London Special: Laura Jordan Bambach

Creative partner at Mr President, Laura Jordan Bambach has gone from being a Canberra-based “maths and science nerd” to expert coder and one of London’s leading digital lights, launching groundbreaking campaigns at the cutting edge of influencer marketing and leading the call for greater gender diversity in the top creative ranks. Selena Schleh meets a true Aussie original

There’s a popular slogan on car licence plates in Australia’s capital: “Canberra – it’s not that bad.” Despite the city’s bland and boring reputation, shots is minded to agree: the place has, after all, produced the digital dynamo, gender diversity champion and general breath of fresh air that is Laura Jordan Bambach, current creative partner at Mr President, one of London’s brightest indie agencies.

Having lived in the UK for 16 years, Jordan Bambach’s Aussie twang has mellowed, but a characteristic Antipodean directness and no-nonsense attitude remains. At our meeting, she’s sporting faintly pink hair; a massive tattoo of a spiderweb lurks under her leather biker jacket. It’s hard to imagine her being a “maths and science nerd” as a child.

Unsurprisingly, she says that nerdiness was tempered with a strong creative streak: “I absolutely loved drawing 70s-inspired interiors – sunken areas, macramé and hanging plants.” While studying contemporary art in Sydney she stumbled upon the digital media department (“basically a bunch of computers in a lab and some software”) and was instantly hooked, discovering a strong aptitude for coding. A chance encounter with Rosie Cross, founder of cult Australian e-zine Geekgirl (Cross wanted to photograph the aforementioned tattoo for a feature) led to Jordan Bambach becoming the site’s creative director, which was “an amazing opportunity because all the eyes of the techworld were on Geekgirl”. 

Her first foray into the advertising world was as a consultant, assisting agencies who were new to the online space with website design and digital layouts. As well as funding a master’s degree, her flourishing business attracted the attention of Simon Waterfall, founder of digital creative agency Deepend, who offered Jordan Bambach a job as a producer/jack-of-all-trades in his new Sydney office.

It was, according to Jordan Bambach, the opportunity that completely changed the course of her career. Up until then, she’d been “designing and making stuff through my gut instinct. I’d never learned classic design or proper typography, but Simon gave me that opportunity to hone and polish my craft.”

Getting stuck in at Glue

A year later, she made the well-trodden Aussie pilgrimage to the UK. First impressions? Not only was London a “grey, cold place, where everyone was miserable, no one spoke to you and public services were like Sydney’s, only a bit more crap,” the move coincided with the bursting of the dot-com bubble – and the demise of Deepend.

Following stints at Lateral and i-D magazines, Jordan Bambach became head of art at Glue (now Isobar) in 2005, helping grow the agency from a small 35-man shop to over 200 staff. She recalls it was a time of great creative licence and experimentation in digital marketing. “You had the proposition from an above-the-line campaign, and what you did with that could be anything.”

Among the many groundbreaking digital projects was Mini Cooper’s ’Ave A Word, one of the first uses of non-linear film online, in which a user could, by filling in an online questionnaire about their friend, generate a customised, emailable film of a straight-talking geezer listing said friend’s specific shortcomings.

“To look at it now, you’d think, what was the fuss about?” laughs Jordan Bambach. “But back then it was really complicated. Finding directors who could get their heads around shooting thousands of stories at one time; the implications for the editing process; and the fact the client couldn’t sign off on a traditional storyboard.”

Her next stop was marketing and tech giant DigitasLBi. Stepping up to the role of group creative director and then ECD was “shit scary”, but LBi’s inclusive culture and broader take on creativity compared to traditional agencies “went beyond campaigns to platforms and systems and included making things useful as well as interesting”.

This approach resulted in career highlights that spanned building the Virgin Atlantic site from scratch, to Macmillan’s Infi-Knit campaign, which addressed the fuel poverty of cancer sufferers. By translating users’ answers to the question “What makes you warm?” into stitches, an innovative Knit Bot machine made a woolly scarf petition to present to the government. After six months, more than 5,000 ‘knitters’ had produced a 125m-long scarf, which led to the Northern Ireland Executive awarding cancer patients £100 towards fuel bills. 

It was when she joined indie hotshop Dare in 2012 that Jordan Bambach realised digital marketing was changing, and not necessarily for the better. ‘It was going from being creatively led to algorithmically led… it was the beginning of big data and programmatic stuff. I came into Dare thinking the creative opportunities would be greater, but ended up finding certain aspects quite limiting. That was a big eye-opener for me.” 

Mr President’s daring diversity

A year later came the new challenge she was looking for – fledgling agency Mr President, originally set up by the former MD and head of strategy at Dare as a strategic consultancy for its anchor client Bacardi, began doing creative work.

The move was a no-brainer for Jordan Bambach. “If you look at all the great agencies, Mother and so on, they’ve all been set up at the time when people have said, maybe the system isn’t working.” Two and a half years down the line, and she is relishing the challenges of boutique agency life: “You can just roll your sleeves up and get stuck in without as much process. There’s no hierarchy; our clients have relationships with everyone in the company.”

Equally important is the agency’s strategic role: “Helping [clients] understand what the right thing to do is, not just the thing they can do. Otherwise you’re just a glorified production company with a few good ideas,” she says. “This sort of approach is very liberating for us, because the output could be anything. Having everyone focussed on what the ‘right’ problem is and how we answer that in the right way means our creativity is released to be all sorts of stuff.” 

The diversity of Mr President’s output reflects this: over the past couple of years it has turned feline internet stars into Greenpeace activists, created a Grey Goose private members’ club via ‘smart’ lapel pins and mercilessly spoofed the British royal family with lookalikes for The Body Shop’s Mother’s Day campaigns. Last year’s Breaking The Triangle, a 25-minute film documenting cult party-crasher and filmmaker Marcus Haney’s attempts to break into a Bacardi-backed music festival, showed a savvy grasp of influencer marketing, something many other agencies are struggling to get to grips with.

Much of this success, says Jordan Bambach, is down to the existence of a crack ‘connections planning’ team of PR, influencer management and social media experts who work with the creative department from the get-go, identifying the right audience and platforms to build reach into ideas. “We never do a piece of work and then figure out where it’s going to go,” says Jordan Bambach, citing the Body Shop campaigns as an example. “The choice of [lookalike photographer] Alison Jackson was a creative one, but we went down that route because she’s got an exclusive deal with the Daily Mail, so we were able to get an enormous amount of reach for our content built in.”

Musing on advertising’s changing landscape, she says the digital space has become more practical. “More money is going to media, programmatic buying, re-targeting, and there’s less room for creativity. Before, the work was really challenging, you had to spend time with a site to get something out of it. Now it’s all about ease.” But there are still exciting opportunities in the space, such as Virgin Red, a new loyalty scheme app recently created by the agency that will unite all the Virgin companies this year.      

Thought for the day: don’t be a dick

As one of relatively few senior female creatives, it’s no surprise that Jordan Bambach is a vocal champion of gender diversity in the tech and creative industries, a cause close to her heart ever since those early days at Geekgirl. In 2007 she co-founded the UK chapter of SheSays – an organisation inspiring and promoting women to take up digital creative careers – and has seen a heartening shift in recent years.

“When we started, it really was terrible, but things have changed at a lower level – you’re seeing a lot more women coming on board, a lot more mixed teams and a lot less stereotyping in the sense of ‘You’re the girl, you do the tampon [ads]’ and ‘You’re the guy, you do the car [ads].’” However, the lack of women at a senior creative level is still “a really big issue”, and one that “can’t be solved by women, it has to be solved by everyone.”

Ultimately, says Jordan Bambach, we just all need to be a bit braver – or, in the words of her open letter for International Women’s Day: ‘Don’t be a dick.’ “Those old ways of creative leadership can be quite masculine, quite aggressive, and that’s not necessarily the sign of being a good leader,” she explains. Pushing the boundaries, producing innovative work, calling out bullshit (and doing it all with pink hair) – Jordan Bambach is exactly the kind of talent the advertising world needs. Canberra’s loss, is London’s gain.