This is a great story for Lost Boy... A nice combination of poise & luck and it feels like it came together right at the moment when things started properly ticking for the Lost Boy Team.

When I launched the company in October, I sent a message to pretty much every creative in the industry. Of the perhaps twenty replies I got, one came from Grant Hunter, the Global ECD of Iris. He said he agreed with my messaging, that creative composition is being done completely wrong. He liked the idea of a more bespoke, hands on approach to composition, and was keen on my idea of working with the creatives to make the track.

We met for coffee at Iris and talked for an hour about this new approach, how it could save agencies time, money and reignite a sense of creative control over this area of our industry. He said he would love to try us out on a project and at the end of November I got a message from Shelley Miller, one of the producers on Adidas, who said Grant had suggested us for an upcoming Terrex job.

We quickly jumped into the briefing process and I was introduced to another killer Creative Director, Jan Pruijser, who became an absolutely vital influence in ensuring this project turned out right. Jan was, at this point, a little wearied by a project that had been dragged through months of creative challenges. With innumerable loopholes having been woven, it would have been understandable for him to have been disengaged, but I immediately felt his commitment to getting the best out of this side of the project. He met the Lost Boy excitement and energy blow for blow, and we immediately began a detailed referencing process. Starting with just two songs, broadening our soundscape to around thirty references before distilling our list back down to around six tracks that we intended to work to. Again the sphere of influence was broad; from blues to drum & bass to house, with a strong undercurrent of indie - references ranged from Dijon to Arcade Fire to Jamie XX to Floating Points to Empire of the Sun.

Jan & Grant were super hands-on, coming back with detailed feedback about what they liked about each reference track, decisively scrapping things that weren’t right. There was a clear commitment to making sure this project was as good as it could possibly be. Clear also, was the depth of experience that these two brought to the table - they knew the importance of this part of the project, they understood that by giving a little bit of their time upfront, they were certain to get way better results from these demos than they would have from a traditional briefing process, and that was absolutely instrumental in us being able to do our job right.

After making sure we were all on the same page with our tracks to work from we went away and smashed out six bespoke demos - have a listen to some of our favourites below…

The winning track was actually a super late-comer, we had already submitted all the above demos and RAIN WON'T COME and RIVERS ARE CALLING were the teams clear favourites - each fighting it out for the top spot.

In one of our initial ideation sessions, we had put down a cute little guitar part which had a kind of Red Hot Chilli Peppers feel, but because of a lack of time we had let it fall by the wayside. When we came back to approach the agencies tweaks and changes on these two tracks we decided to re-open it. Overnight one of my producers had fleshed out this little riff and made it way more commercial, with a crunchy bass line, a driving beat and one of the chant vocals from another demo. We decided it was a good idea to re-submit this with the two updated tracks and immediately got a message back saying that the team loved this new direction. After a few minor tweaks it was added to the deck and the agency presented it as their preferred route.

The result of that final push was our winning track, TALL FLOWERS WAVE, and it is truly one of my favourite pieces of music we’ve created.

If you like the way this all sounds, I would love to chat to you more about how we could create your next bit of ad-music together.

Get me on the below if you want to talk about an upcoming brief, or just shoot the breeze generally.

Big Love,

Lost Boy Collective