How to get into a creative career: Mike Beddoes
Meet Mike Beddoes. He's a creative writer and producer who jumped from the glitz and glam of TV and Netflix Documentaries to being a Creative Director in B2B tech.
But guess what hasn’t changed? The heart of his work is still all about telling a good story, whether he's making a documentary or cooking up a marketing campaign.
Give Mike a follow to keep up to date with his latest projects.
Below you’ll find a transcription of this Waddyado podcast. It’s a very enjoyable and insightful listen (and read!). We hope you enjoy!
How to get into a creative career
Claudia: Welcome to the Waddyado podcast, where I sit down and speak with professionals, having honest conversations about their careers, how they got into them, and advice for those looking to follow a similar path. But most of all, telling you, the listeners, what it's really like to do that job.
The idea for Waddyado came about from my own personal experience of not knowing what I wanted to do as a job in my twenties. So rather than wasting time and money on training for a certain profession, I wanted to know what it was really like to do a job. So here I am, interviewing these wonderful professionals for you to learn and pick up on their nuggets of wisdom.
In this episode, we sit down with the creative extraordinaire, Michael Beddoes. With 15 years of producing and creative directing experience, we take a deep dive into how he got started and his why. Having worked with brands such as Airbnb, Deliveroo, Bombay Sapphire, and Heinz he talks about the not-so-attractive side of the creative world, the good stuff, being in-house versus agency, and also the versatility of being a creative director. I hope you enjoy.
Well, Mike, thank you so much for joining the Waddyado podcast today. Absolute pleasure to have you.
Mike: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Claudia: Awesome. So Mike, to give a little bit of an intro here, is a wonderful creative writer and producer with experience in the content TV and film worlds. His experience has taken him on an adventure, which has navigated the worlds of B2B tech companies, global brands like Bombay Sapphire, Heinz, and Skoda, as well as working on Netflix documentaries, YouTube channels, and festival selected films. So an absolute pleasure to have you here.
Mike: Thank you very much. Yeah, that's now you read it back. I now figure out why I have gray hairs. It sounds like a, it sounds like a lot over a short period of time.
Claudia: So, um, without further ado, I kind of want to just jump straight into it. Um, and ask, you know, how would you describe what you do to a living to someone who's not in your field or industry, perhaps, for example, a grandparent or something like that?
Mike: So I've come across this actually with my parents and now by default, my parents' friends, whenever you bump into them and like, Waddyado? And if you attempt to use any of the jargon from marketing world or from the world of broadcast television streaming, they're just lost.
So what I now do is I say, Oh, I'm a, I'm a writer and a producer. So I bring together video and audio projects that either sell something, explain to someone why they need a service or entertain people. in the form of documentary or narrative. So that's my really simple thing. When I was in my last sort of B2B tech job as a creative director, I would always say, you'd have people from inside the structures of even your own company going, so I've seen you on Slack, Waddyado? And then I basically said, if it moves, makes a sound, twinkles, glitters, shines, it's probably come out of my team.
Claudia: I love that you're on the Twinkly team. We're the Twinkly team. So what were kind of the first things that influenced you into moving into that type of career?
Mike: So actually I grew up in the West Midlands at a state school and I remember very specifically saying that I wanted to tell stories or make TV or make film and being told people from our background and our neighborhood don't do that, which was hugely discouraging.
So actually I carried that with me and I still did stuff as a hobby, but I always saw it as just as a hobby. So when it came to university time, I knew I liked writing and I knew I adored weaving a narrative and I did have a love for TV and film. So actually I studied journalism with an eye to becoming a critic because then at least I'd be like adjacent to the thing that I love. And then weirdly, I had a chance encounter with a producer who makes TV in America. He was over here and he became almost like my mentor and I told him what had been said to me and he was just like, you can do whatever you want to do. And we would meet for a coffee every Saturday for months and I'd get sort of film producing 101 off this guy who had made like He'd made 24, the Keith Sutherland TV show. He'd made Supernatural. So he's like really plugged into that TV Hollywood system.
And then he wrote me a letter. I never know to this day, because it was sealed. I don't know what was in it. But I wanted to go and be around people who could inspire me and teach me. And I actually just wanted to be in a room rather than coming out with another degree. I think I wanted to be in a room where I could raise a hand and say, how does this work? Or I'm full of these good ideas. How do I not only monetize them, but how do I turn them into something people actually want to show, buy, stream, you know?
So I signed up for a master's and the master said, you must have an undergraduate in a related film, film studies, film production subject. But I didn't have journalism. And he wrote me a letter to the head of the course. I do not know to this day what he wrote in it, but I had an unconditional offer. to go and do a master's at Royal Holloway. So whatever he wrote was magic.
Claudia: It's not about what you know, it's who you know.
Mike: I mean, yeah, God knows what was in there, probably like a hundred dollar bill and nothing else. So that was cool. And that was the start of it really. And then that, I was around people who, my lecturers had all done it as a career, you know, they were all like full on film and TV makers of some success. So that just kept me going. And then as I came off that course, I thought, right, now you've got to earn money, right? There's no safety net. If you're from a working class background, there is no safety net financially if you can't make this work as a job.
Claudia: Just on the career and degree stuff, so is it essential to have a degree in what you do for a living, considering all your lecturers obviously had been in the game as well?
Mike: Probably not, if I'm being absolutely honest. I think it helped me because I was already, I'd already taken a couple of steps, I was a couple of steps behind people who'd maybe done an undergrad in it. But even as an undergrad level, I think you can self-study. I think if you're creative, you can find other ways to add structure to the madness and find a way to sell it and find a way to utilize it for business or for TV or whatever. So I don't think it is. I think it was important for me to do it for that year to just basically treat it like one giant Q&A session for a whole year and then come out of that with the inspiration and the confidence to do stuff with it. And then my first step into the commercials world was a company called Hoot Comedy. Their tagline was your comedy department for hire. And there were three mates who were just whirring up, going out to big brands and agencies saying, hey, you've got in-house creatives. They know brand and they know activation and they know conversion like the back of their hand, but are they funny? And they would straight up go into rooms and say, from our experience, you're creative writers who go, I'm funny. are not funny in a way that was going to sell a product or make someone think well of your company. So yeah, that was great. And I was hired as their first ever producer. I was there for three years.
Claudia: Fabulous. So within a role as a producer with these guys, so talk me through what a typical day to day would have looked like.
Mike: Uh, coffee at some point, James Rawlings, our creative director at about three minutes past nine with a 9am start would ask everyone what they wanted to do for lunch. Um, and then priorities and then we would jump into like a quick team meeting. What's on the slate of who we're pitching to, what pitch decks do we need to put together? Do they need to see a sample? Do they need to see a script? What we got on the agenda in terms of physically going to their office to meet them. And then if we were in production, my job would be looking at the budgets, the schedule, seeing where we're at. And every day was very different. So one day could be making three different budgets where it's, you know, maximum approach, budget-friendly approach, because they don't quite have the spend and a middle ground. And then tooling up, you know, with crews, casting, uh, even the legal and compliance part that people don't really think about. So, you know, your shoot is, your shoot is worth millions of pounds to the client. It's also worth millions of pounds to the livelihoods and the safety of the people and the equipment on your set. So all of that, the legal side and the compliance side, that was all on my shoulders as well.
Claudia: Yeah, they're not so sexy stuff that people forget about, I guess, when they think about creative careers, they always think about the creative, beautiful parts of it and the glamorous parts of it potentially rather than, you know, actually compliance is very important.
Mike: It really is. The call sheet apparently is the number one piece of evidence that will be brought up if you are ever in a court of law because someone got injured or heaven forbid killed on your set. there you go so what would you say would be um what were like the highlights of that particular role for you it was a really cool dynamic team we were a little bit scrappy like before anyone was really using the term properly like of startup because this is back in you know 2012 Um, we were, it felt it was a startup. Now I recognize what it was. It was, we'd taken a side office alongside a really cool edgy creative agency called lean mean fighting machine. We weren't in Soho, we were in Camden. You know, you're around all these brilliant creative people on the agency side. And you're working in this converted warehouse, you know, by the canal in Camden near Chalk Farm. And you're like, it felt exciting that every day was different. And you'd look up the list of people you were going to meet and you'd be off to see, you know, one day you're off to see Tribal DDB or even MNC Saatchi, all these iconic agency names. And then you'd be in direct to client with someone like Emirates or Coke or, and that was really cool. Um, and you know, Castrol oil was one of my favorite jobs. They literally had a pot of money and said, we want to do a web series about loving your car. So we just brewed up a ton of really fun, silly creative around that. Um, yeah. And then it was my job to take that script, take their budget and like make those two things, you know, bit of bit of alchemy, turn those things into the finished product.
In-house vs agency in the creative world
Claudia: So you've worked obviously in-house and agency side. What are the key elements that are different from both sides of the coin?
Mike: I think they're very similar. I've always thought production company versus agency. For years, I was like, oh, they must be very different. I don't think they really are. I think production company sometimes has to think more about the nitty gritty. the agency will be like the ideas guys. And then there'll be the end of it as well, that how do you seed it? How do you use ad spend to push people to your content? They're experts in that world. And in the production, you're sort of the meat of the sandwich or the middle part, which is, can be the initial idea, can be a bit of writing and then turning that into the finished piece of content. But I think they are almost like having done both of them and work both sides of that wall. I think it's modular. So on one job for one client, it might wholly be on the production company to brew up the scripts and the creative and the agency will just add guidance. You know, the client has said they don't want to see anyone over a certain age. They don't want to see any children in this. They don't want a regional accent. They want an RP London accent because they want to sell globally and you're feeding in. But there are some jobs where it's the complete opposite and the agency creatives are acting like a writer's room and they will literally hand you a finished script and go, client, sign that off, go make it. So it's a very modular thing depending on who you're working with.
Favourite projects worked on
Claudia: Awesome. And what would you say are some of the best or your favourite projects that you've ever worked on?
Mike: Ooh, oh yeah, that's a nice question. I like that one. Happy reminiscing time. I did love the Castrol job. I'm a bit of a car nerd and actually spending a lot of time, you know, we faked a wedding procession with a vintage Rolls Royce in Serb, was that in Serbiton? I think that was in Serbiton. We did a night shoot where, and this was really fun as a producer. The idea in the story was that a granddad, for his grandson's 17th birthday, gives him his Olka. And it's this maroon Clio, you know, the safest car we could think of that with classic wheel trims, very standard car. And the joke was, as soon as the son gets it, he's like, thank you, granddad, you know, I won't do anything silly. And then he drives straight off, he backs into a garage, the shutters come down, and then a time-lapse happens day to night. And as it pulls up, it's like stars in your eyes or like the reveal. It pulls up and there's a load of dry ice in there. and the car is now bright yellow, has a body kit on it, like a Fast and the Furious tuner style body kit, huge alloy wheels and neons underneath. and that transition was great. Having a chat with the company that sources vehicles for us and going, so I need a standard Maroon 1.2 Clio, but I need you to like talk to sort of the max power reading car modifying networks and borrow me exactly the same age and model, but modify to the nth degree. That was fun. That was really good fun actually. Any others? We once had a stuntman dressed as Boris Johnson. Yeah, ready for the Olympics, riding a Boris bike down a bunch of steps, like bunny hopping a Boris bike down some steps for Emirates because they were about to be one of the sponsors of the Olympic games. Uh, we had, yeah, there's been a few and then even going into things like unit. Um, I once had the pleasure of being the lead creative and director on a bunch of idents for Dunlop Goodyear and we got to take over a racing circuit for the day. And I used to do a little bit of motorsport myself, sort of karting and racing and still dabble a little bit. So, um, it was quite funny. Halfway through the day, I had my SFX supervisor go, the driver they've sent from Dunlop, he's not, he's not like hitting the right lines. He's not, he's driving it like a safe driver. So I had a chat. I was like, can you go faster?
Claudia: Yeah, come on, we need some, um.
Mike: It's meant to look like motorsport. It's meant to look like a race car. So I was like, um, can you go? And this guy literally said, Oh no, I'm, I'm really not willing to. I'm the Dunlop tire tester. I drive a hundred thousand safe miles and write long reports on the tires and I'm not really comfortable. So we wouldn't make him do that. Spoke to the track organizers, spoke to the insurers and the final, the end of this story is they lent me a helmet. I signed a waiver. And I, so basically I went from director, head creative and writer to also stunt driver.
Claudia: Honestly, that is a wonderful story about the versatility of being in the creative world. I love that. Also, accolades added to your CV, Racing Driver.
Mike: Yes. Although that story ends in quite a funny way, I'd like to share, and that is we borrowed this car, this Mercedes from Dunlop. And what I was told during this is we've borrowed it from the car pool, so it's one of our staff members' staff cars. And we're harrying it around a racetrack, again, smoking the tires, hammering the brakes. You know, not driving it how it would like to be driven and then it survived the day. It survived the day really well, not a scratch on it. We had it cleaned at the end of the day. We were really happy. So then we go and do another shoot on a beach and we do all the filming on gravel, which could cause damage. And actually that was just normal driving and it was fine. And again, has another clean. We all smile, we all hug, we all have, yeah, that's a wrap everybody. hand the keys back to the representative of Dunlop who was called Sophie, but I won't name her surname because I still speak to her and I don't want to embarrass her. And she jumped in it to drive it back to Birmingham to return it to its rightful owner and backed it straight into a post.
Claudia: Oh no, did you get it in for that or did she? That's the question.
Mike: That's her. I was like, she was like, I'm taking responsibility. I'm going to tell him it was me. But we had done all sorts to that car over about an eight hour filming day and it had come out perfect. And then it was coasting out of a car parking space into a wooden post.
Best parts of a creative career
Claudia: So what would you say? I mean, you've told us pretty, pretty exciting stuff there about your role on a day to day, but what are the best bits of your job?
Mike: Best bits of my job is the variety, the people you meet. Like I've worked with some incredible people and actually more often than not, I've worked with some brilliantly kind, empathetic and smart people who I've learned from in every meeting. And that can be people all the way up to the top of a client who, you know, they sit at board level in a massive company like a Unilever, for example, that literally own everything in your bathroom right now. Or it could be that you're working with these amazing hands-on practitioners. Like I've worked with the most incredible directors of photography who make things look absolutely stunning. Worked with some brilliant writers, some legitimately funny comedians. So it is that variety and range of not only projects, but the people. I think that is the best bit of my job.
And the other bit of my job I love is being sat with someone when a piece of content, and that doesn't matter if it's a TV commercial, a thing you did for YouTube, when it comes up and it makes them react in the way you wanted them to react. So they laugh along with it or they go, how did you do that? Or that often feels like being, it feels like working in magic a little bit and someone seeing a trick and going, how did you get that shot? Or how, you know, so I find that the best bit of my job.
Claudia: Yeah. Taking a concept and delivering on it and just nailing it. Yeah. It's probably very satisfactory. I would have thought.
Winning a webby award
Mike: It's really lovely. It's really nice. And then you get the trade-off when, so it was at SEON Technologies for about nearly three years and we wanted to make, and obviously we're a startup, and I was like with Jimmy, who was the old chief commercial officer, we were like, why don't we do a piece of content that will hide the pain Harold, the meme, because he's Hungarian and SEON started in Hungary. And we'll write a narrative, we'll write a fake documentary starring him. And we'll make it for very little, you know, it was like the camera, the, I think the crew was the Hungarian film crew was like six people and we put it together and we released it. And without, I don't think there was any traditional ad spend. Um, it, the first episode did like 133,000 views and it just really reached out. So that success felt good. And then we thought, why don't we put it in for some content awards? And we were honored at the Webby Awards for that piece of content alongside a piece of content from Netflix and a piece of branded content from AT&T, the cell phone network in the States. I'm not just with my production head on rather than my creative head. I would be willing to bet they probably spent more on lunch on those two projects than we did on the whole production.
Claudia: Just to show that, you know, you don't need a huge budget necessarily to deliver a really hot piece of content. Yeah.
Mike: A good idea is a good idea, I think.
Worst parts of a creative careers
Claudia: So what are the worst parts of your job?
Mike: The worst parts? Warts and all. Warts and all. The biggest one, the biggest headache is if you have a title with creative is that creative is both objective and subjective. It's opinion driven. You can use data to see that something didn't work and not do it again. Or you can see the data worked before and repeat the success or try to repeat the success. But what you can't do is if, especially when you're bringing humor into it, if you're delivering something that has comedy, you could show it to people from the actual comedy broadcasting world to go, that's really funny. You could show it to a CEO who just doesn't get it. So the buy-in is harder because it ultimately creative is based on opinion, even though you can back it up with, you know, analytics. The other part is in physical production.
So you mentioned the glamour of, you know, the film, TV, cameras, lights, but actually, in my experience, nearly all of them, regardless of budget, and I'm going all the way from like half a million quids worth of TV campaign I ran all the way down to a two grand piece of, you know, content. It's an early start. There's never enough time. And there's always a gremlin or something, whether that's an actor's taxi getting stuck in traffic, whether that's the caterers make a mistake and nothing arrives on time. So it's then delaying your 30 hungry crew who are hungry and annoyed anyway, and then you're going to be even later starting in the afternoon. You can't quite get the performance you want and you know you've got 10 minutes to get it or you've lost the light. There's always something. It's either small or it's massive, but there's always something. So I think producers earn their fee in preempting that as much as possible and putting levers in place they can quickly pull when the inevitable happens.
What personality type suits a creative career
Claudia: Thank you for that. So with regards to, I guess, the types of personality that would be a good fit for what you do for a living, in your opinion, what would that look like?
Mike: Calm, both, producers and creative, calm. Calm in production, because like I said, when those things inevitably don't go the way you planned, you need to just go, what do I do next? Not lose your mind. And actually in creative, if you spend months developing an idea and someone who you think is wrong goes, but they're more senior goes, no, no, don't get it. Don't want to do that. You've got to go, how can I change it to make it work for them? Or do we have to start again? You just have to breathe through it almost. So I think a calm demeanor. And I think the ability to see through the noise, and that works in a load of different ways. That works in, there's a lot of voices in a room all with a different opinion. You've got to find a way to cut through that noise or get them all on the same page.
Best advice received from a mentor in the creative industry
Claudia: What was the best advice that you've received from a mentor?
Mike: So my producing mentor, who's a guy called Cyrus Yavne, who was the American I mentioned, who's sadly no longer with us, he said once, everybody in a boardroom or in a writer's room or in a production meeting, it's the same mindset of people in that room. You're going to have people who protect the business interests and the money and people who are there for the creative. And sometimes they all get along. But he said the one thing he's noticed, there's a growing trend of everyone feeling like they have to say something to qualify their own existence.
Claudia: I think that's true in every boardroom or every meeting. There's so much content about that at the moment even, I think, on social media.
Mike: He said, don't be afraid to sit back. and have huge eyes, huge ears and a tiny mouth.
Hiring pet peeves in the creative industry
Claudia: As a hiring manager, when you're hiring for wonderful creatives, what are your pet peeves with regards to CVs, interviewing, anything like that that you find really irritating or that really deter you from hiring someone?
Mike: I think at CV level, I'm more agnostic. I need the information to be clear. But I actually don't care what template you use. I don't care if it was written in, you know, Mac notes and screen grabbed as long as I can read it clearly. Or it could have a funky template, you know, that they've got off Google Drive or Google Docs or Microsoft. Like it doesn't matter to me as long as it's clear.
Claudia: I mean, I obviously, as a recruiter, see hundreds, if not thousands of CVs a year, thousands, in fact, it should be probably hundreds of thousands. And so I've become very quick at assessing what is, you know, impactful. And I think ultimately it's putting out the brand names that you've worked with, probably some key achievements and the impact that you've had within those campaigns that you've maybe been involved with as well. So anything to add on that?
Mike: No, I was going to say once you come to interview, I think be sure, be concise and have in front of you, or at least in the front of your brain, your top, top achievements, which will be the things for me that you are most proud of that actually make you smile when you recall them.
A career move that turned out to be the biggest payoff
Claudia: Oh, I love that. Smile when you recall them. Definitely. Yeah. Wonderful. What is the one career move or decision you made that you thought was risky that turned out to be the biggest payoff?
Mike: Right now, I've got two. So the one I did that springs to mind immediately was joining SEON. And the reason I say that is because up until that time, I'd split my time on the very hard B2C side of things, on the TVC, global, out of home, like the large campaigns with the brands like the Bombay Sapphires, the Heinzes, the Vanishes of this world. And post-pandemic, just an opportunity that I wasn't, I didn't apply for it, I wasn't chasing it, but through someone in my network. They said, it's a startup, it's B2B. And I was like, I've never been in a startup. I've never been in a B2B and I've actually never been in house at a brand. I've always been working for them, but I've never been. And they're like, oh, that doesn't matter. We just want someone to build the content slate of video, audio offerings, take stuff we're already doing on a really small level and like tool it up with freelancers so we can do more of it. And I was like, I was really in two minds about taking that job. And I think I remember. saying to my now wife, who at the time going, but it's B2B. I've never been that side of things. And I'm not disparaging B2B at all. It's just not my world. And she was like, yeah, but look, we've come out of a pandemic lockdown and you were saying you wanted to try something new because you've been going out your mind for 18 months with not much flow of work. Why don't you at least give it a try? Just be honest with them. and give it a try. So I gave it a try. And I was like, first day, it's gonna be really hard to get my head around this. I don't think I'm built for this world. And then after a week, I was like, it's slowly coming. It's building up. I think we can do something cool here. And I think they listened to good ideas above all else, which was good. And then it kind of clicked. I remember at the end of week two going, I'm actually really enjoying this now. However, I think I'm going to do a year. I'm going to get them on their feet and then I'm going to hand over to someone who is of this world. And I was there for about three years. So that's how that one turned out. Yeah, we got a Webby, two Lovey awards in terms of like the content awards people were heard of. And then two Davey awards, which are usually given to, they're called Daveys because David and Goliath, they're usually given to agencies. with an income below a certain financial threshold. But because we were a startup and we fitted the budget cap, but we weren't an agency, they still considered us and we won two golds at their awards. So that was decent. And then the next one is happening right now. So this is like live feedback. And while looking for my next adventure, I actually got speaking to sort of a well-regarded TV comedian and presenter, a really well-known in history circles historian, and one of my old friends who's actually a writer, BAFTA-nominated writer and performer, and we have a passion for World War II history. And we decided to buy a small amount of kit, like camera kit and drones, and use a small amount of our own money to train ourselves to get us up to scratch. Like I can already film a little bit, but get really up to scratch, get certified in flying the drone practice with the idea that as a four, two in front of the camera and two behind, we'll start a YouTube channel. and a content stream that also will have social channels and like a multi-channel offering that is about taking people to places of import during World War II.
Claudia: I love that. Well, everybody watch this space. Watch out for Mike's new YouTube channel covering wonderful historian World War II stuff and it sounds very exciting. Thank you. Let's help with the hard questions on some salaries. So for anyone who's looking to get into a creative career or pivot, maybe they have some skills that they can use and utilize to pivot into a more creative career. What are the salaries like? Let's get to the juicy stuff, you know, like from junior level to maybe like a head of creative level, maybe producer. Can you just roll through what salaries people could expect to make?
Mike: Absolutely. So if you go in house at a production company and they're making commercial or branded content, if you start at sort of a junior producer or a junior creative, you're probably looking in the mid twenties, mid 20 thousands, somewhere in that zone. Uh, if you come up to a full on producer, you'd be looking to edge to 30 early thirties. Then if you become a senior, I would say you're looking somewhere between 35 and 45. If you keep scaling up that you could go, if you're looking in play things that have titles like head of content or head of production or head of creative, you're looking somewhere in and around the 50, 65 mark and then up into creative director. So creative director in a brand, B2B and B2C is fairly standard and you're looking somewhere between 80 and 120. That's a huge range, but it depends on the size of the team you manage. It depends on the scope of the work. How much are you putting out?
Common myths in the creative industry
Claudia: Alongside, obviously, salaries, I think it's really important to get some more insights into some myths or common myths that circulate with regards to the creative industries. So can you tell us a common myth and maybe dispel what that myth is?
Mike: A common myth? Oh, I've got one. So the one I always hear and hear from people who really should know better is that creative is really easy in a way because you can literally just make anything up and it will work. Which is stunning as an opinion, because actually behind creative is such a, it is such a silly title because behind it is data metrics, learning, looking at what your competitors are doing, looking at what people in completely other industries, but that are adjacent to yours are doing. And that's everything. from the brand book that contains the colors to the font you use. And then there's even discussions about, well, this successful company doing something similar-ish to what we're doing have succeeded with this. So do you follow their path or do you go completely the opposite way to stand out? If everyone's doing really serious explainers, why don't we do a comedy? Like it's all about those discussions. Then, only then do you get approval to take a route and to start physical production. And even then, some things don't catch fire. I can say the things I've made, you know, some of them for every award win, there's one that does not have the sales conversion or the HubSpot influence in income or the, I don't know, even the acclaim of people saying nice things about it internally. Like if you do creative, you're always some element of risk. And I think that we're in a place where If you, if you understand that from the get go, it won't completely crush you. When you hit that first, that didn't quite work out how I wanted to.
Advice to get into the creative industry
Claudia: And so that takes me nicely on to, you know, what three actual steps would you recommend to those looking to get into your industry?
Mike: Early on, if you're early in your career, be around creative people. Go to anything you can that inspires you or that is within your network and watch all you can. So that's everything from attending a talk by a leading creative or watching a web series by someone who won a CanLion. I think walls are descending. So within that, that can even be watch a movie that inspires you and figure out why it works for you. Or watch a TV show that everyone is absolutely slating and figure out why it doesn't work for them. So the why it works and why it doesn't. Start too early in your career, be around people who can teach you things, but also be around content and the delivery of stories that can teach you about the success and failure as a measurement. There's some great LinkedIn threads I follow at the moment. I will put them, I'll give them to you after so you can put them in the description. But every week they're like the best pieces of advertising, social or content I've seen that week. and why. And I find even just analyzing, Surreal, Surreal Cereal are smashing it at the moment with their social stuff. They don't have a big team. I don't think they have a huge budget, but they're doing this kind of subversive cheeky tone of voice that's really stretching their reach and really working for them. I don't think we ever truly got back to full 100% even though the pandemic was a while ago now. And then we've had financial pressures on top of that. So for example, anyone looking to find a role in production or in creative, last month was awful. I think I saw one using my LinkedIn premium. I saw that one job that was a mid-weight role in production had something stupid like 612 applications. Wow, that's a lot of applications.
Claudia: Which is huge.
Mike: So standing out in that, you might be the one, but you're actually, it goes from being considered against 50 good candidates and you could be one of them. At those odds, it's almost like playing a bingo or a lottery because you could so easily get overlooked.
How to stand out from the crowd in the creative industry
Claudia: So what would you advise for people to stand out from the crowd?
Mike: Go for the direct approach. Creative and production is all about people. Yeah. So actually a blank document can tell you how brilliant you are at one thing or five things, or it can sell your skills as a document. But I do think investing in, I've just gone back to it actually, LinkedIn premium, where you can reach out to people who aren't in your network. Find people at agencies or brands that you really think are great. Say hello, ask if you can go for a coffee.
Claudia: Totally agree with you. Couldn't agree more. Great stuff. And what three resources would you recommend people getting into the industry?
Mike: Breaking in, the basic one I've mentioned already is LinkedIn or LinkedIn premium, just because you get a wider access to places. Even if you go to a paid for event, there's going to be 30, 40 people there. LinkedIn is infinite. It's the whole globe in your laptop. So that's a good one. I endorse that one. Yeah. If you specialize, get really into your specialism. So mine, and this will make me feel old now, mine was global TVCs, but actually it's rapidly evolved into YouTube. But if you are like, if you love TikTok, if you're a TikTok specialist, live and breathe it, see what's working, see what's not. Because actually that platform particularly moves so fast that what worked three weeks ago might not work today.
Claudia: Yeah, amen to that.
Mike: Because everyone jumps on it and it kills the algorithm. So then someone has to try something new. Again, it's the cutting through the noise. I'll come back to that phrase. You've constantly got to be thinking. So get really into whatever platform your creative output is, even if that's print, get really into seeing what's out there on banners, on tube adverts, on billboards, just really put your head into that. And then the other one in terms of resources, there is actually a book or it's a book series I will recommend. And I think if you're any kind of storyteller, so that's, it could be anything. It could be literally writing films and narrative TV all the way to advertising in a branded content video way. There's a series of American books called Save the Cat. It started as a structure book for people who wanted to write feature films of either 90 pages or 110 pages. But that series has kept evolving. So you can get Save the Cat Writes for the Stage, Save the Cat Writes for TV, Save the Cat Writes a Novel. But what it will do, I've read all of them. I'm not a novelist and I've never read, I've never read, I've never written a play and I'm never gonna write a play. It's not my medium, but I've read those books Because what it does is it gives me a really deep understanding of structure of storytelling. And it will at least give you some hints and tips at what are the common denominators in storytelling.
Claudia: Brilliant. I love that. Such good little insights from that. And also, I'll pop the link in the comments and in the description below. So amazing.
Most unusual interview question you’ve ever had in the creative industry
Claudia: Finally, what is the most unusual interview question that you've ever had?
Mike: Oh, good question. I know what it was. I won't name the company, but I had made, I'd written and directed a piece of content for Deliveroo, which starred Jack Whitehall. And I kid you not, I walked into an interview ready to answer questions on, you know, how do you assess the success or failure of a piece of content? What content inspires you? What are your budgets like? Can you operate on a smaller? I expected like actual hard questions and no jokes. They opened with, what's Jack Whitehall like in real life?
Claudia: Wow. Yeah.
Mike: So that's the weirdest question. Cause it completely threw me completely. I was like, um, he's lovely. He's a really talented, lovely, sweet man. Um, yeah. Anyway, next.
Claudia: Well, that's quite a nice little late night. I probably dropped your guard a little bit. Potentially.
Mike: It could have been a nice icebreaker. It was a nice icebreaker, honestly, but I was not. I think I got so, they were B2B, so I got very fired up for hard, you know, stats questions. And I was completely wrong footed by, yeah, what's he like in real life?
Claudia: Awesome. Well, Mike, it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on today. So thank you so much for joining. I hope all of the insights have been very helpful to everyone and I'm sure they have been. So thank you.
Mike: Thank you so much for having me.
Claudia: A pleasure. Thank you so much for listening to the Waddyado podcast. Whether you're looking for a job or ready to find your latest inspired hire, head over to waddyado.com or click the link in the description. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button and share with anyone you think would love this episode.