Clive (burch-diddy) Burcham
Founder
Clive might just have a personality disorder, a sort of ADD mixed with a Rainman-esque obsessive streak, because he can focus on a million things with the intensity of a sheep dog watching a massive flock and not miss a trick. (Woof.)
Or maybe it’s just that he grew up on a farm in remote Western Australia. Though there were no sheep and he did not sleep in a kennel in the backyard, he did sow seeds in paddocks, learning from this, how big things grow from little’uns. That getting in there and getting your hands dirty produces buckets of results, he picked up from milking cows.
One or two textbook troubled teen experiences (he’s saving those stories for Oprah) saw Clive move from the farm and into the big world. Lonely out there by himself for the first time, he was working at his first TV station surrounded by production paraphernalia, when at fifteen he picked up a video camera and got lost in the magic. He directed and produced his first TV pilot, the excellently ‘80s-named Kidz Biz. It made it to air.
Discovering early that even kids like him from a farm in the sticks can have their dreams become reality has played its part in Clive’s commitment to empowering his young team to go play and create amazing things. And it’s kept him dreaming big.
Seeing his business win awards, break records and set new precedents is the result of that, but he’s still just a farmer’s boy, albeit one living in a digital/social media/humanitarian world. He just happens to also be obsessively committed to optimising cut through across all media for his beloved clients and projects, while intuitively growing his business with inspired strategic positioning. Just like his days sowing seeds and milking cows, he’s all about creating results with resoundingly positive outcomes.
That’s how TCO and The Happy Farm have come to be what they are today, businesses that are multiplying year on year. Ahead of the game with a guerilla approach to combining traditional, digital and social media technologies (another obsession of Clive’s, yep sheepdog), Clive’s longstanding relationships with blue chip clients such as Coca-Cola, Vodafone, Telstra, FFA and Network Ten have seen the TCO companies produce branded digital films, dozens of live events, a TV series, documentaries, 75 integrated TV campaigns and then some in the past year alone.
When Hugh Evans’s Oaktree Foundation came to TCO a new chapter in Clive’s life began.
Not only did it mean a new friendship with Hugh, but with the drive of Oaktree and the innovative and visionary production skills of TCO, the Make Poverty History events stand today as the most successful youth concerts in Australian history.
It also spurred Clive’s passion to eradicate world poverty. Bugger the bureaucrats, it can and will be done. To that end, he’s still proudly in cahoots with the awesome Hugh Evans on Evans’s Global Poverty Project, a grassroots movement with support in high places aimed at educating and inspiring the world to give the 1.4 billion people living on the edge the same fighting chance as the rest of us. (go to www.globalpovertyproject.com; do it now.)
The twosome also head up The Human Race, a consultancy showing companies how to get amazing results with positive human and environmental outcomes.
It wasn’t just straight from Kidz Biz to here, though. Clive did his tour of duty through the media and advertising worlds like a character in a Jay McInerney novel.
Fresh from WA, he moved to the Australian east coast and precociously worked for all the major Australian television networks before launching Foxtel’s ground-breaking, multi-award winning Comedy Channel . He drove record sales while creating innovative brand-funded ideas such as Hahn Ice Headliners and toyotatraycomedy.
He crossed the Pacific and worked for AttiK and iDeutsch in New York and Fuel in Los Angeles. Through the top creative job at a UK broadband outfit he racked up the frequent flier miles to launch four broadband channels across the globe (Done and Dusted, Skive being two), including Madonna’s record setting $45m MSN Webcast. To Clive’s delight the globetrotting soon involved several Ford Supermodels through his successful stint as International Project Director for ‘Search for a Supermodel’.
He himself was searching for something else. While having a drink at the Lotus Bar on the Lower East Side of New York City Clive found it. He suddenly had a crisis of conscience (or lack there of). He wanted to work with people and ideas that were authentic. For a year he meditated over this idea while exercising like Forrest Gump on Bondi Beach and managing the band The Hampdens until he finally stopped the navel gazing and gave birth to TCO.
The mantra was to create work that had a legitimate connection between creator and consumer. Passion paid off. TCO doubled its business each year in its first three years and almost quadrupled last year. It is now Australia’s largest independent branded entertainment specialist and has just moved into a nice big house in Redfern, where Clive sometimes laments his democratic style when a certain band (that shall remain diplomatically nameless) is played on the sound system by his colleagues.
Clive loves riding his bike - the dream to one day win the Tour de France. Watching from the sidelines will be the wind beneath his titanium wheels, wife Belinda, daughter little Betty-Rose Angel Burcham and the newest addition to the family, a ridiculously handsome son by the name of Thomas.
