Q&A: Wee Beastie Founders Chris McKenna and Monica Hinden

Chris McKenna and Monica Hinden are co-founders of Wee Beastie, a New York-based production company that creates advertising campaigns for television networks. The name Wee Beastie is imported from the UK, where McKenna grew up, and it describes the way ideas crawl into the creative team's heads and lay a few eggs before they hatch into one of the agency's conceptual and story-driven campaigns. Last month the partners took home two ProMax Awards for "Best Consumer Tie-in Promo of the Year" and "Funniest Promo" for their work on a co-branded spot for National Geographic and Geico. We caught up with them at their office in TriBeCa to talk about their progress since they opened their doors in 2006. Read the full interview after the jump: Why did you decide to go into business together? CM: Monica and I were working at another agency. I was a writer and director, Monica was a producer. So she was doing all the organizational work at every job that we did and I was doing all the writing and creative work. Most of the stuff we did within our company, it was just the two of us working on each project. We realized after a year or so that we got on really well and that we could probably do this ourselves. At that point the company we were working for started moving in a slightly different direction. We said, oh, this is a good opportunity for us to leave. I still can't believe we had the balls to do it. MH:They kind of took things away from shooting and wanted to be more straight post-project. Our favorite thing to do is shoot - he's the director, so we said, we want to do it, we'll keep doing it ourselves. CM: We had a lot of relationships with clients. That took a lot of the stress away from launching - it's still terribly stressful - but that made it easier. We had two months of going for lunch for two hours every day, going, "this phone eventually has to ring." I sold my flat in London and made a bit of money on that, and that's what we used to start the business, and then Monica invested some money. We only had three months' worth of overhead and at the end of the second month, the phone finally rang, and it was the Travel Channel. Totally unexpected. They hired us and somehow from then on, we just managed to kind of bootstrap. When you get your first job, it gives you enough money to last another month or two. Get your second job, a little bit more, a little bit moreâ€¦we kind of clawed our way up. And went from there toâ€¦ MH: ...the empire you see today. CM: I spent a lot of time at various TV networks and I know how they see us, and it's a very different perspective. Being on the client side, I have a really good idea of what their expectations are, and I know what they mean when they say one thing and mean another, which is really, really common. MH: He's like our translator. We'll talk to a client and I'll get something from it, and he's like, no, that's not what they meant -trust me. And I'm like how do you know? That's what he always does, because he's been where they are. I think if we were a company just of people who had been at small businesses or agencies forever, we'd be missing a lot of unspoken cues that our clients don't realize are unspoken, because that's their world. Luckily, Chris knows it very well. CM: We have a great, classic producer/director tension as well. I just want to spend money all the time, Monica wants to save money all the time. If we were both the same, the company wouldn't work. I kind of recommend this to other businesses and other startups, typically to have a certain amount of tension. We have very different jobs as well, and that really helps, too. We don't step on each other's toes too much. Describe your creative process. CM: Our clients ask us for scripts and we say, please, let us give you some concepts first. Sometimes it's just a paragraph, sometimes there's a whole page. [The clients] tell us which ones they like and only then will we start writing a script. We think that's something that marks us as different from our competitors because we're so conceptual from the beginning. That way very little rewriting goes on. They rarely come back to us and say, we don't like that script - start again. Because we give them just a nugget of an idea to start with. MH: Our number one goal with our company is to inspire our clients. To inspire them with the work that we do with them, and also to inspire them to enjoy their job and to do the work on their own because a lot of our clients do in-house work as well. Our goal is to create those moments that make them step out for a second and say, I love my job. CM: The corporate environment destroys the creative process for all the networks, as soon as you get in an environment where everyone's got a Blackberry and everyone has to be at a conference call or meeting and everyone has to be with their boss who they're worried about impressing. We've actually been asked by a lot of networks to come in and help them with their brainstorm and idea generation process. When we bring them here, everyone that works in the company is used to our brainstorming process and we can sit here and in the space of an hour can produce 20 to 30 ideas that are viable. It's great for us and the clients love it. Tell us about the Geico/National Geographic promo. MH: This campaign has really affected our whole business model. Coming up with it was hard, because National Geographic is obviously about education and knowledge and Geico is pure nonsense and we had to figure out how to make the two of them happy in 30 seconds. CM: [Tie-ins] are becoming more common as advertisers are looking for more ways to get their message across. There's a huge scramble going on - all the networks are trying to offer better, more creative ideas to the advertisers to encourage them to spend their money with them, so they call us and we get to execute it. MH: We like to think with the help of our concepts, Geico bought in at the same exact ad level [during the 2009 upfront season] they did the year before, which was basically unheard of that year. It was the height of the recession. How has your business grown since you first started? MH: We brought [in our business consultant, Suzel Tuesta] because we're kind of at a point where we're successful, we're running a business, we know the work we're doing, and we've learned a lot about business but neither of us are business people. We know there are a lot of things we could be tracking, like whether our sales are really effective, but we don't know how to do it. She's helping us create processes and ways to track these things. CM: In most businesses the principals do the work and when you bring other people in it all starts to fall apart. And that's where Suzel's helping us get beyond that point, so we don't fall apart. So we can grow without Monica and I having to be involved in everything. MH: And we're succeeding. We've hired people since she's started, and we're growing. We really try to bring people into our staff who not only have hobbies, but who also have different backgrounds and educations. If you're graduating in communications, that's great - I did - but [we like] people who are interested in other things besides the obvious, like shopping. People who are really into something and who can bring a whole other area of expertise into the brainstorming sessions. What interests to you have outside of work? MH: I would say my biggest hobby outside of work is genealogy. We share that. CM: Genealogy is like going into the library. You know, when you're looking for a particular book and you spend 15 minutes going through card index looking for the book you want, and your brain goes into this Zen kind of feeling of relaxation that you get when you're looking for something? That's what genealogy's like. You're looking through data, looking for a match for your family. If your work is particularly stressful, it's amazingly good at relieving the stress. What's a stressful day at the office like for you? CM: We spent a few weeks shooting in Alaska for the Discovery Channel. We had no phones, no electricity running, no communications, no transportation... MH: No separate rooms. CM: We were trapped for days. MH: It was the first time in my life when I realized I was in a situation where I honestly could die. It never got to the point where we actually felt like we were going to die, but one or two things change, and you could be in that situation. That's crazy. CM: We had an aerial filming escapade where there was so much turbulence that the cameraman couldn't lift the camera to his eye without feeling sick and Monica had to throw up in her hand. It was like Heart of Darkness. After that we felt like if they asked us to shoot on the moon we could do it. Anything is easy after that. So, what's next? CM: Most of our work up until now has been with cable TV networks that generally are willing to take more risks. We really like that. We love working with them because they have fewer layers of management and they are usually very open to taking a creative leap. What we are seeing with the increase in the number of co-branded sponsor-advertiser tie-in type promos [is that] the cable networks kind of pioneered those and the broadcasting networks are now catching up. We come from the cable world and people are seeing us as being a different marketplace, so it's always a struggle to break through and create a first impression, so that's something we're working on right now. We just want to do more shooting.

Fishbowl

Q&A: Wee Beastie Founders Chris McKenna and Monica Hinden

Devon Glenn

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Devon Glenn