fostering a playful and inclusive culture and why diversity in perspective is key to creating great work.

 

How has the BMF creative output evolved in the past 5 years?

Alex: BMF’s output has evolved dramatically in the last five years, and indeed every year for the last 27 years. It’s a natural part of an agency built on a foundation of creative excellence. When creativity is at your core, you’re innately curious for the unfamiliar, and your drive to be original means that you get twitchy if you stand still for too long. The pace of change at BMF has increased in line with culture, technology, and people’s tastes. Which is to say that it’s shifted dramatically – especially in the last few years.

How will the BMF creative output evolve in the next 5 years?

Alex: We’ll always love making film, and film will always be relevant because it’s one of the most immediate ways of connecting emotionally, but we’ve also been creating books based on behavioural science to help kids sleep, we made an old school arcade game for ALDI, a TikTok shanty for boat refugees, and a sustainable fashion brand for Tassie. We’ve been pushing ourselves into unfamiliar places which is always exciting, but it all comes back to making deeper and more meaningful connections with people; and the wellspring of that is always a deep understanding of the essence of a brand so you can build more and more affinity over time.

Tara: BMF has always had a strong track record of building effective brands with Long Ideas, and over the past few years our Long Ideas have also evolved. As we continue to make more meaningful connections for brands and their customers, we’ve evolved our thinking to include Long Innovation. Innovation allows us not only to inform and entertain consumers overtime, but it also opens the opportunity for brands to provide utility – and to be helpful to their customers – meaningfully, and authentically.

What pieces of work are you most proud of from the last few years?

Alex: I’m always going to say brand platforms like ‘Good Different’ and ‘Come Down for Air’ because they’re the kind of differentiating ideas that you can continue to play off for years and years. There are also important behaviour change ideas for the Department of Social Services that are making a real difference in the world – tackling things like domestic violence and child safety. In the last couple of years, our most awarded piece of work has been ‘The Reluctant Shanty’ for UNHCR. This made me incredibly proud because it was a different shape of work for us and the team did a phenomenal job, from the creative, to account service, and to the production company FINCH. I have to give a special shout-out to Kyra Bartley the director who was incredible to work with.

Is there a specific approach BMF takes to creativity? How do you get to good work?

Alex: There’s no secret formula, we just hire really great talent and try to give them an environment and a support network that allows them the freedom to do what they do best. We’re very scrupulous about making sure what we make is on brand, and we understand that making this kind of work is an iterative process and that every person, at every part of the process, has an opportunity to make the output better. Sometimes I think that this level of craft and overthinking frustrates people, but it really elevates our output.

What makes BMF different from all the other agencies?

Alex: What I’ve always loved about BMF is the openness and warmth that our people display – even in moments of real stress the kindness of everyone at BMF is always evident.

Tara: I joined BMF not only because of its ability to produce highly crafted, meaningful work, but because of its culture…and I have been delighted to find the rumours are true. BMF’s people are what makes it different. We are able to retain amazing, talented people because we know every single BMFer has something different to bring to the table and those differences are celebrated, no matter who you are. This sets a culture where everyone feels encouraged to bring their whole self to work, building authenticity and trust across departments, which is rare. Our people are our secret sauce.

BMF often talks about its people, but what’s the culture really like at BMF?

Alex: As simple as it sounds, we try to have a lot of fun doing what we do, and that makes the culture playful. Of course, there’s stress and tension at times, but that’s a lot easier to ride out when there’s always a smiling face or an infectious giggle close by (I’m looking at you Jenny Lee Archer).

The tenure of the people at BMF is something the agency prides itself on. Why do you think you have lifers, and BMF-againers?

Tara: The average tenure of a person working in the creative industries is 3.2 years, but in the halls of BMF it is difficult to find someone who is sub five years. Then we have our BMF-againers – those who go looking for a different shade of green in the grass and then miss the green BMF pantone, so they come back.

It is a hard to describe why BMF is the special little place it is and why we have those BMF-againers. I suppose it’s a bit like visiting your grandma’s house and the nostalgic feelings that come with it: warmth, safety, and familiarity. BMF feels exactly like that, a familiar, warm, and safe place where you can be your full creative self. The specialness of BMF is the homely essence of its social fabric. And like me, when you are new to BMF, it is the warmth that you notice first, just like a visit to Grandma’s minus the potpourri!

How do you recruit, retain, and foster a culture of difference? And how does the work benefit from diversity of perspective?

Tara: Diversity of perspective leads to better and more innovative thinking and has been proven to do so. Historically, creative agencies have lacked diversity and consequently the work has suffered. As an industry, collectively, we have ignored entire audience groups because they are rarely part of our departments; for example, 68% of people feel that modern advertising doesn’t represent them or their community (IPSOS). This is a missed business opportunity. For example, my community, the LGBTQIA+ community, outspends their straight counterparts by double, Ikea and some progressive brands have included our community for a long time, but many brands are slower at realising the rainbow dollar is real.

To get to more inclusive and innovative work we need more diversity, D&AD Shift is one great initiative to attract different talent to our industry, but we need more pathways in, and as an industry, we need to be more attractive to diverse talent. We can do this through designing an inclusive industry together, each agency and network plays a role in that, and if we don’t pull our socks up, we will continue to lose our best talent to more inclusive and progressive industries like tech, in-house agencies, and start-ups. At BMF we have Project R.A.D (Review. Action. Drive) a cultural initiative designed to continue to foster an inclusive culture, and to build cultural I.Q. and belonging, and we hope to externalise some of Project R.A.D’s initiatives in the future to share learnings, tools, and contribute to coming together to solve this problem, because we will all benefit.

As a newly formed duo how does the combination of creative and innovation sit next to each other?

Tara: With consideration (Alex) and commotion (Tara). AKA calm chaos. To explain… Alex and I are an unlikely couple where Alex is driven by highly strategic, highly crafted, and considered creative which is what BMF has built its reputation on. Then comes hurricane Tara. My attitude is to try fast, iterate, then try again, and when combined with Alex, we create an interesting pace of work where he slows me down – which improves my strategic rigour – and allows time for craft which often is left out of the innovation processes. But I speed him up, which well I am not sure he is benefiting at all from.

Alex: Creativity and innovation are inseparable endeavours. Innovation requires a creative brain to make it happen, and we’re blessed with creative brains at BMF. So, adding Tara’s very specific skill set, her network, and her ways of working has been an absolute godsend. After a couple of months, we’re already seeing it bear fruit for some of our biggest and most ambitious clients.