I'm Mike. The Shadow Factory is my practice.
Before this, I spent two decades in New Zealand's leading ad agencies, working across every category, every media, and most of the challenges a business can throw at a creative department. The work won awards from Cannes to the Clios to the Effies. More importantly, it moved product, built brands, and changed how people thought about the businesses behind them.
But it got boring. Big corporates with layers of bullshit. The businesses with the most interesting problems, the NZ-owned companies genuinely building something, weren't getting the creative thinking they deserved. Too big for a freelancer. Too small for a traditional. So they'd get okay work, from well-meaning people, and wonder why it wasn't cutting through. That's what The Shadow Factory is for.
I work with NZ businesses with great stories to tell who know their brand marketing could be sharper but aren't sure where to start, don't have the internal creative & strategic leadership to get there, or have been burned by agencies who treated them as a small account.
You get strategy and execution from the same senior person. No handoffs. No bloated process. The people who do it come to you, meet you, then get it done.
Clear thinking, strong creative, and work that actually does something.
What I believe
Great creative isn't about taste. It's about truth. When you understand what a business genuinely is, what makes it different, what it cares about, why people choose it then the work becomes obvious. Not easy. Obvious.
The best work I've done hasn't come from a big budget or a famous brand. It's come from finding the real story inside a business, and then telling it in a way that's impossible to ignore.
That's what I come to work to do.
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