When Production is Paramount: How Superbloom Rebuilt the Creative Pipeline

Orlando (00:10)
thanks for doing this. I’m really excited to chat with you because A, you’re a friend, you’ve been a mentor to me, you were the person who sort of got me out of the editing room and into being a producer. So you very quite literally changed my life. You know, and now you’re a client at Koobrik Labs and, and you know, I’ve been really

getting to see what you’re doing at SuperBloom up close. Because it seems to me that you’ve kind of taken all of the most difficult things and put them together and actually made them work. know, the kind of production company agency strategy brand consulting hybrid with robust production pipeline and all, and the creative collective.

can you just start by explaining what SuperBloom House is and what it does?

Tom Dunlap (00:56)
Well, the positioning of SuperBloom is we are a creative company and production company built to unearth the unexpected. so my business partner is Bryony McCarthy and she and I met at a previous company called Hecho Studios, which was born out of 72 and Sunny. And we’re sort of an unlikely pair that was put together.

I come from production and both on the agency side, as you know, Orlando spent years on the physical production side, working with Ridley and Tony at RSA and Scott Free and across their companies. Briny’s, but always around marketing and advertising and brands. Briny’s journey was a little bit different. She, again, always around brands and marketing, but from the media side. And at the time that she and I met,

we were both looking at the industry and there was this fundamental change that was happening with the way that brands were communicating to their audiences and their consumers. Advertising was still alive and well, 30 second spots, six second spot, print ads and out of home and all those things still to this day, still very relevant in the media mix. But there was this whole other world that was happening with the multi-channel networks, the machinimas and

all the MCNs that were popping up around Buzzfeed and Virtue and Vice and Fox, right? These were all, these were new channels of communication for brands and ones that were taking a huge share of the storytelling and the marketing opportunities that we were doing on the advertising side.

we both noticed that one agencies to traditional ad agencies were not taking advantage of those spaces. They weren’t thinking about digital and social content. They weren’t thinking about publishing. They weren’t thinking about partnering with creators that were to amplify their stories, not just influencers, but the types of people are making the work. That’s where Vice had so much value is

they were creating content for an audience by people that were in those audiences and about people that those audiences were interested in. And so there was this giant hole in the market and we saw a brand shifting media dollars into those spaces. And both of us saw that opportunity and we kind of looked around the landscape of advertising and there really wasn’t a company that was successfully sitting in the middle between those two.

There were ad agencies still doing ad work. There were publishers doing publishing work and working directly with brands, but there really wasn’t an entity that was bridging that gap and also doing it through the lens of what was right for the business objectives that our brands were trying to get across. And so that was really the opportunity that she and I saw when we founded SuperBloom coming out of our previous company. And we really looked at it as a way to redefine how brands

create and produce content in an ever-changing media landscape. We saw the opportunity to really build a company that really seamlessly blended the idea of creativity through the voices and the lens of the people that were speaking to consumers through those channels and blending that with a production entity that was built to execute that work and deliver those bold unexpected ideas.

through the correct strategic lenses that brands need to solve their business challenges. So that was really the impetus of SuperBloom and what where we started. It was really first and foremost, creative and production coming together to deliver those types of solutions to those brands. Then we had to figure out how we do that and built a creative and a production model.

Orlando (04:30)
what I find very interesting is that normally when you start a company that’s a little bit different shape, usually it’s different in only one of its sides And that’s your then USP. What’s remarkable to me about SuperBloom is that it does quite a few things all at once, which is usually a recipe for a disaster. But like you have this creative collective, a very cool

creators and producers and and people who have people like Diablo Cody and people who you know have been writers and filmmakers and music producers So you work on both project basis as well as having long-term strategic relationships with brands so you’re building their strategy as well as executing the the productions which as well as

is two different ways of even coming at your own business Then you also are doing all your own post-production and post-production workflows. It’s very interesting to me that you’ve kind of taken on all of those things at once.

Pretty much every producer at some point over a beer has been like, you know what we should do? We should have a company where we just have this like list of great creative people that we work with and we can draw on for any number of things. And you know we should do? We should start an agency that’s production first. And you know what we should do? We should handle all of our own post-production and bring that in-house so that we’re doing all of our media end to end. And so many people have started trying to do any one of those things as a USP and failed. And that actually you’ve succeeded by doing all of them at once, which seems…

both counterintuitive and incredibly difficult.

Tom Dunlap (05:58)
Yeah, it really is interesting. It is a very difficult model because our industry, the craft and the creative and the work is still the thing. You can have all the best strategy. You can think about all the high, mid, low funnel work. You can program the shit out of it. You can spend a ton of money making it and a ton of money putting into media to boost it and get it out to the world.

But at the end of the day, if it’s crappy content, then it’s not gonna work, right? So while, you know, a big thing for me has always been talent. You know, I grew up in this industry working in incredible ad agencies like Chiat Day and Wieden Kennedy, where craft was at the center of everything we do. And there’s a whole industry built around servicing that craft. And for so long,

It did a great job. The commercial production industry did an incredible job at servicing agencies and bringing new and interesting and relevant directorial and creator talent into the fold. But that’s also a very narrow lane. And I always found it a little bit crazy for producers when you just rely on someone else’s point of view for the work. Hollywood doesn’t work that

Hollywood is about developing not only creative but developing the type of people you’re working with and there are no handovers. There’s no pass-offs like there are in advertising. There’s no like writer and art director sitting in a room going, okay we did our job time to hand it off to the director to do theirs. No, the writer and the director and all that they start at the very beginning. So I always found that to be kind of crazy that

you wouldn’t involve the people that are making the work from the very beginning of a project. And if you could find a way to condense and combine that process of the development of work with the people that are gonna make it, that just felt like a really strong model, right? And one that we’ve put into practice in other ways. I was working at RSA, we had this incredible roster of talent.

And there was a production model that was being fed, right? By brands and by agencies. But then there was all these brands that were coming to us, like from the outside going, I want what Ridley and that team of people are doing. How can I access that world without an ad agency, right? I’ve got my ad over here, but I need a reality show or I need a documentary or I need a digital series. I need an explainer video. need.

Orlando (08:25)
Right.

Tom Dunlap (08:34)
something but I want it done well and I need to, I wanna work with the people that are doing that.

They want to work with brands. They see an opportunity to play and experiment and expand their storytelling, but they didn’t know how to get brands and brands didn’t know to get to them. so just harnessing the power of that world, we were making incredible things. We were making documentary features and shows and developing video games. And I sort of saw like, there’s this whole world left to be harnessed that our colleagues in the commercial production industry aren’t tapping because they’re not relevant to tap in a business model.

And so when I got into this model at SuperBloom , being able to harness that power and to tap those alternative creative voices sort of made a lot of sense when you are trying to harness culture. You’re trying to harness the conversation that’s happening in digital and social channels. Why would you go to a commercial director whose whole soul craft is making commercials?

when you’re trying to build a digital content series for, know, that looks and feels like entertainment that that consumer might be engaging with, you know, on, you know, whatever form they are out in the world, why not call that person and see if they wanna do the work, right? And so we found ourselves gathering this community. Like that was how we, that’s how we, that’s how we got our work done, right?

Orlando (09:39)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Dunlap (09:55)
And it was not only a survival tactic, but it was also a creative tactic. By bringing in show runners like Evan Rosenfeld to work on the NFL, this is a guy that’s made like five 30 for 30s all around ESPN’s football storytelling. Why not bring him into an NFL project to get under the skin, like true authentic storytelling around NFL football players? Or we’re doing a content series around menopause. Why wouldn’t we go to documentarian

women who tell incredible stories, you know, from the point of view of women that are experiencing this. Like those people aren’t available in the open market. You’ve got to tap, you got to find them and harness them, tap them. So that was sort of, you know, as we saw that happening with SuperBloom and sort of accessing that network, we decided to formalize it. And that was really the creative collective. And that is the creative collective and how we do it. But.

In order to activate those people, you’ve also got to activate all those production things around it. You got to have a full service production team, you know, to shoot it, to produce it. And you got to have post-production. Otherwise, you know, you’re just, you know, just going out the door and handing off. This way you have control over it. You have control over the product. You can invest where you need to invest. You can push back where you need to push back. And you always know where the dollars are

Orlando (11:12)
you mentioned in there, you obviously you spent time at Ridley Scott and Associates RSA being an executive producer one of the first people I knew to kind of move into that world of starting to do entertainment, but also really blending, you know, on what we now call branded entertainment.

But to be honest, I’ve always kind of felt that branded entertainment is the hardest thing to do. mean, making entertainment, mean, something that people really want to seek out and watch is incredibly hard. People are trying to do it every day and a lot of things fall flat. Making good branded things that not only work as something to watch, but also have a

brand identity associated with them, a, you know, brands values and messaging and positioning associated with it. That’s incredibly hard making a piece of media that does that. Doing branded entertainment seems like the hardest of both of those things sort of brought together to make something exponentially hard.

Tom Dunlap (12:07)
what I learned about branded entertainment back then and what we know now is, entertainment is still such a valuable thing for audiences, right? And if a brand can meet an audience where they’re at with a story, a perspective, then it can be very valuable. And branded entertainment can take many different forms, right? And the best entertainment, what I’ve learned, is when a brand

is inherently woven into the fabric of the content, right? It’s not a marketing vehicle for a message. It’s not a, you you’re not selling something through it, right? You’re actually using it as its own cultural moment to be able to brand around that content. Take what Netflix has done with Formula One and Drive to Survive. That is probably the greatest example of branded entertainment. That.

I don’t know what their brief was, but what I do know is that series, you know, opened up Formula One to an audience, especially here in the US, that never knew that that existed because the times of those, you know, those races are in the middle of the night and they’re in Europe and Monaco and Asia and whatever.

So it wasn’t really a thing for the US to engage with, but as soon as they created entertainment out of there, you saw the intrigue, you saw the storytelling, you saw the drivers, you saw the action. That opened up a whole new audience that now F1 can brand around. They can bring races to the US, know, sell against those, you know, those drivers are now, you know, known quantities and brands in their own right.

Orlando (13:47)
funny because it did take the biggest bug of Formula One was you had to know the drama. You had to give a crap about the drivers. You had to know what their inner squabbles were to enjoy the race

Tom Dunlap (13:58)
Yeah.

Orlando (14:00)
Netflix lent into that and then brought that out so well and that’s what became the thing that made people love it is that suddenly you care about Charles Leclare getting pushed off the track by Max Verstappen.

Tom Dunlap (14:02)
Yeah.

You have context for it, right? But

I think that is the great lesson is they created a cultural moment that now F1 can leverage in a bunch of new markets and a bunch of new funnels around their brand. And that’s what we try to do too with our brands. And again, that’s why we created the Creative Collective because, you

A large part of the collective itself are people from Hollywood, showrunners and producers, folks that are engaging day in and day out with the entertainment world and creating the type of content that audiences are rabid for. Chris Van Dusen, for example, is one of the creators and the showrunner, Bridgerton. He’s one of our core creative collective members. And when we have brands like Marriott Bonvoy, for an example, that

are looking at what’s happening in the travel industry around the white lotuses and how that’s changing. And they can get access now to a guy like Chris Van Dusen, who’s used to telling period pieces and pieces about locations and stories and humans. Giving them access to a talent like that is a huge opportunity. Or like what we’re doing right now with Virgin Voyages. We have a show called Mystery Voyage with them.

which was developed out of our creative collective with a reality show production company called Purveyors of Pop, who are masters at that Bravo-esque deep storytelling, combining them with Richard Branson’s cruise line to tell a murder mystery reality show on a boat. That is creating a cultural moment for

origin voyages to be around. And they’re not even having to pay for that. They’re just providing the backdrop. You know, a network or a streamer is gonna benefit because they’re getting an incredible show from a… Absolutely. But it’s being done, and this is what I learned is in order to create those cultural moments, you gotta work with the people that know how to do it, right? And that’s why, again, going back to our creative collective, why we built it the way we did,

Orlando (15:53)
Right. Yeah.

Yeah, it’s better than earned media. It’s paid for media. Yeah.

Tom Dunlap (16:17)
so that we can access and harness that power and not just be like smoke and mirrors about it, but legitimately put the people in the room who are making this happen. And that’s another lesson that I learned is, brands need that credibility. They’re not gonna look at SuperBloom and be like, you’re a four-year-old company. What do mean you do TV shows, right? No, this is SuperBloom providing the platform for purveyors of pop and virgin voyages to come together to create something very, very special.

Orlando (16:46)
that’s quite incredible. And I think that you’re absolutely right. think that each of these disciplines, whether it’s entertainment or television or content, mean, one of the groups that I think has been most sort of maligned by the creative community are YouTube content creators. And the simple fact is it is undeniable that when they’re successful, they understand that medium in a way that most people don’t.

And I think that’s true of show runners. It’s certainly true of filmmakers.

It just gives you slightly different instincts and it’s important to be using the experts.

Tom Dunlap (17:16)
and

Well, there’s different forms of storytelling, as you just said. What you see on Instagram versus what’s happening on YouTube versus what’s happening on Netflix are three completely different things, you know, and require not only different inputs to get those relevant outputs, but it requires that point of view and that experience. you know, folks can learn and stumble into it, but…

when you’re trying to bring credibility to a project and have a brand engage with it and pay for it, they need some receipts. They need to know, like, hey, this woman has made these documentary films and that’s why she’s the right person for this project.

Orlando (17:52)
Yeah. Yeah.

And I think that, you know, that person getting the opportunity to work with somebody like you, where I think that one of the biggest responsibilities of the production process in the advertising community is not just being creative, but it’s being creative in little pockets that those approvals and standards can be sent through a corporate entity up the chain of approvals and come back in time to still be able to be actioned.

a film production only has to make the director happy. A commercial film production has to make the creative, the CMO, the founder, it’s a founder-led kind of smaller company or whatever else, it has to go up these rounds of approvals at every stage. And that naturally obligates a different type of work.

Tom Dunlap (18:46)
there’s two types of producers and you know this Orlando, there’s the ones that are project managers, right? They’re just pushing something, you know, through a schedule and hitting timelines, ensuring things are on budget. And then there’s those that enhance the creative product.

right, that contribute to it, that drive it, that have a point of view about what is being executed, just not the nuts and bolts of a schedule and the deliverables list, right? And that’s where, like I’ve always been, and the teams that we’ve worked with, you were that way and are that way.

and the people that we worked with together and grew up with and moved to this industry are all the types of creative producers that are helping to evolve the creative idea into its final form through the packaging of talent, through the packaging of production strategies.

And through the alignment and the partnership with the folks that are developing the creative and being a crucial part of that experience. Those are two different roles and those people exist in our industries and they both succeed very well. I wanted to build a company that was made with the latter, the folks that, I wanted a creative company where producers had just the same amount of impact on the outcome.

as the creatives do. We’re not in service to the creatives. We are part of the creative process. And in a lot of ways, we are driving the creative strategy because of our production strategic thinking of how we’re gonna make something and ultimately who’s gonna make it because those two things are just as important now as what we make.

Orlando (20:11)
Mm-hmm.

it’s been really interesting for me to, you know, just coming into SuperBloom , obviously we’re now working with you and, you know, but we, you you’ve been open since before we have worked together and it’s been very impressive for me to see how much you have cared about your tech stack, you know, the technology you’re using and the technology workflows that you’re using.

and how much you’ve seemed to care about that since day one. And I know you’ve always been sort of quite tech forward,

what’s interesting to me is how

you’re also responding with the ability to kind of spin up post facilities quite quickly, whether for clients, for your own use, but making sure that you are incredibly responsive. And that goes all the way through your workflow from…

being to respond very quickly to production briefs and being able to sort of get teams together, teams built incredibly quickly, but then also immediately have that production team supported by offline facilities, offline personnel, the ability to sort of get that accessible and get all of the elements of a production immediately accessible to anybody wherever they need it. So they have the maximum amount of control of their assets from the moment it’s…

immediately after it’s shot, that pipeline sort of springs into action and you’re creating the ability to immediately kind of spot create editing suites and post-production suites sort of, you know, wherever your clients need them. That’s an incredibly robust pipeline to just be there ready to access at any moment. And I’ve been incredibly impressed by that. What drove you to understand the necessity of that kind of

you know, tech forward approach from day one.

Tom Dunlap (22:20)
Well, you know, we started SuperBloom during the pandemic, right? And that was amazing for a number of reasons, because one, starting a new company, you know, didn’t need offices. ⁓

Orlando (22:34)
And

just to get a timeline just before just during 2020, bang in the middle of it, like just coming out of it. What was that time?

Tom Dunlap (22:39)
Yeah,

the impetus of SuperBloom really started in 2020, even before the pandemic. Well, we were building at Echo and ultimately what the vision that Brian and I had for this type of company was pre-pandemic, right? We were already thinking about what this model would look like in an independent setting, right? The thing that made it work,

was when we started SuperBloom , April, 2021, April 1st, 2021, exactly one year and two weeks into what was that moment. I had already gone through the challenge and the experience of building virtual pipelines.

for specifically post-production and creative environments, you know, because we couldn’t be together, right? I had already had this post-house I’d built with, you know, 20 edit bays and recording studios and shooting stages. And all of a sudden, overnight, we had to pivot to work virtually. We had already put systems in place, but we hadn’t optimized them. And we had about two weeks to really get that up and running. And we did.

And it was the learnings from that workflow that gave us, gave Briny and I the confidence to say, we can actually start SuperBloom during a pandemic and live the totality of the model that we want to put into place because of the speed at which that technology cloud-based production and production had moved and the comfort levels around it. The way that creatives and editors and directors had learned and producers

had learned to work with it, right? So we knew we could start a different type of company in a really different time because we had had first-hand front row experience with what that technology could do. And it wasn’t that expensive to spin up. We had learned, we’d already gone through the trials and tribulations of these things. So when we started SuperBloom , we were able to get up and running very, very fast. And technology became a cornerstone.

of the company we were building in order to be able to do business, to be able to create revenue flow immediately with it. so technology played a very important role in that. And we were able to take those learnings from the pandemic and go, okay, what’s the 2.0 and the 3.0 version of that? And that’s what we want. That’s what we want. That’s the future phase and the future state of SuperBloom and our ability to work efficiently, work quickly.

and be up and running very, very fast. that was really the, a point of view on technology, brining jokes all the time, I’m, the cloud-based systems and things like that, like they work and they’re there, and I’m really proud of that, but they work because they’re non-existent and nobody knows they’re there, right? So, the infrastructure we did was, and how we did it just became super important.

Orlando (25:35)
Yeah. Yeah.

Tom Dunlap (25:42)
Now it has informed our business model and it has not only allowed us to get revenue up and running and move quickly and provide craft and access, you know, great talent around the world to be able to work with us. It’s also been the differentiator in projects that we have won. We did a, we did a, we call a new social newsroom for the Sundance Film Festival last year where we were on the ground for the first six days of the festival broadcasting.

and creating content daily for them. Their challenge was being in Utah, in the mountains, snowing. They wanted to get what was happening on the ground to audiences on social channels. Within minutes of that happening, we were able to take our workflow and set it up in Park City and be able to, without really anything, an internet connection, right? And to be able to plug in, and that was really, that was…

Orlando (26:28)
Yeah. Yeah.

Tom Dunlap (26:32)
the opus of what our system was built to do for us to be able to get on an airplane in LA, land in Park City, plug a couple things in and be creating content from the center of the universe there.

Orlando (26:47)
Yeah,

and I think that so much of it as well as the security of all that, I think that that’s one of the things that we’re very glad and lucky to be the custodians of it now, but I think that when I came in, we were very impressed with the security of it because I think that that’s one of the things, it’s quite easy to kind of go cloud-based with a lot of post-production now.

it’s very difficult to do it incredibly securely. And I think especially when you’re talking about the types of clients that you work with, and especially when you start moving into entertainment-based clients and people like that, what you’re talking about is very sensitive media assets and strategic assets that need to be deployed very quickly, but incredibly securely. And that is something that I think a lot of people forget.

Tom Dunlap (27:29)
Yeah.

Orlando (27:37)
to handle properly. And I think that, you know, that’s certainly something that you guys have done incredibly well.

Tom Dunlap (27:42)
Well, that speaks to our ambitions, you know, of the type of creative company and agency that we wanted to build and the types of clients we wanted to work with. You know, I grew up in gaming. I grew up around Apple. I grew up around Nike. These are all companies that, you know, protect their intellectual property at the most highest level. So if I’m spending money, you know, as an entrepreneur and a business owner,

you know, investing our money in technology solutions. I sure as hell want those technology solutions to be future forward.

So I can stand in front of Activision and be like, absolutely you can keep your data secure. You could absolutely give me your dev builds. Here’s our tech stack. Here’s how it’s divided. Here’s our security protocol. Here’s the insurances we have in a place. I’ve gone through that enough to know that we needed it. I was no spring chicken here. Been through enough.

Orlando (28:34)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, because you were

at TBWA Chiat Day doing all the Apple stuff and there’s no pipeline more secure than the Apple pipeline. mean, I remember working with them and having to have cameras on our safe, you know, that that’s where the hard drives went. And there had to be, you know, I mean, both both digital, but also very serious, you know, physical security.

Tom Dunlap (28:46)
Yeah.

Well, yeah, and you think about, you know, whether it’s Apple or gaming, tech, you know, like Coke, you know, they’re launching Coke Zero, like they sure as heck don’t need one of their competitors seeing what they’re doing. And so that, you know…

This goes back to the idea of what was the founding principles of SuperBloom , which is how you make and who you make it with is just as important as what you make. How you make it, that’s the tech stack. That’s everything from technology and how it’s set up and how fluid it is and how you can engage with internal teams at brands in their studios.

to the types of creative talent and the things that are coming out of it. It’s all encompassing of all of those things. It’s ultimately like that’s all part of the solution. There are things that we do because of our technology solutions and our sort of, you know, our business perspective that other production companies and agencies will never be able to do. We win business because of this. It’s an advantage and a differentiator.

that allows us to win business, move quickly, stand up, produce great quality content, offer competitive pricing because of the ways that we’ve thought about that sort of baseline infrastructure.

Orlando (30:18)
Yeah, I’ve never seen an agency quite so responsive as SuperBloom . It’s incredibly impressive how quickly you guys can move everything from onboarding to spinning up a project to spinning up all the resources that are required for that project so quickly.

Tom Dunlap (30:27)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Thank you, it’s table stakes. mean, that I think speaks to my business partner and the world she comes from, from the media side of being able to move at the speed of audiences and social channels and things like that.

Orlando (30:49)
Yeah,

it’s interesting to me because there’s been a lot of talk about how AI is stifling creativity. And I was having a conversation with Dav Karbassian the other day and he said, we briefly got into Omni-Com bringing production in-house, but in-house to the holding company, not in-house to the agency. it’s…

Tom Dunlap (30:52)
you

Orlando (31:10)
getting actually one step to remove, although it’s moving up in the chain, it’s getting one step removed from the creativity, which I think, you know, anybody who’s kind of seen that sort of move agrees that it’s not gonna lead to better work. You know, the output is not gonna be improved. And it was interesting to me, cause I just thought if you get them wrong.

can hamper and stifle creativity or they can vastly augment creativity. And, you know, for you, just going through the places you’ve worked, you know, senior producer at TBWA, Chiat Day, director of integrated production at Wieden and Kennedy, Amsterdam, senior vice president of production at Deutsch, executive producer and head of branded content at Ridley Scott and Associates, chief production officer at 72 and Sunny. You know, these are places that have incredibly

robust human systems that support creativity.

Tom Dunlap (31:59)
I think that, you know, the human element of creativity is still the most powerful thing that there is. The systems, the tools and the processes that enable the output should make the job of executing the right type of work.

that should enable that to happen so the right type of work is made at the highest creative level possible to give those teams the tools. And I think that you have to have production and creative together as part of the culture. It has to be the culture. Those two things cannot be decoupled because they just can’t, they simply can’t. Schedules and budgets.

are creative deliverables, not just the job of production. Creatives need to know what their timelines are, what the budgets have in them, the tools and the processes and the production strategies that are being deployed to execute their work. And conversely, producers need to be able to shape the creative product in order to make the deliverables and the things that need to be made. In fact, they need to be just as strategic and just as creative

as a creatives do. Like we put those two things together and actually a lot of times production is leading creative. You have a million dollars to make and here’s, need to make a hundred assets. Here’s the, here’s a way to do it. And that becomes a production strategy that informs a creative strategy that ultimately informs creative ideas. And then ultimately who’s going to be making those ideas. So you can’t decouple that. Once you put those together in the right way,

Orlando (33:11)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Tom Dunlap (33:36)
you can do what those holding companies are trying to do, which is commoditize and monetize production. It’s okay to do that. Like it’s okay, it’s okay for, you’re not gonna make the, you’re not gonna be making work at the detriment of your client because you’re doing it in house or you’re doing this and you’re not having the commercial production company objectively do it.

Orlando (33:44)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Dunlap (34:00)
If you have the right creative and production strategies going in and you’re enabling those things to be made, there’s a lot of money to be made as well as great work. there’s a lot of efficiencies to be had. You’re actually potentially saving your clients money that way. There used to be kind of an idea, you know, the AICP, for an example, always felt that agencies taking work in house was at the detriment of the client because

Orlando (34:08)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Dunlap (34:26)
It was putting profits ahead of above a creativity. Maybe so back in the day when we were spinning up in-house post houses, you know, and I know that a lot of the holding companies are really investing heavily in posts because they see it as low hanging fruit and it is because of tools and AI. But ultimately, if you were to look at the full funnel of that and you put the cultures together in the right way and you give them the right tools,

Orlando (34:41)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Dunlap (34:51)
then you can make more money, you can do better work for your client, ultimately everybody wins. Problem is talent, the access to great talent, the access to editors, the access to directors. It’s hard to do, right? And that’s why we had to build the creative collective is our answer to that because we needed a workforce to able to live that. There’s not a lot of companies out there that have invested that time, that energy to build that talent workforce.

be able to enable that and give that system credibility, you know, because ultimately it does come down to the best work and the best people making the work. ⁓ And that’s, if you don’t have that, then you are going to be at the detriment of

Orlando (35:23)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Tom Dunlap (35:30)
but you have

to have those people together. You’ve gotta have producers and creatives still to this day, and you’ve gotta give producers a bigger seat at the table.

Orlando (35:39)
Yeah. Because I think that as, things become sort of different shapes, I mean, one of the things that, you know, has always been true is the producer’s job isn’t to know everything. It’s to know where to find the answers and to be honest about what they don’t know. And, and, you know, be dogged and trying to find the answers. and that’s the most fun way to produce anyway.

Tom Dunlap (35:50)
Correct.

Orlando (35:58)
producers need to be as creative in finding the answers as creatives need to be doing, it need to be about finding the right creative answer for a brief. It’s two sides of a very similar coin.

Tom Dunlap (36:11)
Yeah, production needs to be part of that brief too. You know, I can’t stress that anymore. And we talk about this with our strategist at SuperBloom too, which is, you know, how production can help strategy define ultimately what gets made.

Orlando (36:14)
Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, it was years before I even met a strategist and then I was so fascinated by what they do. But it also means that if the producer at the end understands the strategy, you get fewer producers and people downstream going, well, I don’t understand why it has to be like that. This is what’s gonna make the best film and whatever else. And if you go, well, actually, this feeds into a strategy that we need to respect, because it’s our strategy.

Tom Dunlap (36:49)
Yeah, you have to think about all the parts and that burden shouldn’t necessarily always fall on the traditional creative team to figure out. Like it’s not fair, you know? And that’s where having the right culture around a project, we call them pods, and all of our pods have creative and production together.

you can move seamlessly through a project and have all of those angles figured out when you’re designing a production moment and you’re going into, like, how are we designing the shoot to be able to gather and capture all the things that we need to get? know, thinking about lower funnel, mid funnel work, broadcast spot, the print ad, you know, all the clunk of the.

Orlando (37:30)
Yeah, gone

are the days of just doing the 60 and being like, well, we’ll cut it up and we’ll get all of the assets from various cuts of that 60.

Tom Dunlap (37:38)
right there is one of the biggest frustrations that drove the creation of SuperBloom , which was the fact that how production and media had to like, okay, we got a 60 second thing, we’ve got to figure out what to do with this now. And actually we don’t need a 60 second thing, we need 36 second things. But here we are, we got this big cool.

Orlando (37:58)
Yeah. Yeah.

Tom Dunlap (38:01)
Piece of advertising that we can’t do anything with, you Now we gotta carve up and pretend to make work. That’s just the antithesis of like what brands need these days for their community. I sometimes that works and sometimes that’s what’s necessary. We wind up with those briefs, but that’s not the stuff that gets us up.

Orlando (38:18)
I’ve kept you long enough, but I am going to just ask you one last question that I’ve been asking everybody. And as you know, the the the great Dan Wieden who was, you know, much more your boss than mine, but he was all of our bosses at Wieden and Kennedy. But yeah, he had a great quote where he said, You’re useless to me unless you failed big at least twice. And I always love that because I think that it made a.

You know, there was one time I messed up pretty big and when I walked into your office, I thought I was going to get a bollocking and instead you just looked at me and you could tell that I had been beating myself up and you just went, well, what did we learn? And I really appreciated that. I think that that, that, quote kind of went into the culture of widen. Can you think, and would you be willing to admit a time that you messed up and what you learned from it?

Tom Dunlap (39:02)
Yeah, absolutely. mean, there’s so many things, but you know, there was one moment in particular that I hold true to this day and age and I don’t consider it a mess up more as a missed opportunity. Like what I hate is when you have something special and you don’t exploit it.

for everything it could possibly be. Not every moment of things we do in advertising are, know, game changing, you know, creative that gets you on the stage it can, but everything we do touch, excuse me, everything we do touch is a creative opportunity. And if not exploited properly and to its full extent, then what’s the point, right? And I actually go back to what Lee Clough,

versus Dan used to say to me, which is good enough is not enough. That was my early mantras. And there was a time when, back in the days when you started out as a broadcast producer as I was at Shia Day, you were kind of given, you assisted on the big projects and you were kind of given things like radio to do. Radio is super fun to produce and I used to love to do all the things that no one else wanted to do and radio was one of them, because I could go.

Orlando (40:14)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Dunlap (40:15)
hang out in a really cool recording studio and work with actors and play. And it was me and a writer and that was it. We were creative.

Orlando (40:18)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Bringing your coffee and snacks all the time is great. Yeah, of course, of course. Yeah.

Tom Dunlap (40:26)
Well, I know that was fun too, but it was more the creative process. You’re creating and like,

producers, that was just you and a writer, right? Radio. And we were doing a, and I gosh, I was.

doing a

think a radio ad for Taco Bell, the Chihuahua, and it was like a cross promotion with the Godzilla movie that was coming out. And you could probably trace that back to like 1998 or something stupid like that. But it was all about Godzilla attacking New York and the Chihuahua was like there to save the day and he had an army with him. I had, you know, I’m a huge Stanley Kubrick fan and like I was thinking about Full Metal Jacket and all these things and like,

you know, and the drill instructor and that. And I was like, oh man, wouldn’t it be great if we get the drill instructor, know, Arlie Ermey for this, you know, he could be in role. And I was like, and I kind of just like thought about it I was like, ah, that’s a lot of work. I gotta call agents and I gotta do that. And I didn’t do it. And you know, I talked to my creative about it and he actually asked me, like, well, do we get in was like, no, you know, I.

Orlando (41:11)
Yeah.

Right.

Tom Dunlap (41:31)
It’s too much work and it didn’t do, we didn’t have enough money or whatever. Whatever my excuse was at the time, I didn’t do it. And we made it, we made a promotional radio spot, you know, with like guy mimicking Arlie Ermey or whatnot. Cut to about a year later, I had another project and we had an opportunity to bring in a drill instructor and I Googled Arlie Ermey or, you know, found us the contact information.

Orlando (41:34)
Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Tom Dunlap (41:55)
all of them and he was in the recording studio and two hours later and I was like, fuck. It was that easy. And the lesson I learned there was to always bring the highest level of creative to every project, produce the shit out of everything. And that was the most valuable lesson in my entire life because that’s, I still to this day draw upon that.

Orlando (42:00)
Yeah, it was that easy. Yeah.

Yeah.

Tom Dunlap (42:20)
executing the smallest thing to the biggest thing. If I want to call up Jody Hill, okay, like I don’t know him, but I sure as hell know how to get to him. Or if I don’t, I can figure it out. know someone that does, right? Like why not shoot for the top and make the best that we could possibly make? Settle for whatever because it’s too hard or whatever. So that was to me.

Orlando (42:23)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Tom Dunlap (42:46)
a lesson in creativity and a lesson in this industry that I literally like think about to this day. Every time I enter a project, I’ve got Arlie Ermey yelling at me, you know, why didn’t you call me? You know, like, I’m through with it. You know, and that’s been a guiding light. And even like, even in my, you know, current situation where it’s like, why can’t I be a founder of a company? Like, not try it? Why not put the…

Orlando (42:51)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Tom Dunlap (43:12)
You’re not gonna get out of something once you put into it, right? So that was my greatest lesson, my first big lesson. And of course there were many other things along the way, but that’s the one I feel, there are tactical lessons and mess ups along the way that you learn, okay, okay, you need to budget that much or, if you smell a director not being able to pull off what they said they could, fire them quickly and they’ll move on.

Orlando (43:14)
Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Tom Dunlap (43:38)
That’s the one that gets me every time when I think about what an opportunity can

Orlando (43:42)
That’s such a good one. That’s such a good one. it’s, it’s not to be patronizing, but it’s quite brave actually, Tom. Cause I feel like I’ve been there and, and you it’s, you know, you just think, it’ll never happen. So what’s the point in trying? And it’s, yeah. Yeah.

Tom Dunlap (43:57)
Too lazy, too scared, not confident,

you know, like, I mean, fuck, like, you gotta, you know, put it all, put your all into something if it’s gonna be good. What’s, otherwise, what’s the point?

Orlando (44:01)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, 100%. Well, Tom, honestly, thank you so much. Thank you for giving us your time. And this was great. I just really enjoyed chatting to you about this stuff.

Tom Dunlap (44:19)
Yeah,

of course, Orlando. Thank you so much. And it’s a pleasure. I’m so glad that we reconnected and that SuperBloom and Koobrik your baby.

Orlando (44:25)
Me too.

Tom Dunlap (44:28)
You you guys are representing the next level of our technology strategy and what we’re doing as a company and I’m really excited to have that sort of forward thinking, you know, 3.0 of what SuperBloom is. mean, that’s what’s gonna make us very valuable and good and it’s just great to be working with you again, so.

Orlando (44:45)
Yeah,

it’s a real treat. I really enjoy it. It’s great just to see your name on the calendar invites all the time. It’s the best. I’m like, yeah, this is great. We get to do this again. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate it again. And yeah, just thank you. All right.

Tom Dunlap (44:55)
Yeah, I like what happens. Yeah. Cool.

Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you.