Page 112 - AdNews magazine Mar-Apr-May 2023

www.adnews.com.au 15
WORDS BY
JASON POLLOCK
Meet the Team
BMF
Creative agency BMF has been named AdNews Agency of the Year, sponsored by TikTok.
The company also was named Creative Agency of the Year and won Ad Campaign of the Year, racking up a total of seven nomi- nations across this year’s Agency of the Year awards.
It’s the first time that BMF has won the AdNews Agency of the Year award, though they did win Direct Agency in 2005 and Sydney Agency of the Year in 2002.
With BMF only a few years away from celebrating its 30th anniver- sary, BMF CEO Stephen McAardle says the agency has a lot to cele- brate since its inception in 1996.
Clockwise from left: Department of Social Services’ ‘Bring up Respect’ campaign; the BMF office; Australia for UNHCR’s ‘The Reluctant Shanty campaign.
“We’ve been lucky enough to have achieved a lot in the past 26-years. One of the standout moments before my time was in 2010 when we won an agency of the decade award, which points towards the ability to, within a relatively short space of time, turn a startup into a really mean- ingful business that delivers great work consistently, over a long period of time.
“For me personally, becoming the Effies Effective Agency of the Year in 2017 was definitely a special moment in time for BMF. That was what we really aimed for when we repositioned the agency as the ‘The Home of the Long Idea’, a positioning that’s in service of marketing effectiveness. Following that up in 2019 underlined the importance of creatively driven brand building and proved our approach wasn’t a flash in the pan.
“More recently we were ranked number three in the world for creative effectiveness and number one in Australia on the WARC 100 Effectiveness Ranking, which was another endorsement of our marketing effectiveness, positioning, and the work we do.”
Over the past six months, BMF has made a number of key hires across their creative, social and content divisions, as well as appointing a new head of effectiveness – a trend that reflects BMF’s growth overall and ties into the strategy for expanding their capabilities in 2023.
“We've had our biggest couple of years of growth, growing by over 30%, which gave us the opportunity to expand our capabilities. Within content and social, we’ve hired a number of people and built in more strategic capabilities to lead into the content production side.
“With regards to creative talent, we love to get the best people from around Australia, but we also keep our eyes on the US and the UK. In the past six months, we've been lucky enough to hire some great people from the world’s best agencies.”
BMF is known for being the ‘Home of the Long Idea’, an agency posi- tioning that informs every piece of work that the creative agency pro- duces. This allows an idea to come to life over a sustained period of time as opposed to a single campaign that’s never revisited.