New creative content company SuperBloom House aims to connect brands and creators
Creative content company founded by industry vets Tom Dunlap and Briony McCarthy leverages a collective of talents to conceive creative ideas for "modern media plans."
FrankLin
Industry vets Tom Dunlap and Briony McCarthy, former leaders of Hecho Studios, Stagwell’s Constellation Network production firm, have opened the doors of SuperBloom House, a creative company aimed at bringing together brands and creators to deliver impactful, targeted ideas at the pace of culture.
Backed by Mother Ventures, the investment arm of Mother U.S., the shop bills itself as a “modern media content and production company,” and connects brands with a curated network of 300 creative talents who can help them get to better ideas faster—ideas fueled by a strategic media plan conceived from the get-go to ensure they resonate with the right audiences.
“We’re not an ad agency and we’re not a production company,” said Chief Content Officer and Co-Founder Dunlap, who had served as chief content officer at Hecho and also previously held production leadership positions at agencies including 72andSunny, Deutsch and Wieden+Kennedy and production company RSA Films.
The company focuses on what the founders call the “lonely middle” of content creation—that space between the big ideas conceived by agencies and the creative output of commercial production companies.
“There’s such a huge gap between the awesomeness of creative agencies offering the big commercial, and the activation and implementation that production companies offer,” said Co-Founder and CEO McCarthy, who also spent a decade on the media side at PHD, where she ultimately served as president before joining Hecho.
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Dunlap and McCarthy explained that the idea of SuperBloom was born from frustrations throughout their careers. When serving as an executive producer on the production side, for example, Dunlap found you could create top-notch films and spots, but “it doesn’t mean that it works for where it needed to go," he said. "I had access to the best tools in the world, but the work we were doing wasn’t necessarily effective.”
McCarthy added that having worked on the media side, she was vexed being “served up a creative piece that didn't really meet the needs of a modern media plan, so we would have to go outside and work with publishers and other creators to fulfill the needs of that plan.”
The company builds media planning into the creative process from the outset to help land on the best ideas—and to ensure those ideas land where they need to.
The company has curated a network of more than 300 creators from an array of disciplines and boasts cloud-native post-production capabilities that streamline development and execution.
The talent network includes global creatives hailing from film and television, interactive media, journalism, tech, gaming, publishing, performing arts and design, who according to the founders “think differently and make different things.”
Among them are Tiffany Frances, an award-winning writer and director whose short film, “Hello from Taiwan,” earned honors such as Best Short Film at the L.A. Diversity Film Festival and Grand Jury Prize at the Taiwanese American Film Festval; comedy writer and director Abe Z; creative entrepreneur Ali Husseiny, who produced and developed TV and music content under Simon Cowell’s Suco with Sony Music Entertainment and now runs his own creative studio; and Vanessa Black, a director, creative director and photographer whose work has been featured in National Geographic, Vogue, Vice, Esquire, Rolling Stone, i-D Magazine and more.
After getting a brief from clients, the company’s process starts with what McCarthy describes as a “casting process” of behind-the-scenes creators, which could include strategists, content managers, producers, writers and more. Then, “we write ourselves a brief, we almost rewrite the creative brief that we've been given from the client, and we filter in social, cultural and media trends into that, and then we all rally to think about what we’ll make, why we'll make it and who we’ll make it with” before bringing the final proposal to the client.
The company has been operating under the radar and in prototype mode since last year, but debuted formally this year. It’s already created a number of campaigns, for clients including Logitech, Panera and Marcum, among others. One effort was a social, documentary-style push for direct-to-consumer retailer BeautyCounter that brought together different generations of women to discuss their beauty commonalities—a strategy that played off the generational “culture wars” happening on social media. The effort tapped an all-female production crew, including Frances as director and Editor Meredith Perry.
SuperBloom is currently in development on projects for Spotify, fintech company Creative Juice, Mobil 1 and more.
As for its name, McCarthy noted it represents “the growing of brands, the growing of creators.” Moreover, it brings welcome optimism following the chaos of the last two years. “Everything’s been serious and we kind of wanted to have a bit of fun.”
