Asma Humayun – A Small Fish in a Sea of Sharks

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.” 0:00 Intro 1:31 The Story behind Shiny Toy Guns 7:48 Breaking into a Male-Dominated Production House 11:06 Building Shiny Toy Guns to Back Other Women 14:28 Is Diversity in Advertising Actually Genuine? 17:13 Founding Roar Collective 20:00 The Schoolgirl Newscasters and a First Glass Lion 25:19 Why Brands Chase Big over Simple Ideas 32:23 The Personal Cost of Success and Family Life 34:28 Baking, Gardening and Creativity at Home 36:29 Asma’s Advice to Young Women 40:27 Asma's Favourite Ad