Pat Murphy:
Hi and welcome to The MCA Prodcast, your fix for everything innovative in advertising production. I’m Pat Murphy and I’ve been working in this industry for more than 35 years now. I’ve seen a lot of changes, but know there’s plenty more around the corner. Each week on the podcast, you’ll get to hear from one of the movers and shakers who are shaping the world of advertising for the future, and we’ll dive into some of the key challenges facing our sector today and how we’re best placed to overcome them.

This week I’m chatting with Lisa Lavender, Managing Director of The British Arrows, the awards that celebrate everything in moving image. Prior to this, Lisa has been CEO of AdStream, the founder and MD of the Traffic Bureau, UK’s largest outsourced specialist supplier of business affairs and advertising, and she’s also been a business consultant helping other businesses flourish.

Lisa, it’s an absolute pleasure having you here on The MCA Prodcast.

Lisa Lavender:
It’s a pleasure to be here! Thanks for having me.

Pat Murphy:
Now let’s start off by asking you what went wrong! Because you have this incredible, amazing career in advertising, but that’s not what you wanted to do.

Lisa Lavender:
Ah, yes! Well when I was younger I used to dance three, four times a week and I really, really, really wanted to be a choreographer. And I took some auditions for stage schools and the one I really wanted to get into was Arts Educational, and I didn’t. The audition was on ballet. I was a fairy elephant and I didn’t get in, even though ballet wasn’t really my passion, at that point realized I was going to have to find something else to do. And I was very lucky that a creative director came into school. It must have been a dad, I don’t even remember who it was, but came in to talk to us. It was a fifth form careers lesson and I thought, ‘oh, that sounds interesting, I’d quite like to do that’. And the rest is history, as they say!

Pat Murphy:
And the first part of your career actually was on the advertising client service background, wasn’t it?

Lisa Lavender:
It was. I started actually in advertising agencies when I was 17. I didn’t go to university. I had a place, didn’t get the grades and my parents sort of said, ‘well, you can retake, or if you can get a job, then that would be good also’. And I wrote to loads of advertising agencies. I got Campaign, scoured the back, wrote off for lots of jobs, no idea what they were, absolutely no idea could have been anything. And one of them was for a production manager in a small advertising agency called Poulter Tennyson no idea what that was either. And I got a very nice handwritten letter back from the owner who said ‘thank you very much for your application, but obviously you’re not qualified for this role, but we’ll keep your CV on file, blah, blah, blah’. So I’m thinking, oh well, that’s that.
And a few months went past and I was actually looking at going back to college and then I got a phone call from the same guy who said to me ‘that production manager we hired is looking for an assistant. Would you be interested’? I was like ‘yes, yes, yes, definitely’. Still had no idea what the job was. Went in to see them in Covent Garden, in Old Brewer’s Yard, off Neill Street it was the coolest thing on the planet to go into a small advertising agency. And got interviewed by all of them and they offered me the job on the spot and I honestly didn’t look back and from. I did print production for a year, which is a very good grounding for anyone that wants to get into advertising, because it’s a bit like being a runner in a production company. Basically you do a bit of everything, and in those days there was lots of tangible stuff. It wasn’t digital. You know, I had to pack up bromides. You might remember those, Pat? And blocks and fill in, triplicate copy instruction forms and all that kind of stuff, loads of photocopying job bags. Do you remember job bags? When you actually used to make an envelope and staple a sheet to the front that you wrote everything on! Yeah, that was my, my job. Interestingly, actually, the tough part about that job was that the guy who I was working for didn’t want a girl. It was the 80s and I had to convince him that I was as good as any boy and, I’m pleased to say, we ended up being best of friends and it was all good.

And after about a year I thought I might spread my wings and somebody told me about a job at Saatchi’s and I went for the interview and I got offered the job and I went back to my bosses and said I’ve been offered this job and they said, ‘oh no, no, please don’t leave, we’ll make you an account executive’. Well, that sounded really good. So I stayed for another couple of years and that was my beginning in account management, account service, which, again, you know, is a good grounding for anything that you end up wanting to do in the creative industry.

Pat Murphy:
If you’d have been at Saatchi’s, we would have crossed paths, I guess!

Lisa Lavender:
Yeah, and Matt and all those boys. We would have all been there at the same time!

Pat Murphy:
Yeah, exactly. And then you went off to Canada?

Lisa Lavender:
I did. Well, I must confess it wasn’t career driven, it was a boy, of course and I went off for a holiday. I’ve got a lot of family there and I stayed there for a long summer and met this boy and we thought, long distance could we do it?

And his father happened to be a manufacturer in Canada. He, made Jockey for Her and Champion Sportswear and various brands and they were using a really hot small advertising agency at the time and he made an introduction for me and I went in to see them and they agreed to sponsor me to come over and I took a job as an Account Supervisor there and I was there for the best part of four years and I actually was with that agency for about two and a half and then I followed my boss to Grey and worked on png on Cover Girl, which was interesting because cover girl being a fashion brand was kind of a new thing for Procter and Gamble at the time. You know, creative / fashion driven / bringing product um benefits into fashion and emotional advertising was interesting and challenging for everybody at that time.

So I worked for Grey for a bit and then I was coming home to see my family and bumped into some guys I used to work with and they said ‘oh, you wouldn’t be interested in coming back, would you? We need an account director’. So I did!

I came back and started working for a small agency called Keith Shaftone Associates who did lots and lots of toy and sweet stuff, lots of kids stuff. We were making two, three hundred commercials a year, which is quite a lot for a small outfit. And I was there for nearly three years and I was getting married in 1996. And just before I got married, a few weeks before, they announced, due to some account losses, that they were going to downsize the business but said ‘do you fancy setting something up together? We think there’s an opportunity’. And we discussed the opportunity of outsourced TV admin, now known as Business Affairs, and it seemed like a bloody good idea three weeks before my wedding. And I said, ‘yep, I’m up for that, definitely. We’ll work out the details when I get back’.

And that’s what we did. So we came up with a name, I found some premises, I had a computer and I had seven and a half thousand pounds and that was the beginning of The Traffic Bureau, which I’m immensely, immensely proud of because it turned into the biggest outsourced TV admin company in the UK. It was the first of that kind of company.

Pat Murphy:
I remember it so well and you became so successful and you serviced so many clients and agencies in the UK dealing with – at that time what was the BACC, now Clearcast. And of course, the RACC as well, which is the Radio Clearance Centre as well, paying and managing talent fees, all of that kind of stuff. Do you think this kind of work now is so complex, considering the multitude of channels that clients are now working with? I mean, how do they get their hands around managing broadcast or business affairs as a whole? Because there are agencies that do it, but it’s incredibly complicated now.

Lisa Lavender:
I think the roles have split. I don’t think people do it quite the way we used to, and it’s more difficult to do it the way we used to. I think that business affairs and traffic became two separate things. So business affairs, dealing with talent, clearance, rights and so on – music probably. And then traffic became the actual broadcast, clearance, playouts, delivery and so on.

I think that helps to keep a handle on it, I can’t imagine doing it today. Now I’m sure we’d have had to evolve our ways of working and models, and I’m sure the girls that are still working out of Extreme Reach XR doing that work have to divide and conquer it in a different way.

I think rights management – and you and I have talked about this before – is just a huge beast because it’s where do you begin and where does it end, and I actually hope, and I’m sure, that technology will crack that nut in time. It already is in a sense, because you know there’s so much more metadata available with digital files that you can start to track information. But it’s all only as good as the information people put in at the beginning. So if you get the right data at the beginning, you’ve got a chance of tracking it and tracking it globally. And AI will come into that as well, in terms of visuals and being able to identify people in content across multiple platforms, and I think that will make rights management actually ultimately easier to do. But it’s how you join the dots with all of that technology, and I know that’s one of the things you you know, you guys want to do and and are doing for your clients, um, but one of the things that when we were, when I was at AdStream, was was really important and how we bring all the bits of technology together so that you can actually track where your content’s going.

Pat Murphy:
You just mentioned AdStream. You sold the Traffic Bureau to AdStream. What precipitated that move for you?

Lisa Lavender:
Oh, that’s an interesting question. Well, I wasn’t actually looking to sell it. The company wasn’t for sale. When playouts went from the good old-fashioned down-the-line and betas to digital, suddenly there were new players on the market. There was AdStream and IMD, Beam and we were using all of them. One of the things about TTB is that we like to be supplier agnostic. We tried to be fair, use everybody. We didn’t really have a preferential supplier. I ended up having lunch with Andy Hopkinson, who was the MD at the time, one day…

Pat Murphy:
Lovely Andy.

Lisa Lavender:
Lovely Andy! And we were just chatting about stuff and he knew we have a home in Spain that we’ve had for a long, long time, my husband and I, and he said, ‘oh, you must be thinking about retiring one of these days and spending more time out there’. I was like, ‘I’m not that old Andy. No, I wasn’t’. He said, but ‘we’re in acquisition mode at the moment and we’re talking to various companies. Would you be interested’? And I was like I hadn’t actually honestly thought about it until then. So I phoned my partner, we did some numbers on the back of a serviette and he said ‘I’ll go and talk to Gerard Barron and come back to you’. And that’s where the conversation started. And it took about a year and at the end of the year they, they acquired the company completely and I was on a three-year deal to a three-year earn out so I stayed on and they actually left us fairly independent for those three years. And I remember my lawyer at the time saying to me ‘oh, don’t worry, no one ever does the whole earn out, they’ll settle it before the end’. No, I did the full three years, right to the bitter end! And then we carried on in our own premises for a few years after that and they were really keen for us to come across. The culture of The Traffic Bureau at the time was, I mean, you know, it was very infectious. We were a team of girls, very hardworking, great work ethic and not that there wasn’t a great work ethic with the team as Jean but I think they felt that we would add something, another dimension to that. So eventually, even though I didn’t really want to start commuting into the West End again, we moved over to Berkshire House and actually it worked really well and I actually stayed on for 12 years, which is unusual after an acquisition.

Pat Murphy:
Wow, was it 12 years? It was 12 years. Unbelievable, that’s amazing. I was just about to say you know, as part of that, coming over to AdStream, you ended up running the business for a time as the CEO. What were some of the highs and lows of doing that role then?

Lisa Lavender:
Before that I was Global Operations Director which at the time the Head of People and Culture said it was going to be Director of Global Operations and she changed it to Global Operations Director, cause she said God should be a woman! I loved that role. Working with all the different market heads, traveling, opening offices, I helped build the US business, the UAE business. That was really amazing times. More than anything when I worked there people. You asked me the best bit about the job. I would always say the people. There are some amazing people that work there, lots of people that you and I both know. Some still in the business, some that came and went, but they had a knack of hiring amazing people and, the business has changed now for lots of good reasons, but in those days it was an amazing team and we did great stuff together, so the global part was brilliant. And then Jerry Sutton, who was CEO at the time, asked me if I’d take over the UK business, which I did for a while, and that was just before the business started reshaping for sale, because obviously they then sold to Extreme Reach XR and I left just before that acquisition, but by then the business was turning into a different kind of business, so for me it was the right time to go.

Pat Murphy:
Lisa, you’re known as one of the nicest people in advertising and you mentioned your team just now. In both Traffic Bureau and also at AdStream, you had a reputation for excellent mentorship, I would like to say supporting and giving young people a leg up, Empathetic leadership. In my view, Do you think that people coming into the business now have enough support and opportunities?

Lisa Lavender:
Oh, that’s a good question. I think obviously it depends on the company. I think the advertising industry as a whole is trying to get better at that and be better at it, because  obviously this is a big topic in itself but the issue of diversity in the industry is huge and if we don’t have the right support there for people coming in of all different cultures, they’re not going to stay. I think I was lucky because The Traffic Bureau was a small business that I ran and was able to run it still like a small business even after acquisition. It was only later that AdStream became bigger and more corporate, that things changed, but they were still really good at supporting staff and providing extra… the soft stuff, you know, the nice stuff that makes people feel part of an organisation that creates culture, and even now with British Arrows you know we’re a tiny team, there’s four of us and a and a freelance creative director but for me it’s lovely to go back to that because I enjoy bringing people on and supporting people. I actually got involved with something called Rise, which is an advocacy group. It was originally for women but now in general diversity in broadcast and that once I left AdStream, that was a way for me to continue to to mentor people, and I’m still in touch with at least two of my four mentees regularly. For me that was one of the best bits – probably the best bit of my career is bringing people on. There’s lots of people that I was lucky enough to be able to give a chance to and it’s really satisfying to see them succeed. Some of the guys at AdStream were graduates that came in and are now running the show. So, yeah, I feel lucky that I’ve had those opportunities. I think it is hard to support young people these days, but I think the youngsters coming in themselves also are so different to us when we were that age. I mean, obviously every generation is different, but we talk about it a lot the whole Gen Z thing and it’s easy to be negative and say, ‘oh my God, these kids. They don’t want to work, they don’t want to do the hours, they don’t want to do the things that we would have done to get to the next level’. But maybe some of it they’re right because they’ve got a wish to have a better work-life balance. We all worked stupid hours, weekends. I remember pulling all-nighters when we were editing something and it had gone wrong. This generation want more! They don’t want to be paid rubbish money for long hours

Pat Murphy:
I remember sitting in rushes post-production for two weeks without going home doing an ad for British Airways. I literally didn’t go home for two weeks. I had my kind of overnight bag. Two weeks on post-production and being paid rubbish of course. Yeah, that’s what you did in those days!

Lisa Lavender:
Of course we all were. I mean, I remember my first salary was £4,250 a year, which was probably flumpence in today’s money.

Pat Murphy:
That was more than me you did well!

Lisa Lavender:
But I also remember running out of SVC and Wardour Street in the middle of the night to go to Brick Lane to get bagels for everybody, because we were going to be there all night. It is different times and I think that generation can teach us something, but we can also teach them, and they need to listen a little too.

Pat Murphy:
Yeah.

One of the discussion points on the panel that I was on last week at the LBB Better Together event was about how to nurture new talent, and one of the points that was made was that much of the new talent is already very tech savvy. It’s the talent that’s already in the industry that needs to almost upskill, rather than the talent that’s coming through. Do you subscribe to that?

Lisa Lavender:
That’s interesting. I hadn’t heard that before. It probably varies depending on what they’re going to do. But yes, I guess because a lot of the creative technology that people use now is available at your fingertips. You know people can make movies on their iPhone. It doesn’t surprise me to hear that, that because kids can experiment, they’re making TikToks, reels for their Instagram and so on. I actually know a lot of my grown-up-son’s friends are… a few of them are influencers or work in influencer management companies and content creation companies, and they’ve all built it up from their own youtube channels or making reels or tiktoks and so on. So I guess the answer to that is yes, that is probably true. But what they learn coming into you know, if you were moving into a vfx company or a post house is you’re going to learn the discipline of applying that and you know the context of applying it in branded content. Plus you would get the opportunity to learn new technology with support which you would probably have to figure out yourself otherwise.

Pat Murphy:
Let’s talk about your current role. I remember the days that I was picking up my Arrows many, many years ago. Those awards then were actually called the British Television Advertising Awards. When did the title change and why?

Lisa Lavender:
Oh, it’s quite a long time ago it was. I think it was a Lizzie Gower decision. It was long before my time. There’s so many unknowns, like we don’t know why they’re arrows, apart from maybe hitting the target, and people still call them the BTAAs it. It’s our biggest bugbear.

Pat Murphy:
Yeah, well, I do. I’m sorry!

Lisa Lavender:
They have been the British arrows for, oh, probably about 16 years, something like that. Um, and, oh my God, talk about landing on my feet. Dream job. Really, really dream job. I was consulting and I just left AdStream and I had a cup of tea with Claire Donald to say, ‘oh, I’m around if you need any help with anything, da-da-da-da’. And she said, ‘oh, I’ll bear it in mind’. And then, probably a couple of months later, she gave me a call – actually, she left me a message and her words were ‘we need a grown up to run the British Arrows, would you be interested’? So I laughed and said ‘oh well, why are you asking me then? Not grown up? Not yet’!

I then spoke to her, I was her. I was like, oh my god, I don’t have to think about it, I would love to have a conversation about that. She was chairing with Johnny Guest, who runs Creators now, and I didn’t know Johnny so we met up for a coffee and we had a chat and I said ‘the only thing for me is you’ve got to get it out of Battersea’. I said ‘it’s got to go back to the Grosvenor House, otherwise I’m not really interested because I can’t stand it there’. And they said ‘totally agree, do you want to do it’? And I was like ‘yes’, and we became like the Three Musketeers for four years and it has been fantastic and, as you know, we did move it back to Grosvenor House and I think it’s kind of gone back to the Arrows Awards of old.

Pat Murphy:
I think that’s a really great and smart move. I remember going to those ones in Battersea and they were never as good as the Grosvenor House, so I’m glad you’ve made that move back.

Now when I speak to markettiers and CMOs, of course they’re really proud when they work on a commission and the work that they’ve done wins creative awards, but with the need for accountability. They often talk more about the Effectiveness awards and the Effys.
So how can the arrows remain relevant and not just be seen as a bunch of industry people back slapping?

Lisa Lavender:
Yeah I think that’s actually important because we positively don’t deal in effectiveness, because the Effys and the IPA awards all deal in that area, and some of the campaign awards also. I think our place on the map is about creative excellence. The arrows are not given out easily. I was thinking about this before we started this this morning. It’s like external exams by your peers. Because it’s creative people and craftspeople judging the work and it’s about ideas or craft. As you know, Arrows and Craft were separate and we brought them together a number of years ago.

So I think creativity will always be relevant. It’s so important because and when we come on to talk about my favourite ad later, this is a relevant point is that if you get it right and it’s a fantastic breakthrough idea, the impact should follow and the effectiveness should follow. So if we’re picking the best ads, obviously within a set of what’s been entered, because we can’t judge everything that was ever made people still have to enter it into the competition but you’re judging what we hope will be the breakthrough ideas and the standout ideas and the standout craft and that’s what keeps the business going.

Creatives want to work for award-winning creative agencies. Craftspeople want to work for award-winning post houses. Youngsters aspire to working for those organisations If we’re going to bring new blood in. The young eras that we launched three years ago are about giving young people a platform – never used to have that. Can you imagine being a young producer and having the opportunity to win an award? Producers are so rarely recognized.

Pat Murphy:
Totally agree, yeah.

Lisa Lavender:
So I think we’re keeping relevant by introducing the Young Arrows to help bring people through the industry. But I think we’re relevant because great creative is what we all got into it for.  Personally, I got into advertising because I wanted to work on great creative, and great creative is what Britain is famous for. We were that. We’ve been the epicenter of global creative for however many years, and I I’d argue we still are because of the standards of our work, and The Arrows is just one of the cogs in the wheel that recognises that work, with a very heavy British focus to support the British industry and it’s an enormous industry globally and a lot of the companies who support us and who are creating the work are supporting other markets as well. They’re global businesses themselves or international businesses themselves. So we’re supporting, I feel, those businesses in giving them some kind of validation and kudos that they can then remarket to support themselves when they’re out there doing their business. So I think it’s really important.

I don’t at all diss the importance of effectiveness because obviously if creative content is not effective there’s a problem, and in this day and age, with budgets shrinking, you can’t possibly justify continuing to invest in something if it’s not working. So I’m not advocating creative for creative sake, but this is the high end of the business.

Pat Murphy:
On other episodes that I’ve done of The MCA podcast some guests have argued that the art of great storytelling is somewhat being lost. Great advertising is not what it used to be. Sir John Hegarty, on one of my podcasts earlier in the year, commented ‘we are all storytellers at heart. This shared language was the very foundation of society’.

What are your thoughts on this? Is the art of storytelling being lost, or is it just being expressed in different ways, driven by different forms of content and how it’s created?

Lisa Lavender:
I think that there is still some lovely storytelling going on. I think just sometimes maybe it feels like it’s getting lost in the plethora of all the content that’s out there, because we’re all completely consumed with our phones and watching stuff and wherever you go – we’re watching multiple platforms for our viewing pleasure. In terms of long form, there are so many places you can watch short form. It’s not that the storytelling is not there, there’s just so much other stuff. So perhaps the storytelling gets a little bit lost in the other stuff. But there’s some beautiful work that gets done with storytelling.

Interestingly, in the Arrows every year we always have a lot of entries in the charity and public service, the PSA category. Many of those pieces of film are stories and they’re the ones that, literally, as they come in, I’m sitting at my desk sobbing at my screen as we keep seeing them. I love a well-crafted piece of work. You know, John Lewis, for years, the Christmas ads – they’re stories!

So I don’t think we’ve lost the art of telling stories and I think any creative director that I speak to or that we see through, juries and chairs all still talk about the importance of a good, solid idea of storytelling. Directors are still wanting to tell stories. I don’t think we’re losing it. I just think that sometimes there’s a lot of other stuff muddying the waters.

And now that it’s cheaper also to get… even from my Traffic Bureau days where we used to talk about you know the fact that there were so many more channels coming online. Now there’s even more and it’s cheaper to get in to a broadcast campaign, whatever that may be, and production budgets are going to vary.

A really good example actually is that we just introduced the Bolt Award at the Young Arrows arrows, which was in the memory of Barney Richard, who’s a really loved creative guy in the industry, and the piece of work that won was called Floyd. It’s about a suitcase and it’s a story of a weight lifter who makes things in miniature to fit in this suitcase. You need to see it at some point. It’s a great story and it won the Bolt Awards for being a bit bonkers and disruptive and a bit different. And they produced it on a shoestring, a proper shoestring! I won’t say how much because it’s not my place to say. But let me tell you, practically for nothing. I mean really for nothing, and it’s fantastic and it’s a story and it’s two young creatives that have produced that. So I don’t think storytelling is dead, no.

Pat Murphy:
I love the whole idea of the Young Arrows Awards which you had last week.

Lisa Lavender:
We did.

Pat Murphy:
How did that go and how did the Young Arrows get started?

Lisa Lavender:
It was amazing! We were at the Outernet for the first time. A lot of people didn’t realise that there’s actually an event space underneath. And for anyone who doesn’t know it’s the big space by Tottenham Court Road with the wellness screens which are called Now. And then above you’ve got the vista screens and they let us have the vista screen so for all the industry people – veterans, youngsters, whoever was coming. It was just like arriving at a massive BAFTA’s style awards event and it was all up on the big screens. And then we went down to Denmark street. They have an arcade with screens that go down the sides and above your head and and we’d created content for that. And we had a young guy, just graduated from Bournemouth, got a first in motion graphics. He met our creative director in a queue at that very venue a year prior and they got chatting and we brought him on to do our motion graphics and a year later he’s standing there watching his graphics on the screen in front of the whole of the industry. I mean, what better platform can you give somebody? It was phenomenal! So it was very exciting and it went really well and hopefully you know we’ll be able to do it again next year.

A lot of people don’t realise we’re not for profit. The Young Arrows is totally dependent on sponsorship. We had a lot of sponsors. They actually cover cost of putting on the event and we also have our supporters and they are covering the free to enter initiative. So this year we made it free to enter, the idea being – well actually it was more than an idea! We got some anecdotal feedback that we were cashing in on the Big Arrows by creating a second awards show, and I was absolutely incensed when I heard that. I was like, ‘right, that’s it, it’s going to be free’. And then I had to worry about how we were going to cover the free. And we went out to the industry and we said, ‘look, we need to cover free, we want to make it as accessible as possible’. And we did end up with three times as many entries and four times as many individuals entering. So that’s new talent, new people entering their own work, which is going to be the lifeblood of the industry moving forward. So that’s how we make it work.

But you asked where did it come from? So pre-COVID, British Arrows had an initiative called BAD, which was British Arrows Doorway, and when Claire and Johnny and I took over we had a bit of a board switchover. We all decided that that was going in the wrong direction for what we wanted to do. The heart was in the right place, but it wasn’t really our area of expertise. So we were supporting young people into the business, running a bit of a jobs board offering videos on what to expect if you were working in a certain kind of company, lots of training, that kind of stuff. But we’re an awards body and I think people should stick to their knitting and we decided we would focus on that.

At that time we were chatting with A New Direction, which is a charity that help bring underrepresented young people into creative roles, and we really wanted to run a course and we talked to Steve at the APA about maybe making it an accredited course and so on, but we just didn’t have the money to do it.

We were at that time thinking how might we go about it? And kind of the idea of having a Young Awards was born. We’ve always had a New Director Award and we’d had a Student Award for some time and we thought, ‘well, maybe if we move those over and added some other categories, we could create something new and exciting’. And I have to say, literally from year one we were well supported and it sold out. And here we are, year three, and I think we’re kind of on the map with it now.

We kind of got swept up in it. I’m immensely proud because it’s something out of nothing and, it caught people’s attention and it caught their imagination and I think we created a really nice vibe and it has a totally different vibe to the main Arrows. It’s very casual lots of youngsters, some in roles, some not, lots of people like us all coming together and encouraging people to chat and network. Networking events for people coming into the business – I didn’t realise we’re not as accessible. There weren’t as many as I thought there possibly were. So now we make sure we run lots of events in the build-up as well. We did a coffee and TV, hosted a shortlist party and anyone that was shortlisted was welcome to come along to that. Creating lots of opportunity for people to get together.

For people like Ian, the guy who created our motion graphics, he met all the talent people at Framestore. He’s met all the guys at ETC, The Mill, lots of companies that under usual circumstances, unless he was at a careers fair, he wouldn’t have had a chance to meet, so that’s exciting!

Pat Murphy:
This is the perfect platform actually to ask people, you know, if they want to support the Young Arrows with sponsorship, please do get in touch, because you know you need a continual supply of sponsors to be able to kind of provide that for next year.

Lisa Lavender:
And the big arrows, to be honest! Sophie, who’s our head of partnership was like ‘everybody loves the young arrows, don’t forget our big baby’. It truly isn’t possible. I mean obviously we have. We have different streams of revenue for the main awards because we have entries and sponsorship and tickets, and I’m totally aware it’s not a cheap outing, but it is the Oscars of our industry every year and we want to keep it that way. That’s our position in the awards market and, as I was saying to you before we started, we’re coming up to our 50th anniversary. It would actually have been next year, but COVID put pay to that and we had to do two years in one just after that. So 2026 is going to be a big year. We’ve got big plans and you know we need the industry support to make that happen. But lots of exciting plans!

Pat Murphy:
Big year next year. What does the future hold for the Arrows? Are you going to include categories like best use of AI in advertising production, something like that, or how is it going to change?

Lisa Lavender:
We review our categories every year. It’s really hard because we have a lot and one of the biggest complaints we have is the awards are too long but when we take awards out, people moan and scream at me that ‘oh my God, where’s that category gone? We really like that category’, so it’s a balancing act, but we do review them. We’ve got a Green Arrow now and it was launched last year and we’re re-evaluating that a little bit for this year as well.

We’re working with AdNetZero to make sure that we’re asking the right questions. So we consult people outside to make sure we’re doing the right things. We have an innovative use of technology. We don’t have a best use of AI award yet, but I wouldn’t say it was out of the question because obviously posthouses are using AI in lots of different ways already. So that could be part of an innovative use of technology category and I’m sure it will be down the road. Just the same as we’re interested in experiential activations, anything like that, as long as it has an element of moving image, we’re going to keep to moving image. We’re not going to brand out from that. That’s our niche.

Pat Murphy:
You are missing one very important category, of course! Best production consulting company, right?

Look, Lisa, what do you see as the other key challenges facing the production industry today? What are the big things that are being discussed?

Lisa Lavender:
We hear obviously lots of different things from different people and it’s really a mixed bag because you hear about things being very competitive. There’s the shadow of agencies bringing production in house. That’s a big one, which you know is a worry and a stress for all the production companies out there. And without production companies I’m worried because production companies probably enter more work than agencies do.

It’s budgets. But then I think you could shout the budget question for the past 40 odd years that I’ve been in this industry – budgets have always been a problem, it’s always been the same. People find money for the big stuff, and that still happens, but budgets are tight. I think last year seemed a little bit more buoyant, the first year after Covid. This year feels a little bit tighter towards the back end. We this year feels a little bit tighter towards the back end. Funnily enough, this time last year, thinking about it, the chat was similar and people were a bit nervous. And when I think back that we actually scaled back our expectations of entries and then exceeded our target!  So you can never quite be sure. So there’s still a lot of work being made because we got a lot of work entered. So it’ll be interesting to see when we get to mid-January, which is when we close entries. It’ll be interesting to see how we pan out, because sometimes I feel like we’re a little bit of a barometer for what’s what’s going on. Um, but I think I think in-house production is probably the big thing. I, I, I know you’ve talked about it on other Prodcasts and I’m sure you’re talking about it all the time with your clients and that that’s the thing we hear the most about at the moment, that moment that worries people.

Pat Murphy:
And it’s an important topic that we all have a proper discussion about. The Better Together conversation last week was amazing actually to have so many people from all the different parts of the production industry all sitting on the same panels talking about this stuff. So kudos to Matt Cooper over at the LBB for doing that, because it was incredibly productive few days, I think.

Outside of work, what does Lisa Lavender care about?

Lisa Lavender:
Well outside of work. I have three dogs at the moment Lunatic, I’ve got a a 14-year-old golden retriever, a two-year-old and a puppy. It seemed like a really good idea at the time to get a third dog, so at the moment life is quite crazy with three dogs. I’ve got a very large extended family five grandchildren, still got one son living at home, also working in advertising. So my family life is very consuming at the weekends but we’re very lucky. We have a home in Spain which we really enjoy escaping to, and I love traveling. That’s kind of consumes me outside of work. It’s family, dogs, cooking, traveling and two awards shows a year, which you would not think could consume that much time but does because, as I said before, we’re quite small but mighty!

Pat Murphy:
Whenever I see medical practitioners, they always ask me if I have any allergies.
I always just say in jest ‘doctors and dentists’. But you really do have medical phobia and drips and stitches. Did something happen to you to get that?

Lisa Lavender:
Oh God, yeah. Long, long, long time ago, when I was in Canada, the agency I worked for we used to work on Lea and Perrin’s Worcestershire sauce and HP sauce and we were shooting a commercial with a lounge singing cow in Arizona, in the desert. And we flew down and I was with my lovely client from Edie Smith, who are the people who manufactured it in Canada, and we’re in a beautiful hotel and, as you do, we were sitting by the pool because there was nothing else to do that day.

We were waiting for a meeting and it was very hot – Arizona gets very hot and I, being a good account director, said, ‘would you like a drink, mr Client’? And he said, ‘oh, yes, please’. So I go in to get a drink, walk from the very hot outside through some very large glass doors into a very air conditioned lobby and the cold air hit me and I hit the deck and cracked my head open on a marble floor. I woke up on a sofa surrounded by paramedics and concerned American hotel staff. I think they were worried I might sue! And my poor client had to come in the back of an ambulance with me to hospital and ended up in the emergency room and I had to have a drip and stitches at the same time and they literally were sewing across my eye you know, you’re watching the needle go backwards and forwards.

So I got over that and that phobia. Those were the only phobias I ever had.

Pat Murphy:
Oh, right, okay, so that was pre-phobia?

Lisa Lavender:
No, no, no, post-phobia. I had the phobia before! After that, that fixed it and you were fine. Amazing, I was fine.

Pat Murphy:
Okay, I better go and have a ton of teeth taken out, then that’ll get rid of my phobia of dentists!

We’re coming near to the end of our wonderful chat. It leaves me just one last question, Lisa Lavender. For someone who’s seen and cleared thousands of ads in your time, what is your favourite? Have you got a favourite ever ad?

Lisa Lavender:
Well, as I said to you before that this is possibly the hardest question, I could write you a list of my favourite ads, but the one that kept popping up in my mind so I’m going to stick with this is the Hamlet Cigars ad, which I think is called Photo Booth, with the guy with the comb over. One shot, brilliant idea, totally unexpected. Great comic advertising, or British comedic advertising, and for me I always remember that as best of British. There are so many, so anyone that’s listening I’m not choosing that over anything anyone else has done, because I’m fortunate to see so much amazing work and I love loads of it, but that one’s just a fun one for me.

Pat Murphy:
Guess what you just did there. That’s also my favorite ad of all time!

Lisa Lavender:
Really how funny.

Pat Murphy:
Yeah, it’s my favorite and I just love that ad. It is simplicity. It’s just great. Great casting, great direction of amazing talent All in one shot.

Lisa Lavender:
All in one shot, yeah.

Pat Murphy:
It’s just great. So well done on choosing that one Good choice.

Lisa Lavender:
I think that would stand up today, you know.

Pat Murphy:
It definitely would. Yeah, it was a brilliant ad and we’ll post it on the Prodcast website as well. But, Lisa, look, thanks so much for being here. I’m delighted to be able to give the Arrows a plug for all the amazing creative practitioners in our industry. Keep doing what you’re doing, and if you’re interested in seeing the work of the Arrows, go to thebritisharrows.com. And good luck for next year as well.

Lisa Lavender:
Thanks, next year as well, thanks. Excited!

Pat Murphy:
To find out more about the MCA podcast. Please head to theprodcast.com, where you’ll find details on all my guests, full transcriptions of all the episodes. Also, if you are enjoying the podcast we’re doing, please give us a rating and review at your favourite podcast platform. You can also send us your feedback directly by email to podcast at murphycobb.com. I’m Pat Murphy, CEO of MCA. Do come and connect with us on LinkedIn or Instagram, of which all the links in the notes for this episode will be there, we’d love to hear from you. Thanks again to the amazing Lisa Lavender, my team at MCA and my production team at What Goes on Media.   Thanks for listening. See you next time.