From St Luke's To Hollywood To Trump And Back: Producer Andrew Hill Tells All

Not all career paths are linear, and some include terrains that involve media moguls and overbearing business tycoons - well at least Andrew Hill's does. Hilly, as he's called, joined St Luke's in 1997, as a strategist before moving into TV production and was headhunted by Elisabeth Murdoch (who was a client at the time) to set up Shine in the UK with responsibility for developing branded content for blue-chip clients. He's now returned to St Luke's - after more than 20 years - to to head up the London agency's branded content business at its production arm, Apostle Studios.

From setting up entertainment production company Shine in the UK and Los Angeles with Elisabeth Murdoch to producing The Apprentice US alongside a pre-White House Donald Trump and creating the GT Academy, which recently served as the basis for a blockbuster film, Hill has made a career in showing exactly what branded entertainment can do.

At St Luke's

As one of the original co-founders at St Luke's, Hill joined in 90s as a planner.

He describes St Luke's as being an exceptional agency with remarkable balance and maturity but admits that it often felt on the brink of chaos and implosion. In truth, it wasn’t a particularly happy place to work, but it was extraordinarily successful, says Hill. Nearly every six months, the team would close the books and declare that they couldn’t possibly take on more business.

It was in this era that St Luke's handled IKEA and created the famous campaign, ‘Chuck Out Your Chintz’ - encouraging British housewives to throw away their fussy furnishings and helped transform British attitudes to design.

"Naturally, that only made clients want us more—they’d beg us to take their business. One of the new clients we did pitch for was Sky Television, led by Elisabeth Murdoch, who was the controller of Sky One at the time. Through the pitch process and ultimately winning the account, I got to know Liz quite well."

It was a fated meeting and Murdoch snatched up Hill as she started the production company, Shine. He joined Shine to head up branded entertainment, and pitched ideas for branded entertainment to UK broadcasters who, buoyed by the success of new reality formats and flush with cash, showed little interest in brand-funded content.

Facing slow progress, Hill was then sent to the US, where Murdoch tasked him with establishing Shine's Los Angeles office in a more commercially-driven environment. The original concept for The Apprentice was a brand-funded idea for IBM, a brand, says Hill, was more open to brand involvement.

"I had some success with branded content there," he explains. "But my family hated living in Hollywood. We had two young kids at the time, so we decided to return home. After that, I was left wondering what to do next. I knew advertising well, but I’d also had a taste of the incredibly exciting world of events, telly and brands. It felt like there could be a big future in that, but the UK wasn’t quite ready for it yet, and no companies were doing it at the time."

With few companies in the UK focusing on this area, Hill decided to start his own company, Grand Central Entertainments, to pursue this vision. Things progressed rapidly, and the company did well over the next 15 years, creating numerous projects that he is proud of including Vodafone TBA, The Beat: Life on the Streets, Gran Turismo: The Movie, The Race - YouTube channel, PlayonPro - social media network and the World’s Fastest Gamer.

It's no surprise that everyone wants to talk to him about his time with The Apprentice US and the former president Donald Trump, but what holds real significance for him was the TV series GT Academy - a collaboration between PlayStation and Nissan, where skilled PlayStation gamers were taught to become real racing drivers. What began modestly, with races involving Nissan Micras in a car park, eventually grew to encompass 180 countries and even became a Hollywood movie, with Orlando Bloom. This project exemplified the immense value of fantastic entertainment for brands.

He’s also developed and produced other branded content campaigns, including Vodafone’s TBA and The Vodafone Live Music Awards, Waitrose’s Market Kitchen with Tom Parker Bowles, and the Home Office’s Beat: Life on the Street.

After selling Grand Central Entertainment and a YouTube channel to an American tech company, Hill planned to take a couple of years off before starting something new. He then happened to bump into St Luke's CEO, Neil Henderson, and he decided to go back to the agency.

"It shifted my perspective a bit and made me think about where I was happiest in my career," he explains. "I realised that it was at St Luke's the first time around. Creating pure entertainment was satisfying to a point, but creating entertainment with a real purpose was a much more interesting challenge. So Neil and I started talking about replicating Grand Central within St Luke's, and things moved ridiculously quickly. Before I knew it, I didn’t really have a choice—and here I am, back at St Luke's."

Hill discusses his experiences involving the former American President and other highlights and why he's back at where he started - St Luke's.

You’ve worked with Donald Trump and Richard Branson over the years – how do they compare to working with Neil Henderson as a boss?

That's the question that gets me fired. I could take the easy route for a laugh here, but instead, I’ll tackle the question seriously.

The truth is, they’re more similar than you might think. As with most people, it’s the small differences that stand out. So, all three are passionate individuals with a strong streak of showmanship. Two are perhaps more self-serving, and two lack a sense of humour.

Neil is stand-up funny. When agency life tires he’s definitely got a career in TV. It’s a rare skill, and many famous TV presenters don’t come close to Neil’s level.

Who are the most memorable people you've worked with?

• most jaw-droppingly, naturally talented... Amy Winehouse

• most devastatingly down-to-earth despite being... Brad Pitt

• most surprisingly and brilliantly professional...The Hoff

• most off-the-scale charismatic... Donald Trump

• most charming - the Japanese Yakuza

• just plain bonkers... Kanye West

How has St Luke's evolved since your first stint?

St Luke's has matured along with the industry. The most significant change I've noticed is that it's now a delightful place to work - it's genuinely a pleasure to go into the office. That wasn't the case during the first incarnation of St Luke's, which was a rather challenging place to work. However, it has retained its startup mentality – it’s fast, flexible and open-minded and the management has created a kind of magical alchemy that has transformed it into a great place to be.

What are the plans to integrate Apostle Studios' expanded capabilities, like artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality (AR), into compelling branded content?

Somebody said that the short-term impact of most new technology is vastly overstated, while the long-term impact is vastly understated. I think that’s true for AI. It will be utterly transformative. Many people cling to the unique, imaginative and creative skills of the human mind but soon, we'll have the equivalent of an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of laptops. Watch out Shakespeare!

Right now, we're at the iPhone Mark One of AI. We can't possibly imagine where it’s going to go. For agencies, the idea of even trying to control it is ridiculous. All we can do is be prepared to ride the wave - move with it, flex and adapt. And by the time it takes all our jobs, we'll almost certainly have bigger problems to contend with.

What other ways do you see the role of branded content evolving in the next few years?

Having spent half my career in an agency and the other half in TV production has been an amazing learning experience. Two industries which frequently share the same screen, but are utterly different in their approach, culture and processes.

If brands are serious about developing their content presence they’ll need to let go of a few advertising archetypes and embrace the world of entertainment – the sort of content that viewers choose to invest their precious time with. To be clear, if we’re having to pay people to watch our content, that’s not entertainment, that’s advertising.

Firstly, the idea of originality and novelty are deeply ingrained in agency creative departments, but have little value in people’s lives. Broadcasters understand that familiarity and recognisable tropes keep people engaged. The least welcome pitch to any broadcaster is the ‘one-off documentary’, they want a series that can return year on year, that can grow and adapt with shifting values. Think of seasons rather than campaigns.

Secondly, the product can’t be the hero of your story. People watch people. We’re programmed to find people endlessly fascinating. It’s something Formula 1 has only just discovered with Drive to Survive. A few years back, F1 was a dying sport for a few moribund motorheads. Introducing human drama, fallibility, triumph and disaster has transformed the sport and engaged a whole new audience – that was unthinkable just 5 years ago. It’s about building an engaged community rather than targeting an audience.

Thirdly, it’s not for someone else. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you make, you can find a brand truth that can be translated into compelling content. On one level, Red Bull is a caffeinated liquid in a can, on the other, it’s one of the most successful entertainment studios the world has seen. Not everybody has to be Red Bull but with all the new media platforms – I’m a huge fan of YouTube – every brand can and should be taking baby steps to creating brilliant entertainment.

What inspired you to return to the advertising world?

I think of it like a Venn diagram where one circle represents the commercial imperative of advertising and the other represents long form entertainment delivered by broadcasters. For me, the overlap in the middle is the sweet spot— combining strategic thinking with entertainment can be very powerful.

It’s successful when the content works equally as a piece of entertainment for viewers and as a platform for a brand message. I find that combination thrilling—like solving a particularly knotty Rubik’s Cube.

How do you balance brand communications with entertainment when developing content for clients?

It's a false dichotomy to separate brand ideas from entertainment. A great brand idea can become entertainment, and entertainment can feed the brand. The best branded entertainment isn’t a platform for product placement, it’s an entire ecosystem of communication. Ideally, the TV series is just a shop window to bring people into your brand world. Think how shows as diverse as Grand Designs and Drag Race fuel huge live events where like-minded are brought together by the content. Come to think of it, think how a virtually bankrupt businessman attracts thousands of people to rallies across the States off the back of a successful TV series!

What key insights have you gained from working with major broadcasters that you plan to apply at Apostle Studios?

I think there are two main themes. Production and creative output. In terms of production, advertising’s model closely resembles that of movie-making. It replicates a mini-Hollywood model where the director is the star turn. It’s linear, slow, and places huge emphasis on planning and pre-production to minimise risk. The shoot is then formulaic, following a fixed script and storyboard.

In the meantime, this thing called reality TV has come along. That’s transformed the way a lot of television is made. It’s now a much more collaborative process – collaborative between the commissioner, crew and cast – and a lot more emphasis is placed on building the narrative in the edit. And generally, with hundreds of hours of footage, that narrative can be radically altered at any point. I’d love to see advertising embrace this more dynamic model by getting faster to the idea, creating an environment (we call it precinct) to film in and then just shooting the hell out of events. I think it could lead to some really interesting work that feels more real, less artificial, than a lot of the ads we produce. Of course that does mean clients and agencies trusting each other to embrace spontaneity and some of the messiness and uncertainty that entails but, in my experience, all the best moments in anything I’ve produced have come from something unexpected – and then running with it.

In such a fragmented media world, what is necessary to cut through?

This is the point where I should say it’s all about bold creativity and brilliant insights, but I don’t think that’s the real solution. Bold creativity and powerful insights should be a given; if they’re not, you probably shouldn’t be working in an advertising agency. The real shift needed is that advertising and clients need to move away from the idea of targeting people with messages and focus on building a community around their brand.

I ran a YouTube channel for three years, which gave me incredible insight into building an audience that gathers around content. For a start, you quickly realise that the content is just a platform around which people talk to other people with similar interests. Maybe not the best example, but the runaway success of one of the world’s biggest websites, the Mail Online, has almost nothing to do with the quality of its journalism and almost everything to do with the online commentary between its readers. Fuelling their own communities will be the future for brands. Why do so many brands turn off comments on their social platforms? Are they really that scared of their consumers? If they are, they probably need to take a long, hard look at what they’re doing in the world.

The problem with the current campaign-based model is that you start from scratch with every piece of communication – you have to find an audience each time. But if you build a community, that audience already exists and isn’t just ready but waiting for your next communication. You can’t feed them with enough content! Red Bull, again, does this brilliantly by creating passionate communities around niche sports that aren’t supported otherwise. And a whole bunch of niche audiences soon becomes a mass.

So, while ground-breaking creativity and strategy matter, the real focus should be on turning your brand into a community. Taylor Swift is brilliant at this – slightly dull content, but an amazing gift for feeding a passionate community of Swifties. We turned our YouTube channel from zero to one million subscribers for the price of a single prime-time ad. Each video attracts something like 1m viewers – figures that many TV channels would kill for.

With all these brands that should take that step, what types of brands or industries are you most eager to collaborate with?

Counter-intuitively, I’ve often found that the big, cool, trendy brands are often the least interesting. Too often, it feels like a tier of managers are shepherding a founder’s brilliant vision, scared to take their own bold leaps forward. I’m much more intrigued by brands that have a strong sense of purpose but limited budgets. These are the brands that I’d love to bring into the spotlight – to create a bigger cultural footprint.

I also have a soft spot for dull brands. Brands that haven’t quite found their place in the world (this is feeling dangerously like therapy now).

What can we expect to see from Apostle Studios moving forward?

It’s early days, and I expected a soft landing back into the world of advertising, but that hasn’t been the case. We’re already in production on four projects and talking to broadcasters about a couple of TV formats I’m very excited by. I was hoping to spend some time thinking strategically about, developing a plan, all those grown-up things, but instead, I’ve jumped straight into the action. Honestly, I prefer it this way—it’s been a quick re-learning curve..

But for Apostle, above all else, I’d love it to become a place where people are desperate to work – when that’s the case, I figure we’d have got everything much more right than wrong. Of course, I want to produce amazing work, but I see that as a byproduct of brilliant, happy people, doing something they love, unafraid to take risks and feeling free to speak openly. I feel like I've drunk St Luke’s Kool Aid already.

From your experience on both sides, how do advertising agencies and production companies differ in their approach to culture and content creation?

Culture is an interesting question and one that I should probably answer in two parts. Firstly the culture of agencies vs production companies and secondly the way agencies approach broad culture (in a strategy sense) vs how producers and broadcasters look at the culture.

So agencies first – the first thing I noticed returning to the ad world is that it’s bursting with smart people and everybody has an opinion about everything. In terms of process, it’s an interesting combination of upfront strategy, idea generation and then finding all the reasons the ideas don’t work. It feels very robust but I think sometimes agencies can rationalise themselves out of powerful, visceral ideas because they focus too much on the reasons why they might not work rather than what they could be. Something like Cadbury’s Gorilla could never be born from that approach.

This is important because, in an attention economy, the hardest task is to gain any attention in the first place. I suppose that’s where the culture of production companies differs most significantly. As a producer you start with no audience and no media budget to buy an audience. Creating programmes is a bit like building a start-up. You have to think; is this a great idea, is there an audience for it, does it have just enough originality and familiarity to attract that audience, who will invest in making it?Mostly, we start with an idea (more often than not, just a series’ title) and then rationalise our way to production. Brand funded content straddles both worlds pretty evenly.

And secondly, in terms of the way the two industries look at culture, I would say that agencies dive much deeper into trends and themes – but the output is a much safer representation of what they find, whereas TV mostly casts around for popular themes but brings them to life in a much deeper and more nuanced way. It’s a more journalistic approach vs a headline writer.