Creativebrief: As Managing Director of Brave what is your primary focus?

Ash Bendelow: Above all, my primary focus is to constantly fuel Brave’s culture and to nurture a ‘never be satisfied’ attitude. This is the one thing that underpins everything we do and makes the agency a tangible entity that translates our beliefs into demonstrable behaviours – from how our clients and people are greeted when they walk through our doors, to the agility in our service, the originality and strength of the creative product, and ultimately to our focus on outcome over output. Outside of this I remain largely on the frontline of client business – this remains the reason I wanted to work in this industry.

Creativebrief: Please share a para on your career to date – specifically talking us through the high points.

Ash Bendelow: I joined Brave about 10 years ago and I think I was the fourth person through the door. I’m grateful to say it has been a very positive journey that I’m proud to have been part of, growing the business from one client to over 50 people, with our work appearing all over the world.

Particular highlights include a Marketing Society Grand Prix for our work on Green & Black’s (particularly as it is one of the few awards voted for by clients rather than just creatives), winning the European creative account for Panasonic, and then, more recently, speaking at the Grand Audi at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity with Dynamo last year, and appearing on the final of the Apprentice with Lord Sugar. Prior to Brave, I’ve always been attracted to smaller start-ups, as I believe your personal growth curve is much steeper and by default you have to be more entrepreneurial to succeed. I started at BDP London before moving to a start-up, Chilli, and then Dynamo (the agency, not the magician, this time!). While there I took on secondments at both Heinz and Sainsbury’s, this client-side exposure providing invaluable experience and helping me to shape the agency proposition and behaviours I champion today.

Creativebrief: What’s unique about your agency / business? Why did you join Brave?

Ash Bendelow: One of the things I’m incredibly passionate about is delivering absolutely on promise. Our proposition, agency story and philosophy are all ruthlessly aligned with how we actually work with our client partners – something that may seem obvious, but can be all-too infrequently implemented, according to some of our clients’ pre-Brave experiences. Our sustainable agency business model, built on strong agency culture and trusted client partnerships, is proven by a lack of churn in our client base over the past decade.

 Specifically for Brave, this means being creatively and commercially courageous. We believe that creativity can lie outside of words and pictures and it is hard-wired into our culture that regardless of department, we think entrepreneurially about the problems our clients face – about brand utilities that drive greater loyalty and propensity to delight rather than just satisfy people – or about new revenue streams for the client and ways to further monetise what they do.

We then find and – where they don’t exist, build – tools to help de-risk brave commercial and creative decision-making. Whether this be our approach to research, with real-world task base initiatives, or our proprietary neuroscience – emotional response tracking – these approaches have the potential to make the brave feel safe, freeing clients to make the big leaps that can significantly grow their businesses.

I joined Brave because of a shared vision to strike the right balance between order and chaos, building a unique depth of agency culture and a focus on entrepreneurial behaviours I’d not seen before.

Creativebrief: Who are the people new to you (either within your business or externally) who have particularly impressed you in the last twelve months?​​​

Ash Bendelow: Our relatively new CMO Helen Weisinger (September 2014 joiner) is a member of WACL (Women in Advertising and Communication London) and I’ve been lucky enough to have been invited along to a couple of their events in the past few months. I’ve been impressed by the work and what they are achieving within the industry.

Secondly, for her passion, belief and self-sacrifice I would reference Eva Wynne. She started a social enterprise, which Brave has been supporting, to fight cyber bullying and online exploitation (see her site at claymedia.org). With nothing but grit, determination and tenacity she is making a difference in local communities in and around south and east London through her workshops aimed at schools, parents and local police authorities. You can’t help but be inspired by people like Eva, and I value the small role we’ve managed to play in helping her to succeed.

Creativebrief: What has been your agency’s best work in the last year?​​​​​

Ash Bendelow: Our global work for El Jimador tequila has been a breakthrough piece of work for the category. Our ‘Mexology’ platform challenges the stale cliché’s and westernised views about how tequila should be marketed and consumed. The work features three artists, whose unique stories are told, before collaborating for an epic event held at the Michigan theatre in Detroit. The work also pays off the huge trust the client placed in us – one example of which was shooting without storyboards, giving us the opportunity to weave artistic welder and ‘creator’ Doyle’s surprise 40ft mechanical fire breathing dragon into the narrative! And, most importantly it has worked. El Jimador is enjoying significant gains especially in North America – the largest tequila market in the world.

Other noteworthy pieces of work we’ve created include the Pink Floyd album cover for The Endless River – playing a role (albeit small) in musical history – and the recently launched RedBull Soap Box digital drag race.

Creativebrief: Industry wide, what work has excited you most this year?

Ash Bendelow: Sweetie – from Lemz in The Netherlands – an obvious choice, perhaps, but I loved everything it stood for and displayed: purpose, craft and innovation, along with social, cultural and political impact. I loved that it came from a smaller indie agency out of Amsterdam where the power of an idea can achieve so much good.

Creativebrief: Who or what inspires you?​​​

Ash Bendelow: I think it’s healthy in this industry to constantly feed your appetite for the new, and to constantly learn. A few weeks ago I visited the McQueen exhibition and regardless of whether or not you’re into fashion the man is an artist whose work inspires. On the opposite end of the spectrum, taking my children to an aquarium, we saw a demonstration of an archerfish that shot jet streams of water above the surface to hit a target of food from beneath the surface. Watching my children’s mesmerised reaction to this, and their ensuring barrage of questions, it struck me that inducing wonder is the key to being inspired.

Elon Musk continues to inspire me with any number of projects he is involved with, like how he very publicly embraces failure for good, and inevitably will succeed with his SpaceX project, right through to Tesla and the breakthroughs they are constantly achieving as the challenger brand of the automotive industry with their electric proposition, as well as his power storage ideas for the domestic market. He’s just a truly inspirational leader who lives, and stays true to, the culture of now. Finally, if you get a spare minute check out Hyperloop – mind-blowing ambition.

Creativebrief: How do you stay in-touch with the industry’s best work and culturally relevant news?

Ash Bendelow: Having started to dip my toe into the speaking circuit over the past year I’ve been fortunate to see some pretty amazing talks and case studies as well as great panel discussions. So being at Cannes Lions, IAB Engage, Eurobest, Dubai Lynx and Adweek US and Europe is a great platform to learn and be inspired – with most of these resources actually appearing free or streamed live. Although it is obviously a little one sided but think with Google is always another great free resource.

Creativebrief: What work or agency from outside the UK do you think is particularly influential?​​

Ash Bendelow: I have to applaud and take my hat off to the likes of 72&Sunny and Droga5 in the US, and I’m a big fan of Sid Lee in Montreal. Then you have outfits like North Kingdom and the more obvious Forsman and Bodenfors out of Scandinavia. What I appreciate about what these types of agencies are doing, especially 72&Sunny, is that they are really pushing the agenda of how brands can truly impact and shape culture, as well as becoming publishers very much in their own right. Scroll through their website and you can be hard pushed to find a traditional 30” spot – a great thing for reshaping the creative landscape.

Creativebrief: What do you think are going to be the main challenges for agencies in the next two years?

Ash Bendelow: To continue to embrace the new – and find ways to hardwire it into established agency processes.  One of the big benefits of being small-to-medium sized is the advantage you can get by being incredibly agile and adaptable. We can introduce new tools that enhance our proposition and make them work incredibly quickly, for the betterment of the agency. It has been simple and incredibly successful to change the shape of our creative department by introducing creative coders into concept teams to offer different perspectives and opportunities at front end of process rather than back end.

To find more ways to move away from time-based remuneration – outcome not output.  Commoditisation of our services remains high on the agenda of most procurement departments in bigger organisations, and they are not always comparing apples with apples in how they look to achieve greater savings – however, the more progressive agencies should be looking to use this as an opportunity to strengthen the types of relationships they have with their clients by having the courage of their conviction in the ideas they have, and be happy putting skin in the game and elevating the conversation above merely time-based payments.

Creativebrief: How do you see the media landscape unfolding in the next five years?

Ash Bendelow: The obvious answer remains the growth of hyper personalisation, programmatic and mobile video.

However what interests me more is the mechanics and technology that is likely to fuel convergence of physical and digital in real-time. How do we embrace, utilise and adopt biometrics in a non-invasive way. Biometrics has the power to give us real-time, scaleable personalisation with an understanding of personal context, converging digital with physical to influence at potential points of motivation.

More simply put, it’s the ability to identify someone enter a store, get an instant data feed on that person, understand their likely behaviour, dependent upon who they’re with or whether they have picked up a trolley or basket etc., and then provide incentives/information to influence behaviour prior to transaction. 

Creativebrief: What’s your attitude to the ‘traditional’ pitch? Do you think there is a better/more modern way?

Ash Bendelow: Pitching is synonymous with this industry and one of the things that makes it pretty unique and exciting. However, discipline and intent is beginning to be more firmly regulated to make things fair and reasonable. I’ve been impressed particularly by the work of the IPA and MAA in raising the awareness of abhorrent pitch practices, providing platforms to report the worst of what we experience. The one big change I think we need to see is procurement involvement should always be completed prior to a creative pitch being requested. Use chemistry to shortlist, be very clear on why an agency has made the shortlist and if the pitch motives are absolutely genuine and sincere the clients should be very willing to commit time to those agencies during the process, because they want to find the best and bring out the best in the eventual winner.

I still think there needs to be more education on client-side to understand the investment and resources that go into pitching from an agency perspective. Even when we do our due diligence on what to pitch and proceed with, we still experience things such as senior stakeholders not making the final pitch at the last minute.

Creativebrief: What’s the best pitch you’ve been involved in?

Ash Bendelow: One of my favourites, as this was because I felt the clients’ motives throughout were completely genuine – to find the best agency partners to produce the best work for the brand – was Motors.co.uk

Everything felt incredibly right – from beginning to end, and it is not often you get the MD asking you to go back a slide because he wanted to take a picture of the key visual there and then. I’m also pleased to report that the work we have done in partnership with that team has been very effective.

Creativebrief: In what ways do you think the industry can change for the better?​

Ash Bendelow: I don’t think there has been a better time to work in this industry. There is more marketing representation on global boards throughout the world, more understanding of the value and role marketing and creativity can play throughout businesses in growing value – and the biggest creative and technology toy box we have ever had to help influence and change behaviours.

I like the agenda of the new incoming IPA president Tom Knox – about creating social good and fully embracing diversity. I don’t think there is a better placed industry to create this change where culture, commerce, education and entertainment now meet.

Creativebrief: What’s the next big thing for Brave?

Ash Bendelow: We have our Brave neuroscience emotional indexing tool up and operational now – and we want to show and share what it can do to more clients. I love the fact that we could get 30 people in a room this evening and index emotional response to creative stimulus in real-time – a great tool to de-risk brave creative decision making.

We have some ambitious ideas for interactive digital on a new brief for RedBull but I can’t say too much more.

Further expansion outside of the UK, as more of our billings are moving that way.