In our always on marketing ecosystem, listening is a skill that is very easy to neglect. Why whisper when you could shout, why walk when you could run, and why make a simple yet brilliant piece of print when you could create an epic three-minute long social video?

For Steve Wheen, Managing Director of distillery, the industry needs to move away from a broadcast model based on always wanting to be heard. He explains, “Listen. You can learn a lot just by listening to the people around you.” Having spent years listening to those around him and gleaning everything he could, Wheen founded distillery four years ago when he turned his passion for the creative industries into the fire to light his own business.

Australian-born, Hong Kong-bred Wheen moved to the UK 15 years ago, following a stint studying jazz performance, film and TV. It was an experience which led him to a career in television commercials in Australia. On moving to the UK, a shift that coincided with the credit crunch, Wheen decided to go back to school, to Central Saint Martins to be exact, where he studied for a master's in design.

Becoming a content studio

During his master's degree, Wheen says he “looked at the design of social video, or online video as it was called back then.” He explains, “As part of that thesis, I talked to places like YouTube about the direction of travel of online video and that really ignited my passion for online and my focus.”

He admits that he “wasn’t technically a Googler” but that working in-house at the tech conglomerate enabled him to truly get under the skin of the behemoth that is YouTube: “[it] helped [me] really see the mechanics of YouTube from the inside and really look at how YouTube was working with brands to create long term content strategies and get the best ROI.”

Once he felt he’d “soaked it all up”, Wheen set out to found distillery, with the aim of remaining “platform agnostic”. Where once the company predominantly produced social video, now Wheen says the focus has shifted: “The agency has widened its focus from just a focus on strategic social video to [becoming] much more of a content studio.”

Crafting a culture

Many of the conversations happening both inside and outside businesses this year have been around culture; both within the creative work and inside the four walls of an agency. For Wheen, “The internal culture for me has always been a real focus.”

Distillery’s unique culture, Wheen believes, comes from his experience working across a myriad of different businesses and industries: “Working in such a broad range of different organisations, when I set up distillery I really wanted to cherry pick all the things in terms of culture that I really liked and to take all of those and blend them to create a culture at distillery that’s really truly creative and collaborative.”

This culture is something that Wheen is looking to replicate out in Singapore where distillery recently opened their APAC office. As he explains, the office is “very much based on our model in London and looking at how our culture translates to our team in Singapore has thrown up all sorts of challenges which is great.”

What’s also essential for Wheen is that each of his employees admit their fallibility; everyone makes mistakes but what’s vital to always fall back on the understanding, as Wheen explains, that “as a team we can fix anything.”

Small but nimble

The size of the agency was also important to Wheen when setting up distillery. He believes the relatively small size of the agency works in their favour as it gives them the agility to work on projects with just days’ notice. “Not many agencies can do that,” he adds.

This has seen the agency work with the likes of Oxfam, WWF as well as on a recent campaign for Lil-Lets that examined how women could reduce the amount of plastic used on their period. After being approached by the brand in 2018, distillery produced all the content for the campaign, running it on social and identifying key influencers. The year-long campaign, in collaboration with Dream Quickly, had a reach of 17.5m as well as an engagement conversion of 51%. As Wheen explains, it is a campaign “that has smashed all their expectations.”

This nimble way of working extends to the way Wheen decided to build distillery, opting to become a content studio “because we can turn around material, really high-quality product very quickly and jump on the back of trends. We’re all about the thinking and the making and the blowing up of content, really making it fly.”

Last year was a celebratory one for the agency, being awarded two Lovies as well as winning video of the year at the British Media Awards. A career highlight for Wheen, who explains, “For me that was a really proud moment that felt like distillery had come of age…it felt like we’d made it somehow.”

Getting out of the echo chamber

Besides running his own agency, Wheen is also an active member of Outvertising, formerly known as PrideAM, the not-for-profit LGBTQ+ advertising lobbying group. He is heavily involved in the Pride Brand Makeover awards and is immensely proud of the impact the awards have had on the industry.

As he explains, “For me it’s about ways of getting out of the echo chamber.” He goes on to talk about the launch of the group’s second iteration of their Outvertising paper, a guide for the industry on how to produce LGBTQ-inclusive advertising for a mainstream audience. The paper was produced to speak to agency and brand leaders looking to diversify their marketing.

For Wheen though, “The real work is actually getting that paper [Outvertising] in front of people who aren’t so engaged in the debate, who perhaps aren’t as aware to really start making a real difference.” He expresses irritation about business leaders who think their work on diversity and inclusion is done: “The thing that bugs me is that whole tick box mentality of yup, I’ve done diversity, what’s next?”

While many agencies talk a good game on the importance of agile marketing, distillery’s growth and international credentials underline the fact that size is no barrier to scale. As the agency model shifts and changes, attributes like speed and nimbleness cannot be underestimated, something Wheen well knew four years ago when the idea for distillery was simply that, an idea.