Pat Murphy:
Hi and welcome to The Prodcast, your fix for everything innovative in advertising and production. I’m Pat Murphy, and I’ve been working in the 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.

To wrap up 2025, I wanted to look back at some of my favourite moments and guests from the past 12 months. We’ve covered a huge mix of fascinating topics, from the evolving role of the producer to the power of Sonic branding, why being selective with your projects matters more than ever, and even the rise of creative marketing and the opportunities that it can offer for brands. And today, let’s start right there. With an amazing conversation I had with Ed East, founder of Billion Dollar Boy. When Ed launched BDB back in 2014, he spotted something long before most brands did: that creators aren’t just media channels, they’re storytellers, producers, and genuine brand partners. 11 years later, BDB is one of the leading creative marketing agencies in the world.

Here, Ed breaks down how creative marketing really works for clients and how it differs from the more traditional ad production methods.

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Ed East:
Well, look, it’s not that dissimilar to, let’s say, comparing it to other more traditional forms of advertising. A creative agency will come up with an idea, it will hire a production crew, and a production team will go and make the ad. So if you compare the same thing, we come up with the ideas, we give it to a production crew, which is the creators, and they make the ads. It’s exactly the same.

Pat Murphy:
And then how do you at BDB navigate the balance between creator freedom and keeping the kind of brand standards that they expect.

Ed East:
So again, I guess it’s like when you’re a creative agency choosing a production company, um, the production company will make a pitch, they’ll have a sort of a roster of work which feels appropriate for bringing that ad to life. It’s just the same with creative marketing. You look at what the creators have produced previously and you use that to align them to the creative idea you have, and you believe, you sort of there’s a belief element there, ‘can they bring that to life visually’ and will it fit within the type of work they typically do’? At which point the creative we give to the talent is less of a ‘this is what you have to do’. It’s more like ‘this is an inspiration, and then you turn it into what you think’s right’. There will be some there will be some do’s and don’ts. Um and there will there is there are uh different steps in the production process. So we’ll brief a creator, we’ll ask them for an idea in response. It can be as detailed or as little detail as needed. Um we’ll go, yes, that sounds great. They go away, they produce it, they return it to us, and then depending on the contract and the scale and the size of the budget, we have different um rounds of approvals and amends where we can request changes if it hasn’t met the idea uh that they initially pitched to us. And there are other instances, Pat, where increasingly we do a lot of production ourselves. And what I mean by that is rather than just letting the creator do the production all themselves, either we support them with the production or we’re actually hiring a production company, which then creators feature in the production, like your talent. It’s probably 20% of the business and it’s fast growing. So yeah, that’s slightly different.

Pat Murphy:
You’re a bit of a hybrid, actually. So you’re not just uh an agency, you’re also part production house. So you’re a bit of a hybrid business.

Ed East:
Yeah. 100%. We describe ourselves as a creator-first social agency. So we’re really creating social media campaigns and we create those in a few different ways, which is one, creators producing the assets for the client and for the ads, and then separately BDB creating those assets too.

Pat Murphy:
Now as you probably read in the marketing press recently, Unilever has recently announced a significant shift in its marketing strategy and placing a stronger emphasis on influencer marketing. I mean, this is a big one. The company plans to allocate 50% of its advertising budget to social media platforms! I mean, that’s up from the previous 30%. This move is part of an influencer-first approach on their part. Are you seeing the same trend with other brands?

Ed East:
Yeah, I think just the industry, you say see the same sort of trend happening within your industry as a whole. And it’s the reason why ‘influence’ may disappear to an extent, but the production model… it used to be called influencer marketing. Increasingly, you hear the term creator, creator marketing. There are different reasons why that’s happened. My belief is that we’re seeing the value shift away from the influence and the eyeballs that influencers bring, but more towards the um the actual production of the assets that they’re creating. And the production model has democratized how you can create content. It’s far faster, it’s far cheaper than if you compare it to those big creative agents with big production companies, there’s much more diversity and the quality is much higher. So I think uh Yes, like that’s the reason creative marketing continues to sort of explode. Strangely, in sort of tricky times, like even recently with the tariffs, there’s a lack of confidence in where people would have a to spend their money. I find that’s where actually influencer does well because people want to put it their money towards more cost-effective um ways of producing content.

Pat Murphy:
How do you ensure brands understand the value of creator-led campaigns, especially when production and media costs are now blurred? How do you measure both the investment and the success of a campaign?

Ed East:
A lot of procurement people may hear this. I think there is a challenge there, which is that businesses like Unilever, large sort of F7CG companies, a lot of our clients are those types of clients, increasingly are trying to hold businesses like ours accountable to very thin margins but those margins aren’t accounting for the creative and the strategic work that has to go into planning for successful campaigns. It’s really just the executional elements. They’re thinking of it as like a media buy. And the sort of, as you said, the blurred lines between the creators, you get both the assets created and you get eyeballs. So the comparisons they’re making to other forms are completely wrong. So that’s one thing to bear in mind.

But then how do we understand that brands understand the value? So increasingly, depending on the type of client you’re working with. So let’s say if you’re working with a direct-to-consumer brand, we can measure full funnel results – like brand awareness, consideration, conversion, everything from start to finish through tracking. But then if you’re working with a brand who is selling through retailers, third-party retailers, then we have developed a proprietary data measurement system. It sits within our tool companion, and we then leverage certain partners depending on what stage of the waterfall it sits in. And we call it a waterfall because it’s like a sort of a list of different items. So we partner up with different partners for brand lift studies, we partner up with different partners for econometric modelling, and then companion at the top of the funnel um measures things like uh engagements, impressions, and uh those types of basic, those basic metrics. Um all of those are comparable to any other forms of media. So it’s really just trying to create the clarity in how you compare it to others.

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Pat Murphy:
A fresh approach to building campaigns that tabs into the creativity of influencers and the audiences they’ve already cultivated. It’s proving hugely powerful for brands, and we’re excited to see how creative marketing develops in 2026 and beyond.

Creator marketing is just one example of how the production industry is evolving at a rapid rate.  Combine that with advancements of AI and the shift towards immersive experiences, and it’s easy to wonder whether the traditional producer role is becoming obsolete. But according to Steve Davis, chief executive of the Advertising Producers Association, the opposite is true. The producer is more essential than ever. The role has just simply evolved. Here’s Steve on how he believes the role of producer has changed.

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Steve Davies:
We wrote something years ago, a report in which we had various people writing about what production companies do, and included a director who decided to be anonymous. But he said ‘what production companies have done is they’ve overvalued the role of the director’. Uh, and in doing so, they’ve undervalued the role of production because it sort of made it sound like the director’s the genius, and everybody there is just to service their needs. And uh that’s not completely untrue because of course they’re vital and critical people, but the producer also has a vital creative role, I think, because if you look at the whole methodology of how you’re going to get the thing done, that is just as critical, important, and clever, really, as uh writing the the storyboards in my view. And we have as an industry ended up with that role being undervalued.

Pat Murphy:
Do you think the role of the producer is a little misunderstood then, would you say, rather than uh undervalued, probably misunderstood. Is that a better way of describing it?

Steve Davies:
I think that’s probably true. Yeah, I think it’s probably slightly misunderstood, yeah.

Pat Murphy:
Now tell me, are you excited or concerned about the integration of AI into the production processes? Surely AI in the hands of a great director can give even more opportunity uh to be creative within tighter budgets.

Steve Davies:
Yeah, I think I’m um I’m mainly excited is the answer. Of course, none of us knows the future, but I think we’ve done lots of AI presentations and uh studies, and we’re we feel that it’s reached a point now where people are feeling more confident about what it’s good at and what it isn’t good at.

We had a superb presentation at the Future of Advertising by William Bartlett from Framestore, who explained exactly why and what you could use it for and what you couldn’t. And it’s clear from that that it’s going to be a tool of the human mind, the creative mind, the effectiveness mind, if you like, of getting where you want to get to. And so it’s not replacing people on that stage at the moment. There are other there are other factors at the moment, you know, I think one of which is agency legal departments are being extremely cautious about AI use. I mean, I’ve seen agreements, for example, where they forbid you you’ve got to get the copyright for the whole thing, and they forbid you from putting it back into the system. Well, if you use an Open AI system, those are the rules of the open AI system. So those are inhibiting factors at the moment to its growth. But I think it’s clearly going to get better and better, but I think it will remain uh uh you know a tool of the of the talented people.

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Pat Murphy:
Steve Davis there on the changing role of the producer and how he thinks AI will integrate into the production workflow, becoming a ‘tool of the talented people’. When we spoke, Steve also explained how the APA supports its members, helping them to thrive, do business, connect, and come together to address challenges. To hear more about the brilliant work of the APA, you can check out the full episode and Steve from earlier in the year.

Now, we at MCA are all about making stuff, something we have in common with my next guest. We know how frustrating it can be when you want to get a production underway, but the client is just dragging their heels or delaying things. Nils Leonard of Uncommon Creative Studio has a rather unique way to ensure stuff actually gets made.

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Nils Leonard:
When we started Uncommon, one of our biggest fears wasn’t… I mean, somewhat madly if you think about it, one of our biggest fears wasn’t winning business, it would be that we won the wrong sort of business. And we’ve all had accounts like this where you spend a year grinding away in meetings and all you’ve made are decks, and you actually haven’t made anything. Now, if you’re a startup, you’re invisible unless you make. You have nothing to talk about, dude, and your opinions are only good once. You can only launch with a point of view once. After that, the work is the evidence. So uh we were like, well, how do we force clients to do it? How do we enter an agreement with them in meeting one where they understand we are about output? So we said, ‘well, what if if they haven’t made anything by six months into the relationship, we just charge them more’? So we call it ‘faff tax’, which is if you’re faffing around, if we’re larking about, if there’s stakeholders, if you change your mind, and we haven’t made anything by six months, we’re gonna charge you 25% more. And of course, we’ve never had to use it once, really. We mention it in meetings and everybody laughs, and then I think there’s this air of, ‘yeah, okay, we better fucking do it’. But honestly, what it’s done weirdly is I think it’s defined a type of client now that come to us. We just don’t attract those guys that don’t want to make stuff. We really don’t. We can’t win those bits of business. It just doesn’t work.

Pat Murphy:
So I’m kind of curious about how you win business. Do you participate in pitches or do you operate in the way that BBH used to operate, which was like ‘we don’t take part in pitches, people come to us because they know what they’re gonna get’.

Nils Leonard:
Mostly the latter. We’re not arrogant enough to say we don’t take part in in pitches. Some clients use them and I think very respectfully use them to go and meet a load of people they didn’t know. What I would say is we don’t take part in anything where people don’t know who we are. So we’ll never just say ‘yes’ to being on a list. You know, I I think a lot of agencies forget to ask people why they came. And it’s telling. The answer is telling. Because, you know, if they say, ‘Oh Nils, I read this thing or I saw this podcast or I saw this bit of work for BA and we want a bit, you know, we want something like Windows’. Then I understand we’re on the same wavelength. You know, if they say, ‘well, mate, you’re on a list and you know, we’re quite good’, we tend to walk away. The best clients come to us and they go, ‘I’ve seen this, this, and this, I’ve heard you speak, I know all your stuff, I don’t even need to see your creds. What do you think about X’? And we have a lot of business like that and and touching all the wood in the world, that tends to also make the the best work.

Pat Murphy:
Do you actually walk away from business? Because that’s revenue that’s not coming in through the door.

Nils Leonard:
Yeah, but when you look at it like um there’s you can have really bad revenue. You can have really foul, dependent revenue that doesn’t just waste your time but actually holds you back. And when you view it like that as a start-up, like imagine someone pays you for your time, they don’t pay you for your work, they don’t pay you for your output, but they just pay you for your time and they buy up that time. That isn’t just you getting paid for your time and kind of going, ‘well, I’ve got some revenue’. They’re actively stopping you doing something else that can change your life. And when you view it like that, you just don’t have fucking time. I don’t have time for those relationships. And so I think it’s almost a defence mechanic in the studio to walk away from those types of business and to sense them very, very early.

Pat Murphy:
And I guess that that keeps the rest of the team pretty motivated. Because they’re working on the kind of clients that that you know really want to be with you.

Nils Leonard:
That’s the spoken deal. You know, the deal is and we purposefully and mechanically tried to be a magnet for talent, and when you think about talent, what talent want most is to make. They don’t actually want money, it’s all a load of shit that they don’t want the best Mac, they don’t want a beanbag. They want to make, and the more they make, the happier they are. And if the spoken deal is ‘if you come here, you will make great work on great brands and your work will matter and you will be famous’, and that’s the deal. ‘But you’ll work hard, you’ll work really fast, you’ll do things that push you and push you out of your comfort zone, but the deal is you will make’, I think that’s the right arrangement. That’s the arrangement certainly that works at Uncommon.

Pat Murphy:
Where do you find your talent from? Because uh in our business, we find it more hard to find great talent than it is to find great clients. Would that be the same with you?

Nils Leonard:
Yeah, I think that’s true. I actually do think that’s true, and I told you before I don’t want to be a cynic, but the one thing I’m fighting cynicism around is you know, I guess what I’d call the exodus of a real talent in our business. I look back actually and I think there’s an entire raft of creative leadership that isn’t here anymore because they were adopted and stolen by the platforms to the mothership and they disappear. By the way, Tor Mirron being one, I love that guy, but he could have run probably the most successful American start-up of his generation. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m sure Apple are recompensing him handsomely for his time. But I look at a lot of people and I just go, ‘God, there’s a whole generation of startups and companies that would exist that don’t now’. I don’t think the industry is attached to as much money as it used to be, and I think that’s a you know, the the clue’s in the money, man. I’ve always had a very open and very tactical relationship with money, which is you know, the Gilbert and George quote ‘make the world to believe in you and to pay heavily for the privilege’. I think this industry’s forgotten that. And as a result, you know, people who want to make life-changing money and want to do those sorts of things just aren’t entering into our game. You know, they’re launching their own brands or they’re doing all that other stuff. So yeah, I I think it’s I think it’s tough. And finding talent, particularly in certain markets, I think the US is a hard market to find a genuinely good talent in.

Pat Murphy:
I’m pretty lucky we’ve just hired a new president of North America. So I’m sure you’ll bump into him at some point in the very near the future.

How do you per how do you personally deal with uh creative fear? If you are about to pitch or you’re you know talking to a client, a potential client, you know, how do you deal with the kind of is there a creative fear with you? Or are you just fearless?

Nils Leonard:
We try to remove the concept or try to recognise it for what it really is. Most fear is giving a shit about what someone else thinks. That’s most fear in any context in the world, really. And when you think about it creatively… I told my wife once that I was going to give a talk on creative bravery. Fearless was it fearless thinking or something it was called, and she said, ‘fuck off’. She said, ‘You don’t get to talk about bravery, firemen get to talk about bravery, you sell cheese’. And I was like, yeah, okay! I mean what we what we try to do is, I mean, and I mean this sincerely, we are more scared of not making, and we are more scared of making bad work than we are of anything else. So I think the only fear I would say that I have is not doing our our thinking justice, not going in that room and articulating it the right way, not making it to the best of our ability. That’s the only thing we’re scared of.

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Pat Murphy:
This was such an inspiring and insightful conversation with Nils. All about making, creativity, business, talent, and so much more. I love his advice that not all projects are worth taking on, and that clients should be partners who truly share your vision and values. Brilliant stuff.

Finally, to one of my favourite subjects, audio. Simon Elms is founder of Eclectic Music and Bark’s Soho and one of the most respected composers in advertising. In our conversation, he didn’t hold back about one of the industry’s biggest problems: leaving music until the last minute when devising campaigns. Here’s what he had to say.

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Simon Elms:
A lot of us have been having this conversation for about the last 30 years, really. I mean, what drives it is that trying to get a treatment over the line budgeted, a director signed off is a time consuming and often quite fractious period, isn’t it? There’s a lot to do, there’s a lot to you know be discussed, countless meetings are had, the detail people, you know, pour over the detail of treatments, and it’s a you know, it’s a stressful moment. And I think I’ll say the fractious thing because of I think often it gets quite punchy at times, and the idea of discussing anything else apart from what’s on the table becomes tricky. They don’t want to discuss the music, because maybe that’s going to be another argument! And the problem is they’re missing a trick, really. First of all, I think agencies have lost so much of that sonic branding market over the last 10 to 15 years because of issues like this. If in the same way as they take control of the production, they were to take control of the sound of the production, I think it would placate clients. I think clients now have been approached by sonic branding agencies saying, ‘look, agencies don’t do this, we can do it’. And they do do, and we’ve had quite a few fantastically good experiences over the last few years, where we’ve been in the room with the agency and the client right from the beginning. And the agency wanted us there. They wanted us to  kind of I don’t know… demystify music, make it sort of accessible, and explain the reasoning of why we did what we’re doing, and you know, what w what we think we should work, what would work better here. And it if as soon as you do that, even if you have a very general conversation about what you’re gonna do, you know, we’ve got an advert here, it’s full of action, the sound design’s gonna be full on and comprehensive. What where what places the music have? Well, maybe it could be incredibly gentle and quiet and it could be up here… so that the all the bottom end can be for drops and all the rest of the all that good stuff. It’s just that simple conversation you have early on, and then the heat’s taken out of the room and people are kind of going, okay, it’s not something we necessarily have to have a point of view about. It’s about what does this music need to achieve, not what do we like. And as soon as you do that, it all falls away and it becomes cheaper, so much less time consuming, and I think creatively better, for want of a much better word.

Pat Murphy:
And it is so important because you know I think we’ve heard the phrase, you know, fifty percent of the effectiveness of an ad is also the sound and the music that uh is created for it.

Simon Elms:
Well no, I mean that’s that was the famous Tony Kay quote, wasn’t it? He’s saying, you know, it’s fifty percent of an advert if he could make the most amazing visuals, but if the sound wasn’t right, the advert would be disappointing. Yeah, no, you’re absolutely right. And uh yeah, it’s yeah. I when you do when you take charge of it early on, it’s so much easier and better.

Pat Murphy:
In my first series, I spoke to Steve Keller, who is the strategy director at Studio Resonate with Sirius XM. He talked about the important role music and sound play in our everyday lives and how it helps brands connect. He also talked about a fascinating psychoacoustic experiment he was involved with where hip hop music was played to cheese and it actually made it age differently. I understand Simon that you’re also interested in the crossover between music and neuroscience.

Simon Elms:
I am I and I have been for years. In fact, I read up about that that cheese experiment. They played the cheese ‘A Tribe Called Quest’. Apparently that was the track. I wondered if the researchers were stoned a lot. Because that could have explained something! But there’s a great quote that which I completely overuse, , but I think it’s brilliant to talk about music to picture. Um it’s by Sir Thomas Beecher when he said the function of music is to release us from the tyranny of conscious thought. And that’s what this whole neuroscience thing is all about. It’s been there for hundreds and hundreds of years. You know Bach knew it, Mozart knew it, Beethoven knew it, Earth, Wind and Fire know it, but particularly in those old classics, you know, when Beethoven wrote a pastoral symphony, you could sit back there with your eyes closed and you could vividly see the undulating hills and the sheep and the cows. It’s programmatic, I think they call it that kind of music. It’s meant to be vivid. Funnily enough, in the sixties a whole notion of, you know, trying to do an audio description of a place, you know, ‘Bombay sunset’, or I don’t know, ‘lunch in Paris’ or whatever it was, that was a really big thing again, because people you didn’t have TV in the way we have it now. You didn’t have that kind of imagery. And I mean even Miles Davis, the ki the notion of ‘sketches of Spain’, you know, those kind of it was a real thing. I think that’s been around I don’t think it’s a new phrase there. I I think that connection with music and sound, music and maybe images its a very powerful relationship, but it’s been going on for a long time. Funny enough, this whole kind of sonic branding thing it’s it’s massive now and there’s a huge amount of research goes in by brands on what music to use for their particular adverts.

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Pat Murphy:
Audio is so important in ads, and Simon’s advice to shift the conversation away from ‘what do we like’ to ‘what does this music actually need to achieve’ is such a brilliant perspective to take when crafting your campaign. 50% of the effectiveness of your ad relies on the sound, so don’t ignore it and certainly don’t leave it to the last minute.

It’s been so much fun chatting to these heavy hitters from the world of advertising in season four and we’re looking forward to bringing you loads more episodes in 2026 of the Prodcast.

If you’ve enjoyed this, we’d really appreciate it if you could leave us a review in your favourite podcast app, as it helps others to find our show. If you’d like to feature on the Prodcast or have any comments, questions, or feedback, please email us at podcast@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 all my guests, Simon, Nils, Steve, Ed, and everyone else who appeared this year. Thanks to my team also at MCA and to my production team at What Goes On Media. Have a wonderful holiday and New Year. See you next time.