What’s wrong with BMF?
BMF, one of the best ad agencies of the last decade has gone off the boil, argues Robin Hicks.
There is a sinking feeling you get as a marketing trade hack when it is finally appropriate, after months of chronicling their decline, to describe an ad agency as ‘troubled’ in a story you’re writing about them.
Most recently, it was a description applied by pretty much the entire trade press to The (now dead) Campaign Palace.
I should be clear that it is not appropriate to describe BMF – for many years one of Australia’s leading creative lights – as ‘troubled’. But at the same time, it would struggle to lay claim to currently being Australia’s best agency.
A detailed analysis Robin.
Here’s one for free:
The secret to agency success is to make really good ads.
Over and out.
When Peter Clemenger sold a minority of his agency to BBDO in 1972, he (unselfishly) took the opportunity to establish the share scheme that still, after 40 years, makes Clems the place to be for loyal staff with skin in the game. How much of a business legacy did the sale to Photon leave? How many of the staff now have a personal stake? Possibly a missed opportunity to ensure the future of a great business?
H-Boy is on to it. Stop with this faddish business modeling, photography studio and content team revenue experiments and get back to what made you great – advertising. Oh and trying to tempt back a few of the people who helped make you great probably wouldn’t either, although somehow I doubt they’d come. Momentum, good or bad, is a very hard thing to arrest. Good luck BMF, I hope you can turn it around before a fourth successive redundancy round is needed.
Just goes to show that advertising and the Kay-os theory don’t work
Yes some great people have left, but there are lots of great people still in the building. That is a body of great work there, creative and effective. Obviously the BPAY video is not an ad.
“indeed are any of Australia’s top shops really firing at the moment?” Good point. Can we expect a series of What’s wrong with articles? You could start with Monkeys, Mojo, Clems Sydney, Whybin, Host, BWM…
DT,
BMF is the market leader. That’s why they deserve to be looked at more closely.
Just make ads? really? wow. good luck to you my friend. because it is a sad day when clients are more innovative than they’re agencies. ad effectiveness is on the decline, agencies globally are struggling.
Unless agencies like BMF continue to evolve their business models we will all die a slow death. I congratulate BMF for it’s desire to innovate, I also respect their courage for knowing when things are and aren’t right. It’s a good article, but i think there is a lot more to come from BMF.
Um, er, Rob I think the overall thrust of this piece is that you are already dying a slow death (at least you’ve developed a tumor that the medical profession can’t identify, not good). You’re from BMF I take it? The point being all that other stuff is all well and good, provided the agency is performing, and it’s not. Off the boil is a good assessment, so then it becomes hard to look at everything BMF is doing and make sense of it. Get back to great ads (in any bloody channel). And to your last point, I hope there’s more coming to. It’s op/ed pieces like this one, and also some hard self assessment within prompted by some ‘concerned citizens’ that kicks BMF back in to gear. And hopefully someone will stop delivering koolaid to the BMF boardroom. They seem to be drinking way to much of it. Enough of the backheels and scissor kicks, get back to completing some passes.
I’d say that what BMF seems to have done is a pretty good lesson in what an agency (or any business for that matter) should NOT do. Sure, innovation is great. That’s what used to make them the benchmark. Then they forgot what and who made them great.
I’m with Rob.
‘Just making ads’ is perhaps too simplistic of a response. Agencies locally and globally are all in the same boat, and they should be asking ‘what now guys?’.
Only the smartest and bravest agencies will change themselves in order to create the new demand in our industry.
Good on ya BMF.
Actually now that you post all those ads together in the one place they’re actually pretty good.
Half of this is ‘information’ is fiction. Hicks is about right.
Tabloid journalism at best.
You’re better than this Mumbrella.
Um…. The ads you show are pretty good….I think they are just warming up when you look at this batch… U wouldn’t find this consistency in such a short amount of time elsewhere
Things go in cycles and if anything, watching the work shows promise not defeat
As for the bpay thing, well…. Um.. It isn’t an ad
BMF’s work is always above average. And you can’t beat Guillards’s Beefgiving, Lamb or Solo. They are just in a chage of era.
I’m really surprised by this post.
Not because from my little knowledge there isn’t some facts sprinkled in here, but because there are so many half-truths, un-truths, and general lack of proper fact verification that it loses a lot of credibility.
Phoenix and FromTheInterwebs,
You know we can see your IP address, right? You’ve got a bit more than “a little knowledge” haven’t you?
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
I have to say, that I loved the Solo ad when it came out! It really took me back to the original feel of that brand… and no, I’m not a BMF’er… I’d say this article may help them to re-evaluate things and come back stronger.
That’s funny Tim. You mean BMF’ers can’t speak up here? My IP will tell you I respect BMF more than tabloid journalism.
Hi Dean,
Everyone’s welcome to have a say, but as with any other story, I do call people out if they seem to be attempting to mislead people to think they are a disinterested third party when they are not. “We”, not “they” goes a long way towards transparency.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
BMF appears to be ‘Blowin Money Fast’.
Check it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdTAlbL72W8
This entire proposition of going-off-the-boil is based on creativity right? That means on awards, right? These ads that aren’t funny or clever enough for award judges around the world may in fact be working their buts off. How can you declare an agency “once great” on the basis off creative awards? Creatively, they haven’t got worse, they’ve just been caught out. The Lambassador campaign was painfully trite right from the start. The deer were a creepy visual wank with no emotional engagement and so on and so on. But, if these ads get great brand or sales results then BMF are a great agency.
Who’s BMF?
The fish rots at the head. BMF = Weak leadership.
Boring Mediocre Factory
I would argue that most people in the industry would want BMF to get back to doing well, being on top and being an agency to be reckoned with. No one wants to see them go down, under or produce work less than their best.
As an ex BMFer I hope that the ship turns around and turns around fast. I think the article is fair, but I also think that the people that are still at BMF would be working hard to bring about the innovation and change required to put this agency back on top.
The leadership there (new and old) and all the staff are some of the hardest working, amazingly talented bunch of people around. I wish only good thoughts to them all and I hope 2012/2013 is the year of comeback!
I’d like to see more op ed articles about agencies. Just be careful with facts – seems Robin has of late certainly stirred the pot with enero pieces.
Have to also agree with @ Peter Rush wholeheartedly re: creative vs effective however.
I find these poorly timed (meaning deliberately) opinion pieces unpalatable, it’s Telegraph journo SOP to a tee and would be inexcusable from mUm except in this case, it’s mostly true. BMF will undoubtably survive, theyre mot the Palace, but just as undoubtably things will get worse (perhaps much worse) before they improve. Simple facts are these, they’ve fired, retrenched or allowed to leave too much talent to not have an impact. The new people, particularly at the senior levels (for they are the only ones that matter) aren’t firing. Im not even sure theyre awake Something’s got to give. Either that or Melhuish will double tap the entire Board and bring in a FIFO ad squad from Brazil. But I think we all hope it doesn’t come to that and BMF turns this whole thing around. I do.
pro BMF = yawn
I take it you’re a disgruntled ex-BMFer. Poor you.
Robin,
along the theme of not misleading people, isn’t it true though that the BPay film isn’t an ad at all but is targetted purely towards an internal audience?
Hi Nick,
The language in that BPAY work is addressed to consumers – my sense if it was intended for an internal audience it would talk about them (as most sizzle reels do).
I see that it’s had nearly 1000 views since being uploaded by the agency to YouTube. I suspect that those are not an internal audience.
It’s also cut to precisely 30 seconds.
Certainly, it may not be a TV ad – but it looks like a message for consumers to me.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
This article is tenuous at best. It’s like saying that there’s something wrong at the Brisbane Broncos – they’re still in the top eight and churning out wins, but that doesn’t mean that Gus Gould goes out and writes a pre-emptive post mortem about their season when there’s nothing really awry.
Sure BMF have gone out and looked at new ways to innovate their business model and I genuinely take my hats off to them for it. But to allude that the sum of the managerial decisions are resulting in sub-par work is frankly a poor estimation of the state of their agency, and the state of the industry in general.
I agree with someone above that the body of work you’ve posted on this page is actually reasonably strong across a pretty diverse portfolio of clients. Toohey’s is particularly average, yes, but anyone with a bit of industry nous can sniff out an agency has to work with the best of what they’ve been given at any point in time. Not every campaign’s going to be a firecracker. Take a peek at industry-darlings D5 for that, and there’s no finger-pointing there.
Guys, the worst part is that you ran this story from an editorial point-of-view when it was a question that no-one really asked and it probably made a lot of hard-working people kinda sad about their job. The last time an editorial “think-piece” was run on this site that seemed vaguely news-worthy half the industry was baying for one poor girl’s head. Let’s report some industry news.
i used to really respect BMF as a place that was genuinely leading the way in terms of Australian communications. The BPay Bingo idea has to be the ‘turkey’ of the year – i saw the bus stop poster last week and thought to myself ‘i wonder what crappy little shop put out that rubbish’ – couldnt believe it when i saw it was BMF….just goes to show what happens when you drop your creative standards and ‘let one get out the door’ just to keep a client with a stupid idea happy…
Lets be clear on two things.
1. When an Agency sells to a holding company it goes through a state of flux – maybe see how quiet Host is at the moment; the people in charge push the profit not the work to get their earn-out and then when they leave there is clearly going to be a great deal of change as the company needs to find its feet again. Seems like this is happening and as an industry we should support our better brand names as our industry will be worse off without them.
2. Apart from the said owners of the company and probably the Garretts and Langleys nobody who has left in the last few years has gone on to better things so maybe it was time for that talent to leave so they could spend more time blogging on sites like this and maybe we should give the talent coming in from overseas a chance as its only good for our market if we can continue to attract seemingly top talent from elsewhere.
Well I’d still go and work there if asked
i agree wholeheartedly with Matt. This article was nothing more than a kick of the hornet’s nest for pretty transparent reasons. Nasty tabloid ‘tall poppy’ stuff with no care nor consideration of the BMF staffers who’d feel pretty sucky about the offending article and the comments stream.
and for what? So Mumbrella can serve up some beefier stats to its advertisers.
If nothing more this piece was a reminder that media is a business like any other
Unlike most people who comment on this blog, I am more than happy to put my name to whatever I write. Anonymity is nothing to be proud of. Now that’s off my chest … Tim what is the point of an article like this? Did you pay Robin Hicks for this contribution? I have read it over and over and I still can’t understand what you are trying to achieve. At best it’s a bad attempt at putting a spin on someone leaving the agency and at worst , it’s the senseless derision of a successful business that has a client list and a creative history that most agencies would die for. Tim, if no one else says it, I will. Mumbrella is fast becoming the toxic waste dump of advertising journalism in Australia. You can do better than this. How about celebrating the craft of advertising and marketing, rather than wasting valuable pixels peddling scuttlebutt, ex-employee vitriol and rumour mongering.
Hi Doug,
Thanks for your comment. To your first question – yes, Robin was paid for this contribution in that he is the managing editor of Mumbrella, so receives a salary from us.
Robin was also the author of the book we published just over a year ago, the Mumbrella Creative Agency Review. In that publication, he researched and wrote about Australia’s top 30 ad agencies. You may recall that at the time, as Robin mentions in his piece, BMF scored most highly. To your point, that’s not a bad example of us celebrating the craft of advertising and marketing.
Robin was honest in his assessment then that BMF deserved to top the list back then, although you’ll see it came with the caveat that there was a question over momentum as the new management bedded in.
He is just as honest in his reluctant assessment now that the market leader is not at present at the top of its game.
I should be clear. There was no falling out with BMF before this was published. There is no hidden agenda here – we like the personnel of BMF and hope the agency gets back up to the pinnacle it was once at. As Robin observed, agencies do go through peaks and troughs. Unreservedly, we wish them well.
This piece did not come out of the blue – it’s on the back of a series of conversations in the office going back some time as a number of piece of work have emerged that don’t live up to the agency’s high standards.
Before writing this piece, Robin made contact with Jeremy Nicholas and we delayed publication until Jeremy could come into our office and give us his perspective, which took place on Friday.
Only at that point, did Robin share his views. I’d challenge you to read his piece again. There is no derision, no scuttlebutt, no vitriol, no rumour.
Your note suggests a misunderstanding of our role. It is not to make agencies happy, although if that happens, it is a positive by-product. It is to honestly tell it to our readers how we see it.
When the institution is as respected and liked as BMF, being the first to publicly criticise is a tough call to make. But that’s our job.
I note that you are not saying that Robin is mistaken. By all means disagree with his conclusions. But please don’t claim he is not qualified or entitled to draw them.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
It’s a shame to be watching a once-great agency brand/business in this situation, but not overly surprising.
Business cycles happen and there is little anyone can do about them – you can’t be the flavour of the month forever. And when you’re on top, the only way to go is down, and suddenly you are defending, not forging ahead.
And let’s face it, this is an extremely fickle business and lots of decisions are made on pretty loose criteria – “that Hansel, he’s so hot right now.”
I’ve peeked inside BMF and one thing I never understood was the Aldi scenario – a sweat shop within an ivory tower never made sense to me. Though it appeared Aldi’s rivers of gold funded some indulgent creative work for other clients. This is not a sustainable scenario.
Domino’s was in the same category – where’s the pride and holding firm to criteria that protects the integrity of the business (clients that want us do brilliant work for them), as opposed to chasing money for it’s own sake by regurgitating the same-old same-old pizza ad dross?
I also thought the photo/production studio (branded BMF no less) was completely at odds with what the agency stood for – why the hell didn’t they call it Acme Studios and hold it at arms length?!
For all that, these guys aren’t dumb, they’ll be back.
My two cents would be they’ve been on the decline creatively for a long time. When Dylan was in charge of integrated and Warren still on the creative ‘board’ they were firing on all cylinders. Sure there were a few things that were ridiculously silly, such as harvesTED, but that stuff still had awesome production values and a strong digital / integrated approach.
The coffee moment without the moment was possibly the last thing I saw that I really liked. But there’s been some stinkers as well (Amaysim anybody? Barbie girl?). They’ve just done some ok stuff for athletes foot, but it’s nowhere near the ‘we gave blood’ or the tongue ad, or even stolen glasses or ducks (even if those two were a little scammy).
I think it all comes down to where the business is focusing itself at the moment. If your aim is to maximise profit, you’ll cut creative resource, giving them less time to develop an idea and cut production values, which leads to incredibly bad advertising. If your goal is to leave at the end of your buyout period, I can see why you’d do that.
I disagree with any comparison to a BBH in Australia. Glue Society are heading into directing and BMF is being bought out and the founders stepping back. John Hegarty has only now just stepped down after 30 years, and are only being bought out now under strict terms.
And maybe that’s the difference.
Who’s Gary?
Who’s Barry, Barry.