Taking a Seat at The Banquet’s Table of No-Waste Production

“Push every penny onto the screen:” For Adham Hunt, co-founder and executive producer of boutique production company The Banquet, it’s not just a mantra but a corrective to what he calls the “bullshit waste” of advertising production. In an industry where turnaround times are shrinking and budgets splinter into hundreds of assets rather than a single glossy TV commercial, The Banquet has carved out a space as a pragmatic, agile alternative.

Born out of Adham’s background in music management – where a shoestring video shoot forced him to step into the producer’s chair – The Banquet has grown into a carefully-curated roster of directors, photographers and videographers, each chosen to avoid stylistic overlap. It’s an offering designed for agencies and brands facing a market in which “content is dead in six weeks” and where speed, efficiency and creative integrity matter more than clinging to old models.

The person who got him into producing is Banquet director Ian Roderick Gray. Adham produced for him for many years. “It started in a weird way,” he recalls. At the time, Adham was managing artists, producers and writers, and funding a music video for one of his acts. When the on-set production began to fall apart, he stepped in himself. “A couple of weeks later, Ian called me and said, ‘Could you produce this Samsung advert for me?’ I said, ‘No, I’m not a producer.’ He said, ‘Just do what you did.’ That’s how it evolved.”

After a period of handing off projects to other directors and videographers, the pair decided to formalise what they’d built. “We realised it was stupid to be throwing work away. We decided to rebrand and formalise… curating a list of people who didn’t overlap in style or specialism. You need to be agile. Turnaround times are getting shorter with the focus on social; content is dead in six to eight weeks. The days of shiny TV commercials with £500,000 minimum budgets are long gone.”

​

Challenging Orthodoxy

Adham is frank about the challenges of working within long-standing industry frameworks. “There are long-established rules and expectations in the industry that can be quite polarising. On a personal level, and as a company, we support the principle of protecting workers and making sure no one is taken advantage of. But the frameworks need to match the times.”

Too often, he says, official guidance feels out of step with the reality of production today – contradictory on rates and disconnected from the pressures clients and crews face. “From speaking to crew, many feel the same: things need adjusting. For me, rates should be more flexible – partly budget dependent, and also reflective of experience. It doesn’t make sense for someone with 15 years’ experience to be paid the same as someone who’s just walked out of college. In any other industry, you wouldn’t walk straight into a CEO salary.”

Rethinking Production Economics

Adham argues that pragmatism often trumps rigid rules for The Banquet. Campaigns today demand vast suites of assets – “a TV commercial is only one” – and budgets are spread more thinly across the year. His solution is to encourage brands to plan production quarterly, bundling shoots together to maximise efficiency. “If you can work with a brand and say, ‘Break it down, plan what you need across that quarter, and come to us with a quarterly budget,’ I can get them far more bang for their buck by shooting all of it over two weeks.”

He notes that this approach doesn’t just benefit clients. Rental houses, he says, will “bite your arm off” for a longer booking at a slightly reduced rate, and experienced crew often prefer guaranteed work at a consistent pace to the precariousness of chasing a handful of premium-paying jobs. In a volatile market, consistency and security can be worth more than the theoretical maximum.

Anti-Waste, Pro-Value

“We don’t over-inflate budgets,” says Adham. “We spend wisely, and we’re very agile in how we approach things. We try to push every penny possible into what people see on screen, because there’s so much fat in this industry that’s just bullshit waste.”

By working closely with agencies and brands at an early stage, Adham believes The Banquet can help prevent unaffordable ideas from ever reaching production. “The further up the chain you are, the more you can prevent people from coming up with something they can’t afford. Instead, you can find the solution to get as close to what they want within the money they have.”

The Banquet’s recent output illustrates the model. The Banquet brought Sky Bet’s Christmas ‘Super Week’ to life with an ambitious, high-energy campaign that fused dynamic live action, imaginative CGI and a series of set pieces that felt like mini films in their own right. With quick turnarounds, multiple deliverables and a tight budget, the production team leaned on strong collaboration to capture the scale and excitement of a sporting bonanza that spanned boxing, football, horse racing, darts, NFL and more. Adham is confident that what was delivered for under £500K with just 10 days of pre-production achieved a premium look far beyond that.

A project for MyProtein demanded a large volume of assets on a similarly tight timeline. Creating Myprotein’s Black Friday cyber hunt involved fusing tongue-in-cheek Hollywood pastiche with influencer-led storytelling, transforming athletes into towering giants roaming global cities. The Banquet’s task was to balance cinematic scale and VFX spectacle with playful characterisation, resulting in a film that felt both epic in scope and true to each personality on screen.

The recent Betfair ‘Safe Sub’ campaign required the ambition of a cinematic set piece, transforming a football substitutes board into a fully fledged VFX character while balancing bold art direction and storytelling craft. The live action/CGI hybrid project was prepped in just seven days, shot on the ninth and delivered within a fortnight – a testament to the team’s ability to marry complex visuals with extreme agility.

An Ethos of Collaboration

The company’s name underlines its philosophy. “Ultimately we settled on The Banquet because we love going out, socialising, having a meal,” says Adham. “Even socially with friends, it’s a debate, a great conversation – and out of that comes great ideas. That’s really what it was about: inviting brands and agencies to the table.”

At its heart, The Banquet is more than a name. For Adham, it’s a metaphor: a table where brands, agencies and creators sit together, debate, and leave with better ideas than they arrived with. That spirit of collaboration underpins a business that’s unafraid to challenge orthodoxy, reimagine production economics, and squeeze maximum value from every budget line.

The message to agencies and brands is clear: The Banquet isn’t about fat margins or putting the highest possible glossy sheen on a piece of filmmaking; it’s about craft, efficiency and openness. In a market full of individual projects becoming odysseys in their own right, Adham’s promise is disarmingly simple: spend wisely, deliver boldly, and always leave the audience with something worth savouring.