As a mortgage PR firm celebrating two decades in the industry, we’ve seen trends come and go, but one thing remains constant: our drive to stay bold, innovative, and creatively daring.
A fascinating study published in The Times explores how musical titans like Coldplay, Radiohead, and REM evolve creatively over time – and challenges the cliché that age or success dulls artistic edge.
The study, led by Professor Nick Collins of Durham University and published in Royal Society Open Science, showed that success doesn’t necessarily lead to a creative slowdown.
While Coldplay leaned into more accessible chord patterns as their mainstream success grew, they continued to push boundaries with varied sounds, instruments, and timbres. Radiohead, meanwhile, maintained their harmonic daring, staying true to their experimental roots across nine albums. REM, defying assumptions, returned to a raucous sound in their final works, proving age doesn’t equate to mellowing.
I see parallels in bClear’s own twenty-year journey; we refuse to rest on our laurels and are as experimental and dynamic as ever.
Our 20 years in the industry haven’t led us to safer, more predictable work. Like Radiohead, we’ve stayed harmonically diverse – constantly exploring bold strategies and innovative campaigns for our B2B clients in the mortgage and property industries.
Instead, we’ve embraced the spirit of Coldplay’s timbral experimentation, adapting to new technologies, platforms, and storytelling methods to keep our campaigns fresh and impactful. About a decade ago, we started working with one of our brokers to produce an annual state of the nation report on the UK’s mortgage market. It’s still going today and is already booked in with a leading mortgage title. Back in the pandemic, the agency created a webinar series with one of our lenders and Mortgage Introducer.
And like REM, we’ve doubled down on our edge, delivering campaigns that are as bold today as they were when we started in 2005. The Times notes that “any clichéd correlation of older musicians’ work to a musical preference for slower, less adventurous materials is not borne out.” Similarly, our longevity doesn’t mean we’ve settled into routine.
Our team thrives on pushing boundaries – whether crafting cutting-edge thought leadership for tech firms or designing disruptive PR strategies for lending giants. Recently we have undertaken a substantial piece of research looking at headcounts across the building society sector and comparing them against total assets providing a rough and ready judgement of the technological sophistication of the UK’s remaining mutuals. And we have compared ONS rental data to survey results from BTL lender which landed us both on Sky and in the Telegraph. And we’ve examined total live gross loan amounts over time to plot changes in mortgage preferences since 2014 and made forecasts n product popularity for 2037 on the back of those numbers.
Success hasn’t made us complacent; it’s fuelled our hunger to innovate. As we mark our 20th anniversary, we’re proud to reflect the same creative resilience as the bands in the study. At bClear, age is no barrier to daring. Here’s to another 20 years of bold ideas, experimental approaches, and campaigns that resonate as powerfully as a Radiohead riff.
Written by: James Staunton
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