This week on The MCA Prodcast, Pat Murphy is joined by Asma Humayun, Founder and Global Creative Director of Shiny Toy Guns, Pakistan’s pioneering female-owned production company, now expanding into the UK. Asma began as an art director five days out of art school and rose to executive producer and partner, before building a body of work that includes Pakistan’s first Cannes Lions Grand Prix for Good and a Glass Lion for Change. In 2026 she became the first Pakistani filmmaker to sit on a Cannes Lions Film Craft jury while also speaking at the Festival.

Asma talks candidly about being her family’s ‘black sheep’ - the only creative in a house of businesspeople - and credits her late mother, herself a poet whose own creative ambitions were shelved after marriage, with fighting to send her to art school instead of business school. That backing, she says, is what let her stay in an industry where she was often the only woman on a set of a hundred-plus men, in a country where more than half of girls never make it to school at all.

A decade ago Asma set up Shiny Toy Guns because there were no women running production companies in Pakistan’s advertising industry, and no mentors for her to learn from. She built it as a platform for other women, deliberately hiring more of them onto every crew, and later founded Roar Collective to spotlight female creative talent worldwide.

Asma recalls two films in particular, both made for Impact BBDO Dubai on little or no budget: the EBM Schoolgirl Newscasters, in which formerly illiterate girls took over a real prime-time news broadcast to campaign for girls’ education, and Pakistan’s first Cannes Lions Grand Prix winner, a film about child marriage that Asma partly self-funded and edited herself. She talks about the extra soul that comes from projects made with no budget to hide behind, and the feeling of watching a film she cut at her kitchen table play on the big screen at Cannes.

Pat and Asma also get into why brands keep chasing scale over simplicity, her deliberate year inside MullenLowe Rauf to understand the agency side, and why - as a millennial who has already lived through the shift from film to digital - she isn’t remotely worried about AI. She closes with her advice to any young woman with talent but not yet the permission, money or connections: “Be brave. Have the courage to say what you want to say … don’t be afraid to be different.”

See Asma’s favourite ad: Absolut Vodka – Absolut Cities

Hosted by Pat Murphy

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This week on The MCA Prodcast, Pat Murphy is joined by Mark Knowles, Global Solutions Officer at dentsu, where he sits at the intersection of media, content, technology, and innovation. Having begun his career in CGI and visual effects, Mark moved to New York in 2012 to launch the Americas arm of Taylor James. He later joined Tag, where he led creative operations across the Americas before becoming CTO following dentsu’s acquisition in 2023, building the AI-native Content Engine designed to transform how global content gets made.

Mark and Pat consider the pros and cons of AI use in media production. Mark broadly agrees that the industry risks ‘scaling mediocrity’, producing a hundred forgettable variations instead of one great piece of work. His answer is ‘intentional human friction’. Because AI averages across everything and predicts the next token, it cannot produce the left-field idea that makes people stop. The human skill is knowing when to zig instead of zag, and the role of the production technologist is to design workflows that create space for that instinct rather than engineering it out.

The conversation also covers the broken world of the RFP. Mark argues that most pitches he sees are procurement-driven, which means they prioritise comparability over creativity, becoming ‘a race to the bottom’. A great RFP, he says, should feel like a consultation: “This is us as a brand. This is where we want to go. How do we get there together?” He also gets behind Pat’s theory that production could become the operating system for marketing, pointing out that unlike media strategies or creative territories, production is the only part of the chain that delivers something physical. That is precisely why it is uniquely placed to act as the connective layer across creativity, media, commerce, and performance.

See Mark’s favourite ad: John Lewis – Man on the Moon (2015)

Hosted by Pat Murphy

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This week on The MCA Prodcast, Pat Murphy is joined by Mary Bekhait, Group CEO of YMU, one of the world’s most powerful talent management companies. Representing global names across entertainment, music, sport and business - from Ant & Dec and Graham Norton to Simon Cowell and Davina McCall - Mary has led a major transformation at YMU, turning it into a progressive, social-first, globally integrated talent powerhouse.

Mary’s career journey began as a music journalist, before realising very early that what she really wanted was to be “in the room where talent made decisions.” A mention in Broadcast magazine’s 30 Under 30 list eventually led to her joining James Grant Management (later YMU) as a director. Her philosophy throughout: do whatever you’re doing brilliantly, add more than is expected, and the next opportunity unlocks itself.

When Mary took the CEO role in 2021, the first thing she ran at was social media. YMU’s roster of established television talent weren’t fully capitalising on the opportunities social platforms offered. Mary invested in skills and infrastructure to help them make the shift, while simultaneously acquiring Gleam Futures, the UK’s pre-eminent social-first management company, bringing their entire team and client list into the YMU fold. The combination of legacy broadcast talent and digital-native creators has, she says, been phenomenally successful.

Mary is known for her leadership principles of clarity, courage and curiosity, and for turning them into concrete action. On empowering women, she argues that small incremental moves such as speaking up in a meeting or going for a promotion before you feel ready compound into real career momentum. She credits parenting with deepening her empathy and her capacity for active listening; qualities she now considers as important to business as speed.

See Mary’s favourite ad: Yves Saint Laurent – Opium (2000)

Hosted by Pat Murphy

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