5 Minutes With… The Outfit
Looking back to the beginning of their careers, you'd be hard-pressed to foresee Niall Murdoch and Charlie Read, The Outfit co-founders', paths ever crossing. Murdoch began his working life at GGT Advertising before a lengthy stint with The Guardian newspaper, where he held several senior marketing roles, and played a part in the publication's online birth. Read, however, started out in commercial production, producing at companies like Partizan and Academy. The pair met at Channel 4’s creative arm, 4Creative, where they spent 10 years developing it into an award-winning studio. Now, the pair head up The Outfit, an agency specialising in creating TV campaigns grounded in entertainment for brands including L’Oreal, adidas, Microsoft Xbox, O2, Sony Playstation, and VW.
LBB> Where are you both from originally and how did you end up in TV and advertising?
CR> I started out producing music videos and then moved into commercials with production companies like Academy, Paul Weilands and Partizan. I was introduced to Channel 4 when they were setting up a different type of creative agency with production at the heart of the business to be called 4Creative. I joined as part of the management team in 1999.
NM> I worked in advertising and then I did a long stint at the Guardian. I was a bit of a lifer there, everyday was different and I worked on lots of launches and start up businesses, as well as the launch of the paper online. I worked with Polly Cochrane, and when Polly moved to Channel 4 to become marketing director she asked me to help set up 4Creative.
LBB> What motivated you both to leave 4Creative/Channel 4 to set up the Outfit? And what were the initial challenges that you faced?
NM> Working at Channel 4 was fantastic. We had 10 great years there and learned loads, but we felt there was a big opportunity to approach advertising in a different way and to make it more genuinely entertaining. We wanted to bring more of the values and creative talent of TV entertainment to advertising.
CR> Although 4Creative had a remit to work with external clients as well as the Channel 4 brands, as the C4 portfolio grew our time was increasingly taken up with work for the channels. It was the next logical step to break away to work with more clients.
NM> The initial challenges were around integrating a team of TV people with advertising and production people. TV people pitch and make programmes in a different way to the way commercials are pitched and made – but the results of having that mix of TV, advertising and broadcast experience all under one roof make for a very different result, creatively. The results have been great for clients.
CR> It was the start of the recession, which brought its own pressures. But it was also an opportunity for us because we make all our own work and could use our broadcast experience to make things more streamlined and affordable for brands.
LBB> You guys have been working together for years – what is it about your personalities that mean you gel so well as a team?
NM> We’re just a good match. We really enjoy working together and that makes for good collaboration and hopefully rubs off on the rest of the Outfit. We’ve got complementary skills as well – Charlie has his commercials background and I have my advertising and marketing experience – we’re good at different stuff. He’s really into technology, whereas I’m more driven by popular culture, so we bring different things to the table. We both love film and music. We both like a glass of wine too.
CR> We do have very different business backgrounds, but it really works because it means we have a wide range of experiences to draw on. There’s also a huge mutual respect for what each other brings to the table.
LBB> While you were both at Channel 4 you were involved in the Honda live skydive – how did that project come about and how difficult was it to integrate the advertising thinking with event TV?
NM> We’d been talking for some time about how we might tackle a big, ambitious live TV ad, and then the Honda Civic brief arrived. Honda wanted a media owner partnership to kick start their traditional TV advertising campaign with a bang. They wanted to bring their ‘Difficult is Worth Doing’ positioning to life and talked us through the ad campaign their ad agency were planning, which involved a group of sky divers creating a number of formations that related to the car’s features. The ads were CGI assisted, but we wanted to create a launch event spot where we did it for real.
CR> Integration was quite straightforward, in a way. Essentially we were making the live version of the ad campaign, and we are very used to working with lots of brands and getting up to speed with the tone and spirit of the brand and the marketing. It was the live TV bit that posed a few challenges. ‘Difficult is Worth Doing’? It doesn’t get more difficult than this! Essentially you’re faced with a three-minute window to line up the plane, the parachutists, the cameras, the airfield and the ad break, not to mention worrying about changes in the weather. We brought in experts in live sport event TV, parachute stunt coordinators, and coordinated the project stakeholders, from the client to Clearcast, and created the advertising campaign that created the appointment to view. But we do love a challenge, that’s really what makes us tick. If it’s not difficult or different, it’s not really an Outfit project!
LBB> How did that project change the way you both saw the relationship between advertising and television?
NM> A big part of the philosophy at 4Creative was to bring as much entertainment and new content to the advertising as we did for the channels and programmes. We would make films that sold the spirit of the shows and that were genuinely entertaining – everything was a piece of entertainment in it’s own right. Honda Live, to us, was a three-minute piece of entertainment that was trailed and promoted like a show. I think it confirmed that advertising can learn a lot from behaving more like a broadcaster, in creating something that people want to watch.
CR> The Honda ad also showed what advertisers can do for broadcasters too. It drove a big audience – even bigger than the audience for the first half of the programme it featured during. Viewing figures increasing during the ad break. While the activity got people involved online and coaxed them into car showrooms, it also got more people tuning in to Channel 4. We do think that TV advertising can break the mould and really add something to the viewing experience. That’s great for TV.
LBB> What can adland learn from TV?
NM> I think a lot of advertising assumes that the audience is interested, but quite often they’re not! People love watching TV for the programmes, not necessarily for the ads. Ask someone what they’re favourite show is and they reel off a load of stuff. Ask them their favourite ad and you rarely get such an animated response. We learned a lot in TV about why people watch programmes and the trails and content around them. The Faces of Four campaign that ran for four or five years featured all C4 talent. It was a real, honest, funny and less rehearsed view of the cast of Channel 4 shows, but also a good example of how brands can work with talent. We just think that there’s an opportunity for advertising to break from it’s traditional format and structure, and be more like the programmes> engaging, entertaining and fun.
CR> TV also has that ability to just get things done – to move fast, be fleet of foot and deliver great entertainment that connects with an audience. But it does that without all of the ceremony. Getting things done faster can help the budget but it also keeps the energy up in the agency. We’re always making something and that means we are always learning and experimenting.
LBB> …and what can the TV industry learn from adland?
NM> TV commissioning departments and Indies can have a distance from advertisers, yet they both want the same things> great programmes and quality advertising that engages the viewers. The last thing the broadcasters need is people changing channels or switching off in the ad break, so finding ways to work in genuine partnerships with adland has got to be the way forward.
CR> Part of that process is also TV understanding what advertisers are trying to achieve and how advertising success is measured. That plus the fact that while TV often plays a pivotal role in the advertising and marketing mix, it has an opportunity to do much more. Second screen and social media integration are very much on many client agendas and the opportunities to work together with adland in these areas are big opportunities.
LBB> I know a lot of your staff have TV backgrounds, but how do you attract these people over to ‘the dark side’?
CR> TV talent are inspired by the high volume, quality and variety of work we introduce them to. Plus they know that we appreciate the skills they can offer. We allow them to broaden their skills and introduce them to new opportunities and ways to work.
NM> Plus a lot of the TV industry work on a project-to-project basis, working on a series for three-six month stints. That means they are flexible and that there’s a big pool of great creative people. In terms of staff, there’s definitely a group of people who can see ahead to the opportunities of the convergence of technology and who see commercial companies as the way to open doors and learn fast.
LBB> TV isn’t dead, but the way people are watching it is definitely changing – and your Prometheus movie launch project really understood that. 25,000 people tweeted the #areyouseeingthis hashtag – why do you think the project was so effective?
CR> Film marketing is generally approached quite traditionally. The idea was to think like a broadcaster and give the audience something they wanted. By creating an exclusive TV event for die hard fans to see the first footage of the film, we harnessed the audiences’ obsession with the Alien franchise and asked them to get involved.
NM> It was a great combination of factors, Channel 4’s tech-savvy audience, a much anticipated film, a show stopping three-minute cut of the cinema trail delivered wall-to-wall in an exclusive ad break. It was also broadcast during a pivotal episode of Homeland – all of that contributed. Live isn’t right for every brief, but it was part of the fuel here. The possibility of your tweet feeding live into a break just struck a note with the audience.
LBB> The O2 Load & Go was another effective project that worked with the medium – this time the C4 soap Hollyoaks. As many of our readers are not from the UK and may not be familiar with the, ahem, charms of the show, I was wondering if you could explain how you targeted the campaign to fans of this particular show and why that was the most effective approach?
CR> Young people aren’t particularly interested in the traditional way financial services market to them so we wanted to create something that would get their attention and engage them. We created a soap opera of our own that ran in the ad break. It referenced storylines from the show so was relevant and contextual to how they watched it. We then took the viewers online and gave them lots of additional content related to Hollyoaks. Talking to them about the benefits of the product in this context was then much more effective.
NM> Hollyoaks isn’t for everybody but it has a massive young audience, so it’s a great way to talk to lots of 16-24s. We just liked the idea of creating a mini-soap within a soap, as if a couple of Hollyoaks characters had gone astray and ended up in the ad break. It caught the audience’s imagination and they got involved. We worked with some great people as well – Inbetweeners director Gordon Anderson and Him & Her’s Sarah Solemani wrote the scripts. Having that pedigree of talent involved definitely made for a more effective campaign.
LBB> A lot of the Outfit’s projects suggest that creativity and media are no longer separable disciplines – do you think that’s going to influence the agency of the future?
NM> Definitely. More than ever the two have to work together, and work together to break some rules too. We really believe that breaking the mould is one of the keys to success. Ads that surprise and interrupt, not just creatively but also from a media perspective, will increasingly cut through. But also working with broadcasters to build partnerships and joint equity for clients will make for a different way of thinking.
CR> Understanding the media environment is crucial to the creative process. With audiences now in different mind sets depending on what platform or channel they are on, you can’t carry on creating one ad and hope that it works. The agencies of the future will also have to learn how to create high volumes of content for all these channels.
LBB> Outside of advertising what are your passions and how do you stay fresh and inspired?
NM> I love film, music and TV. We’re a few series into it, but Modern Family is still genius. I saw Steve Levitan [Modern Family creator] interviewed at Edinburgh last year and he was really inspiring – a lot of my passions feed into what I do professionally. My kids are teenagers too, so we share a lot of these interests. It’s great because there’s always new stuff being played and talked about in our house. I also still love newspapers and I’m an avid reader. That keeps me fresh and inspired.
CR> I’m a bit of a geek at heart and enjoy hunting out all of the latest tech innovation. We can all learn a lot from tech start up businesses and their ability of not being scared to try new things. I love the way that technology is rapidly changing the way we consume media and advertising, and that no one really knows where it is all going.
