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5 Minutes With… Charlie Mawer

10/04/2013
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London, UK
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ECD, Red Bee Media

 

Creativity can crop up in the most unexpected places – something that Red Bee Media ECD Charlie Mawer is so conscious of that he once tried to hire a vet. It may have something to do with the fact that Mawer himself had to claw his way into the creative side of things, having started his career as ‘a terrible accounts manager’ (his words not ours!). It was a battle worth fighting though – Mawer eventually landed his dream job at the BBC’s commercial arm. LBB’s Laura Swinton caught up with Mawer at PromaxBDA Europe to find out how Red Bee is bringing the secrets of broadcast to brands.
 
LBB> What makes Red Bee unique?
 
CM> We used to be the in-house creative arm of the BBC, doing design, promotions and digital. In 2004 the BBC decided that they would sell us off to a private equity owner which was great in terms of opportunities. Even for someone like myself who had wanted to work for the BBC since I was seven, it’s still exciting to occasionally step away and work with other partners.  
 
We’re unique in that we’re the size of a top ten ad agency, there’s about 200 people working here, but our creatives are expected to write, produce, animate, account handle the whole thing themselves. There’s none of that big agency structure around it.
 
LBB> And does that heritage and association with the BBC trickle through to your approach at Red Bee?
 
CM> Culturally I hope it does. I hope we’ve kept the best bits of BBC culture in terms of respect for people and honesty. We value these public service principles but we combine that with a commercial mind set in terms of our understanding of audience and the focus on return on investment. 
 
Our most famous case study is still probably ‘Dave’ [the TV channel formerly known as UKTV G2] as a brand, even though it’s about five or six years old now. It’s one of those telling moments where nothing changed but the name and the branding, but the return on investment was something like 25 million in the first year. That’s when you can see that design and branding works. We all know it works, but to have real tangible proof like that is great.
 
LBB> When you work on properties like TV shows or channels that already have characters, stories and a personality  associated with them, how does that change your creative approach?
 
CM> It’s very different from working on a tin of beans or a car. You have to accept that you’re working on a product that is inherently entertaining. If you’re promoting a show like Luther and working with Idris Elba on how to capture the essence of that character in 30 seconds, you can’t do it in isolation of the writing team or him as a talent. There are potential compromises you have to make. But you also hope that they understand that programmes aren’t made to be cut up into 30 seconds and sometimes the skill of arresting a viewer in a break is something different to what they do.
 
LBB> And when you then go and work on a tin of beans, what can you transfer from your experience working on an entertainment or media brand?
 
CM> Lots. That’s a new-ish area that we’ve been exploring. We’re talking to brands about how they can behave like broadcasters. There’s a PDF on our website on ten lessons that brands can learn from broadcasters. It ranges from really simple things - like if you are going to generate content, it’s got to have all of the same narrative drive and entertainment values as a programme - through to treating your audience as an audience rather than a customer, which is a subtle mental shift. Then there’s stuff like scheduling, packaging and lots of little things that are probably second nature to everyone attending Promax but which are alien to most non-TV brands.
 
 
LBB> There are lots of current discussions around the idea that brands have to be constantly connected and reactive. What sorts of insights have you gained from working with a broadcaster like the BBC which obviously does a lot of news and current affairs coverage?
 
CM> The power of live. Something like Felix Baumgartner for Red Bull is the quintessential example. Not everyone has the capacity to do something at that level, but it’s something that brands aspire to, having a moment in time that you can drive people to. It’s really powerful.
 
LBB> I watched your packed speech at Promax and you had a lot to say about nurturing young talent. You mentioned that a lot of the creative at Red Bee haven’t come through the traditional route.
 
CM> Yeah, it’s partially because I didn’t come through the traditional route of Watford College-type classic advertising courses. I quite like the fact that we’re able to hire someone like a keyboard player in a Manchester band. We even hired a vet once. That didn’t really work out, come to think of it, but I like the notion that anyone can have an idea. You can train people with the craft skills. It’s a balancing act – sometimes you do need people who can think about things in a certain way. With most ad agency teams, you know that if you put in problem ‘A’, you’ll get answer ‘B’. It’s solid and professional but it might not necessarily be surprising.
 
I did English as a degree at Oxford, and I had to fight like a dog to get into a creative role in an agency. I’m an intelligent person with a proven track record in writing but I didn’t have a portfolio. At Red Bee we do classic copy testing of people. I’m just as interested in people who have been busy illustrating children’s books even if they have never written an ad before. I can teach them that bit. It just makes it a more interesting place to be really.
 
LBB> One of the things you were talking about was training and you urged the audience not to be too prescriptive or restrictive in the kind of training you offer to people. 
 
CM> It’s hard – training budgets in any company are the first things that come under fire the minute you’re under any sort of financial pressure. 
 
I tell people that I haven’t got the time to go out and find these different courses but if they come to me and say ‘I’ve found this thing and I’d really like to do it’, nine times out of ten I’ll say yes. The very fact they’ve gone out and found it suggests there’s a level of interest. However if I choose something for ten people, eight will cry off the week before hand and two will barely drag themselves along. There was a girl who I agreed to send on a storyboarding course. She sits and edits trails all day but when she came along with that suggestion I thought ‘yeah, I don’t know how it’s going to be useful but I’m sure it will be’.
 
LBB> Ultimately getting outside of your day job and getting out of the industry is no bad thing - there’s nothing worse than advertising that’s just about advertising.
 
CM> Exactly. I had to cut some stuff out of my talk, but Dave Droga once said that people who can tell you who wrote and directed every ad are not interesting people, they’re just museum curators. I would rather have people who don’t know any of that but who are interested in other stuff and who can bring something new.
 
LBB> Your first foot in the door at advertising was through a JWT graduate scheme, where you were, in your words, ‘a terrible accounts manager’…
 
CM> I was! The reason I know I was particularly awful is because my now wife was also an accounts manager there at the time. When I left to join the BBC she inherited all my clients and my filing system. It was basically a drawer which I stuffed everything into. 
 
There was a guy called Stephen Carter who became MD at JWT at the age of 27 and who is now Lord Carter.  He was my account director at Nintendo and I think he was fascinated by me because I was so wrong for that job. But I suppose what I was good at was bringing creativity into unexpected places. At the time, the creative department thought things like sponsorship idents were beneath them. I was desperate to get my hands on anything that was vaguely creative so I was like ‘I’ll do it!’ I would put my heart and soul into it. 
 
LBB> And so how did you move from that to working at the BBC?
 
CM> I managed to get enough of those opportunities at JWT to have a credible body of work. One of the biggest opportunities that came up was editing the in-house satirical magazine at JWT. That was when the creative suddenly went ‘oh God, so he can write’!
 
I arrived at the BBC at a time when they were moving from informing people that a particular programme was on to persuading them to watch it. It was kind of insane when you look back at it now. There was a big shift in the mid-90s when the UK moved from a cosy four channel set-up to having multiple channels. I was in the first wave of that; that’s when they started to hire from advertising. 
 
It was a total shock to the system to see how little awareness there was of the audience. One of my favourite anecdotes involves a producer who rang me up to ask when the first trailer for her drama was going. I checked the schedule and said it was going out on Friday evening at 7.30pm – a good, prime time spot. She said ‘that’s appalling – everyone’s leaving town to go to the country then!” That’s a 1994 BBC drama producer’s view of the audience. It’s all changed now and everyone’s very, very aware now. 
 
I tried to get into the BBC three times before hand; I had wanted to work in radio comedy and I suppose I was just desperate to work for them in any field. I loved advertising. JWT was brilliant, not least for meeting my wife, but I never cared about the products as much as I did about broadcasters and I could really see value in entertainment.
 
LBB> Having had the experience on the agency and broadcaster side, Red Bee is a funny sort of hybrid.
 
CM> When we went commercial we could have set ourselves up as an advertising agency – we’ve got nearly the same skillset. But then that struck as a bit counter-intuitive – we had all left advertising for a reason and we can be quite complimentary to what agencies do. We don’t crop up on AOR pitches. We view our space as quite specialised, even within a growing area like online content. We’re increasingly doing a lot of that sort of work with people, whether it’s a little job like Hyundai or a big project with Bacardi, where we’re shooting 75-80 pieces of content. TV producers know how to make half hour shows for a fraction of the cost of a TV commercial. 
 
LBB> I wanted to talk to you about your D&AD White Pencil entry, Peace Babies. It’s interesting to see the move towards creating projects with real values underpinning them?
 
CM> Companies have to do more than just have a CSR programme. With Peace Babies, I wish we had been able to spend six months rather than six weeks on it. It’s one of these things that always falls to the bottom of your list of jobs. But it’s a project that springs a bit from our public service ethos. It’s also nice to work on something where you’re your own client. It allows people to show off their skills.
 
 
LBB> When you’re not working what are your passions?
 
CM> Sport! The dull stuff is I’m a really big sport fan and music fan, but I’m also on the board of a theatre in Hammersmith called The Riverside Studios. It’s an arts complex – there’s an amazing play just starting called Mies Julie by a South African company. My wife works with the Donmar theatre so there’s a link there too. Theatre and poetry are my two loves, the two things I cling onto outside this grubby commercial world. And kids – kids fill up so much of your life. I don’t know where my evenings go. 
 
I wrote a collection of poetry called ‘Birth to Three’ which was a poem a month for the first three years of my children’s lives. They’re now eight and ten and when they ask why I’ve stopped writing, it’s because I don’t have any time any more. Poetry is like advertising – it suits people with a short attention span. I don’t think I’d have the dedication to write a novel or a TV series but I can cope with a 30 second creative product, either in literary or commercial form. I have a meerkat-like attention span. 
 
LBB> And as a creative director, how do you help or encourage creatives who are involved in outside projects like that?
 
CM> It’s a fine balancing act. I don’t want to interfere in people’s personal projects because it really is none of my business. But I want people to know that if they do need help, I’ll do it. Sometimes it’s just a case of giving people unpaid time off or making sure their schedule’s going to work. Sometimes it’s a case of letting them use kit or sharing resources or knowledge.  It’s a bit parental really – I genuinely take pleasure in seeing what they do. 
 
We do run short film competitions and we’re now running a short documentary competition. It’s an interesting format, I guess because it tallies with our brand’s competencies. Encouragement but not interference is the line I try to draw. If people don’t want to tell me what they’re up to, that’s fine.
 
 
LBB> And what projects have you worked on or are you working on that we should look out for?
 
CM> I’m working with BBC sport on a project that draws on my love of football and we’re working on Glastonbury for the BBC too. I can’t go this year, which I’m gutted about. 
 
The other thing I really enjoyed is a documentary called ‘The Great British Flying Test’ which we did in October for The Aviation Foundation. I think it’s a really watchable, enjoyable film.
 
I love that variety really, the ability to skip from one thing to the next.  
 
 
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