Pro Hello: Jamie Lennox
Jamie Lennox is a commercials director, producer and creative executive with 20+ years’ experience in filmmaking, marketing, advertising and digital media. He’s directed, produced, written and ideated everything from big-budget TV ads to online series' and social content; influencer marketing, infotainment, features, animation, comedy sketches and branded entertainment.
Jamie is also the creative director and co-founder of Hotwolf Ltd, a full service creative and production agency. In his role, Jamie brings his passion for creating stuff people actually WANT to watch and would be proud to share, helping his clients and their content stand out from the crowd. Before all this, Jamie worked professionally as an actor, editor, art director, producer and as a writer for BAFTA-winning series 'The Armstrong & Miller Show' (BBC), 'Me & My Monsters' (Henson Company / Tiger Aspect) and 'Psychob*tches' (Sky Arts), amongst many others.
Today, Jamie shares some of the projects he's proudest of, and tells us how he's got to where he is today.
LBB> What do you do, and where are you based?
Jamie> I’m a commercials director and owner / creative director of Hotwolf Ltd, a full-service creative agency, based in and around London.
LBB> What recent campaigns might we know you from, and what was your input on these campaigns?
Jamie> Campaigns for Protect Your Bubble, Trailfinders and PitPat are currently screening across TV, cinema, VOD, radio / podcast and socials. The 'Life’s Better with Bubble' campaign for the gadget insurers spins around that heart-stopping moment when you drop your new phone and the world seems to go into slow-motion as you watch it fall. But if you’re covered with PYB, even when the worst happens, you’re still in your happy place! I created the campaign concept along with my creative team, wrote and directed the TV spots... and ended up providing the opening voiceover (after the client kept coming back to my guide track!).
LBB> Tell us about your journey so far.
Jamie> I’ve always made films – early animations with my cousin, using my uncle’s Cine-8, and sketches with camcorders growing up. I studied as an actor (to very mild success), then went on to work in loads of different fields behind and in front of the camera – art department, props and costumes, editing, writing, producing and directing. When online video started ramping up in the mid-late noughties, I was in a good place to put all these together and start making sketches and content – first for Warner Entertainment and John Lloyd’s ComedyBox, and then ChannelFlip Media, where I produced and directed branded shows like 'David Mitchell’s Soapbox', 'Richard Hammond’s Tech Head', and a puppet show for Cartoon Network, amongst many others.
ChannelFlip broke early ground and carved out a niche in the UK influencer space, so I produced countless creative influencer campaigns for the likes of Oreo, Dr Pepper, Dell, Bethesda and Kellogg’s. In my role as content director then creative director there, I also produced, directed or executively-produced 50+ original live-action and animated series' as part of YouTube’s global Original Channel Programme. Definitely the most prolific run of my career... certainly the most knackering!
We sold to the Shine Group and I left to found Hotwolf with my business partner, Matt Rook, in 2015. We’ve been going strong since then, with a wide range of work for clients like Trailfinders, 20th Century Fox, Protect Your Bubble, LIVGolf, Square Enix, Hooch, Vegan Friendly, Reebok, MTV, Fun88, Sheilas’ Wheels and many, many more!
LBB> What projects / campaigns that you’ve been involved in have been the most personally satisfying to work on, and why?
Jamie> Early in Hotwolf’s journey, King of Shaves trusted us to create multiple strands of content to help them reach a younger audience, which was really satisfying – bringing professionalism to product videos, a human element and authentic tone of voice to 'how -tos', smooth music covers of famous ‘rough’ music tracks (#RoughSmoothed), and a comedy series featuring guys on dates with their own big heads, apologising for how they’ve treated them (and other body parts) before switching to King of Shaves products!
I absolutely love working with Protect Your Bubble. We’re constantly pushing each other to come up with more and more engaging ways to make a potentially low-interest product (gadget insurance) stand out. We’ve blown up buildings, brought in a T-Rex and meteors, filmed inside washing machines, produced papier-mâché heads, and most recently used AI to augment super slo-mo footage of a phone fall and coffee splash. A combination of clear storytelling / message, amusingly exaggerated emotion and a bit of choice VFX is my sweet spot.
More personally, during lockdown we were asked to create an online campaign for Council Fostering. I wrote and produced a short video with some extremely talented animators, and used my daughter, who was seven at the time, to do the voiceover. It’s super-emotional, and hard to watch without welling up.
LBB> What’s been your proudest achievement?
Jamie> Awards are not something we tend to shoot for (they often don’t feel worth the money to apply and IMHO having an eye on awards can lead creative away from being effective for the client), but winning Best Branded Video Series for the King of Shaves sketches in Hotwolf’s early years was a great validation that we were on the right track. Mostly, I’m just proud that we’re still going, and coming up with stand-out and successful work after nine years!
LBB> What do people (clients, agencies etc) come to you for specifically?
Jamie> We talk about ourselves as a challenger agency for champion brands. We have tonnes of experience but we always bring that challenger attitude to help our clients outsmart their competitors (rather than outspend them). We also tend to go for slightly less 'safe' creative ideas - bringing humour and some eye-catching visual hook (if, of course, that’s appropriate!), and I always stress-test ideas for the long tail. If I’m not fizzing with ideas for the next iteration of the big idea, then it’s maybe not right yet...
LBB> What are your strongest opinions relating to your specific field?
Jamie> Practical creativity. I never pitch an idea I don’t fully believe can be achieved within the budget, and that will deliver a clear message. There’s nothing worse than seeing an ad where there’s some wacky or clearly expensive scenario, but at the end you have no idea what it was for, what they want you to do about it, or even WTF it was about. It doesn’t matter how visually interesting or cool it was, or how much money they’ve thrown at the camera (or celeb), if the idea doesn’t serve the product / brand / message, then it’s not good enough. End of.
Sometimes you can tell there was a great idea in there to begin with and it’s been death-by-committee, but it’s absolutely the job of a creative agency / director to challenge and push for that to shine through into the execution.
LBB> What sort of projects really get you excited at the moment?
Jamie> I love working on wider campaigns, as opposed to one-off projects / TV spots - that big concept with planned supporting content which can allow the idea to bend and flex, and really get its hooks in! Obviously having a larger budget frees things up a bit creatively, but I still love that feeling of overdelivering, of making something look a million bucks when you’ve had nothing like that to play with!
LBB> Who are your creative heroes, and why?
Jamie> I love the convention-breaking approach of Ryan Reynolds’ Maximum Effort’s viral ad spots and videos. They have a real confidence for playing with established marketing conventions and turning things on their head (or at least pot-shotting at them). I admire how Who Gives A Crap market themselves – in campaigns, in emails and on-pack they’re anti-sh*t in every way. And I’m a sucker for good, old-fashioned clever marketing copy and imagery. I wish I’d come up with KP’s “The Nut Nut’s Nut”, and I love Pret A Manger’s food art photography.
LBB> Outside of the day job, what fuels your creativity?
Jamie> Even if I retired tomorrow, I’d still be making stuff at home. Writing and playing songs, silly Photoshops of friends and family pics - it’s become a tradition for us to do back-to-school pics with laser-wolfs, superpowers or DeLoreans (and I can’t help myself if I see a Facebook post with an empty background to add Godzilla or something in). I make little films with my kids to foster that same sense of creativity I was encouraged to have growing up, but now the tech is so much more accessible, affordable and easy to use that there’s far fewer boundaries for them.
