Pat Murphy:
Hi and welcome to the MCA Prodcast, your fix for everything innovative in advertising production. I’m Pat Murphy and to celebrate the end of a huge year on the podcast, I’m bringing you some of my favourite moment from Season 3.

Throughout 2024 I’ve been lucky enough to sit down with some of the real shining lights in our industry and we’ve talked about so many different topics; from creativity and storytelling, to leadership, nurturing new talent, technological developments and even exploring entirely new ways that we can connect with audiences.

We also brought you a panel session from the LLB & Friends Beach in Cannes. I chaired the session, alongside Doerte Spengler-Ahrens from the Art Director’s Club (ADC), Upasana Roy from Reckitt, Philipp Schuster from Bayer Consumer Health as well as advertising legend Sir John Hegarty.

The panel was about the importance of creativity and storytelling. I asked the panel why great storytelling is so vital for their brands when it comes to engaging with their consumers. Here’s Doerte:

Doerte Spengler-Ahrens:
For us, there’s no brand without a story. So I’m totally convinced that if you want to move people, if you want to surprise them, you have to have an emotional impact. We call it momentum. Without momentum, some call it disruption. I think so, without that and emotional engagement, there is no success.

Upasana Roy:
When I think about stories, I think about memory. It’s like a little picture book, right? If I’ve been on a holiday and if I don’t have a story to tell about that holiday, I would not remember it. So stories are like little pockets of memory for me and I think that’s what brands aspire to do today – to create that memory and mental availability with our consumers. And in my role, I try to aspire to build memories with our consumers.

Pat Murphy:
Philip.

Philipp Schuster:
I think it may be more about – in the context of our industry. So we are actually both working in healthcare or in consumer health and I would say, historically, we haven’t maybe done a really good job of storytelling. Because it has a very functional background, product benefits and we really have to if we want to stay relevant with our brands. We have to become much better storytellers. I see it now more and more and you know, I think we embrace the challenge, but it’s something which maybe has not come natural to us in the past. So I think for the companies in our industry, those that are able to embrace that and to take this on and become good storytellers, they will be the ones who will be relevant in the future.

Pat Murphy:
Thanks, Philip.
John, over to you.

John Hegarty:
Yeah, I think I love that idea of memories because that’s one of the things that it’s about, but I also think it’s culture. From the beginning of time, people sat around the fire and a storyteller would talk about the world and what it was and how you related to it. And storytelling went from there throughout our lives and it is so fundamental to everything that we do.

And in a way, technology now is trying to usurp it. You know it’s almost trying to say ‘you don’t need it, you can do things in short, little slots, you can do things in little moments’, and that and it’s actually… some of it is trying to take our humanity away, and storytelling is part of our humanity and I think we have to fight back. I think we have to say no, no, no, you’re a service to us. I mean, you know, technology is brilliant, it’s fantastic, it allowed us to do all kinds of things, which is incredible.

But you know, I was at a conference and that was now about 15 years ago and it was about, the digital world was opening up and the speaker before me was talking about ‘we don’t need stories anymore because we can talk direct to the person’.  And half the audience were clapping and I thought I’m in front of a bunch of idiots. They’re complete fucking idiots. They don’t understand a thing about anything and I had to get up and talk about creativity and storytelling is fundamental to that.

But they genuinely believed technology had put that, didn’t need it. I could talk directly to you. Here’s the proposition, don’t need anything else. You know, sign up here, thank you very much, and I’ll take your money. That was the way they felt and thought, and so we have to remember storytelling is our humanity and that is truly profound and that’s truly, truly important to us.

Pat Murphy:
A really fantastic panel from what was a superb week in Cannes and we’re already excited for the return of The Beach in 2025.

As for the importance of great storytelling – that was definitely a theme that emerged through all of our podcast guests this year. It was particularly fascinating to hear how new technological developments are enabling brands to tell stories in new and exciting ways.

Mark Benson is President of The Mill and he is really excited about the prospect of immersive experiences; putting the audience at the centre of the action! He’s currently working on a project to bring Elvis back to life so a whole new generation can experience the King of Rock and Roll.   Here’s Mark to tell us more:

Mark Benson:
There’s real momentum around the growth of experiential entertainment and I see it, I believe it and I think that is going to transform the business beyond anything we might have imagined in the past, because I think the world will continue to demand more of engagement that will be more immersive, because they the expectation around immersive engagement will continue to grow. I think that for content creators, for the storytellers, for the ambitious visionary storytellers, that is going to be a fertile space to engage and to be super competitive in that new space, and by that I mean creating experiences that people love, that talk about or they don’t love or whatever they might be. But that will be in the space and I think that we continue to see real material growth in and will be exciting for us all and will be exciting for us all.

Pat Murphy:
Completely agree with you.

I read also the article recently about you bringing Elvis back to life and it sounds like a fascinating project. Is it something a bit like the ABBA Voyage thing that’s out in East London? Tell us more about that.

Mark Benson:
I understand how it fits meet with the genre of Abba Voyage, which I certainly love. This is a different experience, so this is, I think, much more immersive experience in the context of it being 180 people moving through different rooms and the experiences within a new space in London and the engagement with actors and Elvis as we will see him, I think will be very well… It will be different and we’ve loved working with Layered Reality and developing this partnership that is so interesting in so many ways.

One, it’s obviously opening up this opportunity to flex our creative and tech muscle in this particular way and in this context, but we’re also learning. I think this is really interesting for us – learning working with a different type of production, what theatre production is about and how theatre produces content versus a production company or an advertising agency.

It’s a lot of learnings and it’s really interesting and I think it will help inform how we develop in this space in the future, because we we’re used to a way of working which is great. We understand how we work today, but when we work with a property company or a construction company or a theatre company, how do we ensure we’re calibrated in line with how the these businesses work? And getting that right think will be very interesting for us.

Pat Murphy:
Really can’t wait to see that Elvis experience come together to bring Elvis to entirely new audiences.

We were very lucky to welcome some fantastic CEOs onto The Prodcast this season who shared their insights on leadership and what it takes to make a great leader. Before persuing a career in politics Kristen Cavallo stewarded The Martin Agency and was Global CEO of MullenLowe. She told us why and how she introduced greater diversity into her leadership teams, as well as how she sought to welcome new talent into the industry.
Kristen Cavello
Every study I’d ever read said that when you have a diverse leadership team, you have higher margin, higher morale, higher revenue. And yet our leadership team at the time – and I think Martin was no different from many leadership teams at the time in the industry – was largely white and largely male, and I was finally in a position where I could personally do something about it, and so I doubled the number of women almost overnight, like within two weeks. I added the first people of colour. I created roles where I needed to, and I don’t think the enemy is not male or white, the enemy is homogeny. It’s not anything malicious but I think you only really see things from your perspective, right? As hard as we try to be empathetic and to see things from other perspectives. You have your own lived experiences. So being able to have a team now with more diversity allows me the ability to hear more perspectives before I come up with a decision and understand the implications of how that decision will land, and I have fewer blind spots because I have more diversity and leadership and the fewer blind spots I think increases the probability of success, and so it’s also dramatically changed our output. It’s changed the work we do. If you looked at our reel before and looked at our reel after, it would feel like a completely different company. The ideas we’re dreaming up, the way we’re making them, the way we’re producing them are very different. And again, I don’t think it’s malicious intent on the prior side and I don’t subscribe to those points of view that, like the future is female, because I think reverse-homogeny is equally dangerous.

Pat Murphy:
I agree with you.

When it comes to finding talent for your agency, obviously the role of agency producer has evolved so much over the last 20, 25 years. The kind of skills now required to do that job are so different. You’re not just doing TV ads anymore, you’re doing all sorts of non-traditional advertising like branded entertainment, virtual experiences, that kind of stuff. How do you find the talent to deliver on that?

Kristen Cavello:
It’s a really good question because you’re right that the sheer volume of scopes on a client contract has just exploded.

You’ll make hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pieces, thousands of pieces, depending on if you’re doing the performance work for a brand in a year, and that shadows what we used to make as a whole agency.

But the upside is – to your point, because you’re making branded content and entertainment and advertising and performance and TikTok and everything is that the places that we can find good people has expanded as well! There are big thinkers in many of these disciplines, and so we can look to Netflix, we can look to Hollywood, we can look to TikTok, we can look to other ad agencies, we can look to in-house agencies, we can look to tech companies, and so it’s more about finding the right fit in some respects as a personality, and do they really click with your creative teams? I think the creative teams… we want the creatives to think really big and not be hindered by what we’ve done before, and the only way they can do that is if they believe their production partner, whether it be the person or the companies that we choose, have the ability to pull it off. If not, then the thinking becomes smaller, because they start thinking about what they know we can do instead of what we might do, and so the key is finding the dreamers.

Pat Murphy:
Brilliant advice from Kristen on where to look to find new talent in a multiplatform world.

2024 has been a breakthrough year in the field of AI with huge leaps forward in the power and capabilities of large language models and generative AI. Matt Miller is President and CEO of the Association of Independent Commercial Producers (AICP) and I asked him what this means for advertising production; could AI potentially replace human creativity and how might AI affect new talent trying to break into our industry.

Matt Miller:
Unfortunately, my crystal ball is out, being fixed today, so I don’t know that I can make that prediction, but AI is going to have a profound influence on this industry. I’ll say it again I don’t think that any technology replaces some level of human creativity and oversight and the management of taste levels and everything else, but the power of generative AI is not something we can even argue.

I was at a conference last week where I saw demonstrations of AI that the year before, at the same conference, were leaps and bounds behind, and now just, it feels like each month we’re seeing new products coming online. You mentioned CGI. The interesting part is look, there’s an element of AI that’s been involved in many of the visual effects tools being used for the last decade. I mean in 3D modeling and various pieces. You’d certainly integrate that within the process and I think that’s what we’re going to have to do.

The issue around generative AI right now that we can’t get wrong is how AI teaches itself and the arguments and the guardrails that need to be in place around intellectual property.  That is a ticking time bomb. I’m not one to look to the government for help. But you need regulation, you need guardrails. You need people who know what they’re talking about to harness this technology so it’s used properly and that, ultimately, artists aren’t exploited on for the work that they’ve done, that which ultimately did teach the tools to do what they’re doing. No small task. It’s a really important piece, but it’s a piece that needs to be in place. We need to get this right. We got so much wrong with the creation of social media and this is so much more powerful than social media, and we need to get this right for the good of ultimately you know not to get too dramatic but for the good of the world, but when you bring it down to our industry. For the rights of creative talent. AI doesn’t operate or teach itself on its own. There’s a core basis there and we need to find the models to work with this to make sure that creative talent is being compensated for the work that they’ve brought or are bringing to the party.

Pat Murphy:
I totally agree with you there. Yet there’s still differing frameworks around legalities in the US, obviously, and then you’ve got the European one, and then you have the Chinese one. They’re all very different. Do we think that there’s ever going to be a global approach to this, or not?

Matt Miller:
I’d like to say that would be wonderful! I do think that there are various standards within our industry and with many businesses that are globalising. I think that, for good or for bad, there are many aspects of the American production business that have been exported around the world and used as a template in the way production is handled on a global basis. Could that be with AI? I mean again, when we start talking about AI, we’re talking about a much larger monster that works not just in our industry but across many disciplines and industries.

My fear of AI if I had to break it down to a personal fear as I listen to many of the companies that are building the AI machines and they’re moving very quickly is they keep talking about the efficiency of labour and the efficiency of especially low to mid-level labour that prepares elements that can ultimately be used by the people at the top of the food chain and therefore needing less people.

When you’re in an industry that has thrived and developed on apprenticeship and learning through the act of observing those who knew what they’re doing, experimenting and coming up through the ranks, you start gutting out pieces at the lower and mid-rung because it could be somehow revolutionised through automation. You’re taking away a very important training element that ultimately brings the next generation of creative thinkers and creative doers in. And again, that goes across industries. That’s not just our industry, but our industry is very much hands-on apprenticeship training based and therein lies a long-term ticking time bomb for us.

Pat Murphy:
A serious consideration highlighted there by Matt Miller – not just for advertising but across all industries. We need to be careful not to replace too many entry-level positions with AI as that is where new talent gets to cut their teeth. A small cost saving today could lead to a real shortage of talent in a few years’ time.

Finally – a subject very close to my heart is audio and it was a pleasure to speak with one of the greatest radio copywriters in the world Paul Burke. He shared with us how he starts out putting together an ad for your ears.

Paul Burke:
The first thing I always do with writing anything is, if you said, write me a commercial, write me anything. I could sit here for the rest of my life. I won’t come up with anything. I just go for a walk for 10 or 15 minutes, or sometimes, if you’re stuck, it’s bizarre. You think what’s happened? Where’s this magic come from? There’s always some connection between walking and creativity. So the first thing I’ll do is go for a walk.

The way I always start with radio is, let’s just say, it’s got two people in it, a man and a woman. The first thing I do is give those characters names. You see scripts, I’ve seen them all the time. I’ll probably see one before the end of the week that’s been given to me to produce and the. The characters are called MVO and FVO. Sometimes they’re called MVO2. Can you imagine a book or a play where all the characters are called MVO? So you just think right, I’m, I’m going to call the bloke Michael and the girl Helen.

Immediately you’ve got an idea of what they sort of look like, how old they are and they oh. This sounds very pretentious, but it’s true. They start to talk because that’s the sort of thing Michael would say. Someone called Helen might say that, whereas someone called MVO, there’s nothing to distinguish him from MVO2, really. So give them names, give them characters.

Nothing exists on radio until you write it, and certain sounds don’t exist in real life. I had this thing where somebody said it was for some gift shop. We hear the sound of a card this is a birthday card. The sound of a birthday card dropping into the basket. What noise does that make then? It’s practically silent and sometimes you don’t know unless you say what the thing is, nobody’s going to know. You have to be very careful with pouring drinks, because it sounds like someone having a wee in the corner unless you say would you like a drink? Certain things I think it’s frying bacon, fire and heavy rain all sound exactly the same!

The questions I always put into these things: it has to answer four questions. Who are these people? Where are they? What are they doing? How do we know? Who are they? Where are they? What are they doing? How do we know?

And it can usually just be one thing. There’s a man talking to a child, but you don’t know why he’s talking to a child. If the child just says ‘Dad’, oh, immediately you know who they are and just little sound effects can place them somewhere and it doesn’t usually take much to fix it.

On television the voice is just there really to support the visuals very often, but take those visuals away and the voice is all you’ve got!

Pat Murphy:
 Copy writing is an incredible skill and safe to say Paul is amongst the very best. Some brilliant tips there that might help next time you sit down to write an ad!

It’s been so much fun chatting to so many big-hitters from the world of advertising in Season 3 of the MCA Prodcast and we’re looking forward to bringing you loads more episodes in 2025. If you’ve enjoyed the podcast we’d really appreciate it if you could leave us a review in your favourite podcast app as it helps other people to find our show.

To find out more about the MCA Prodcast, please head to theprodcast.com where you’ll find details on all my guests, links to their favourite ads and full transcriptions of all the episodes.

You can also connect with us on LinkedIn, just click on the link in the notes to this episode.

If you’d like to feature on the next season of The Prodcast or have any comments, questions or feedback please email us at podcast@murphycobb.com.

Thanks to my team at MCA and to my production team at What Goes On Media.
I’m Pat Murphy, thanks for listening, see you next time.