Creative Social popped down to have a chat with Dave Bedwood and Sam Ball, two of the founding partners of Lean Mean Fighting Machine. After a quick look around the studio, a beautiful open plan space with a mini golf course on one of the upper decks, we found a quiet corner and I started firing some questions at them.
I began by asking what they think it is that has got them to where they are today. Sam is quick to answer, ‘a combination of luck and hard work really.’ Going into a little more detail he explains that he and Dave had met whilst at university, both studying Advertising. They graduated at a time before digital advertising. As Dave says “There was no such thing as traditional advertising then, as there was nothing to be traditional against”. In 1999 a forward thinking Creative Director suggested to them that this new ‘internet advertising’ could be big. This led them to BMP Interaction, the digital arm of BMP (now DDP), an agency with a reputation for great creative ideas. Within the first couple of weeks they were creating the online brand positioning for the Pot Noodle account, enjoying the creative freedom that an above the line agency would not have been able to offer. ‘We were lucky in a sense that we were ignorant of what you could do with digital,’ Dave tells me. A lack of knowledge about what you could and couldn’t do with this new medium, meant they ended up in fresh areas. Today Sam is still confident that ‘digital work forges more opportunities to be creative than any other medium.’ While working at BMP they met Dave Cox, who they describe as a ‘yes’ programmer. It was this unrestricted creativity, combined with positive technical attitude and ability, which allowed them to create fantastic work together.
Setting up Lean Mean Fighting Machine gave Sam and Dave the opportunity to become masters of their own destiny. This control and creative freedom suited the way they worked and also who they are. ‘It suited us because it was very do-it-yourself,’ Dave says, referring back to those early days creating work for Pot Noodle when they would be writing, designing, filming and having a go at whatever else came along without being stifled by hierarchies. For them, setting up Lean Mean fighting Machine felt like the logical step after BMP. One of the biggest differences, they noticed instantly, was the amount of people in meetings. ‘It doesn’t take many people to do good work,’ Sam tells me, adding that many of the big agencies function as a service industry rather than a creative industry. The more heads in a meeting means more opinions, and can result in ideas being watered down to try and please everybody. ‘Keep it small and nimble, keep an edge,’ is the advice from Dave.
I ask the guys about the projects that they have been most proud of. Sam’s first answer is the work that they produced for Emirates. ‘If you set a benchmark of good work you want to reach that and surpass it every time,’ he says. Having looked at work on their portfolio it’s clear to see why they have been consistently proud of the communications they have produced. In particular Sam talks about the Nonstopfernando project, a campaign that would still stand up today but that was groundbreaking at the time of its release, in terms of social connections and distributing an idea. For Dave, the memorable projects have been ‘any of the ones that have had a massive amount of risk.’ With Nonstopfernando, for example, they had to get it in one take with the client looking over their shoulder the whole time. Sam adds, ‘Creative people don’t think of it as risky, what’s risky about trying to stand out, trying to be original? The biggest risk is to stay the same, pumping out the same thing that looks and feels just like all the other advertising. Over time you won’t be relevant to people, in the long term you’ll become a bland company and somebody more interesting will come and take you over.’
When asked about the future of advertising, Dave’s opinion is that not much will change: ‘It will be the same problems that you have now, people don’t change a great deal, media just allows it to be projected in different ways’. These fundamental human attributes will still be the same in the future; they will just be facilitated in a better way. One thing Dave is sure of is that there will always be a gap for people to invent buzzwords to tell you about the next ‘new’ thing, which turns out, in most cases, to be a different form of something that existed before. Sam adds, ‘I don’t think anybody has ever told me anything about the future of advertising that has been remotely helpful.’
In terms of current challenges facing the industry, both Sam and Dave agree that creativity can be a problem. Dave talks about the changes within advertising in the 50s and 60s that lead to agencies starting conversations with consumers, and yet even today there are campaigns that are developed to simply shout at people. ‘Not enough people in the industry seem to be enjoying it, they all seem quite tense,’ Sam tells me. He believes that until people start to enjoy it and be proud to work in advertising, creativity will never reach its potential. Dave highlights the issue of ownership, relating to the way clients use multiple agencies on a single campaign as a contentious issue. He also talks about the way that many of the smaller agencies that have now been bought up by larger companies are forced to spend much of their creative energy figuring out how they are going to integrate.
The next question I ask the guys is ‘If you could collaborate with anybody alive today, who would it be?’ Dave’s choice, William Goldman, as he would like to witness how somebody of that caliber would go about his process and find out what he would do with a creative advertising brief. Sam tells me it would definitely be somebody from another creative industry, an artist or a poet maybe, ‘Imagine the ideas you could come with if you worked with someone like Damien Hirst, they would be a million miles away from advertising’
I finished by asking what advice they would give to somebody starting out in their career. Sam told me he had been reading a book the previous evening about stars that died young, ‘Buddy Holly died when he was 22 and he changed the world of music forever. If you go out when you’re young, with enough energy and you’re prepared to work hard, you could change the advertising industry. You could certainly change the course of your own life and maybe even something bigger.’ Dave agreed that it is all about energy, people expect their ideas to happen but sometimes things beyond your control can stop them from happening: ‘It’s like waves on a shore, you just have to keep bashing them down with idea after idea, that’s the difference between the good and the great. Some people get bitter and that energy turns inward, you need to have a good capacity to let ideas go as well as caring about them immensely”.
Check out the Lean Mean Fighting Machine site here.
