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These are exciting times. An industry that took a century to settle is being rewritten in a couple of years. How work gets made, who makes it, what clients pay for: all up for grabs.
Most of the business reads this as a doom scenario. So it’s a pleasure to be in a room with people who see the possibilities instead. For a studio with real craft and the appetite to add a thinking layer, this is the best moment in decades.
What follows is how I’d help Rascal make the most of it: where I fit, an honest look at the position, the practical structures, and a roadmap that starts with clients you already have.
Strategy, branding and creative direction sit above Rascal’s production engine. It’s the layer that decides what the work is for, who it’s for and what it’s worth, then pulls the craft through at partnership prices.
That layer is my seat: ECD of the new strategy and concept division, running the creative and the vision. Operational support builds underneath it as revenue scales; the thinking never waits on headcount.
The market is evolving: creative moved in-house, channels went owned, production value stopped being scarce. The winners will sell the thinking and deliver the making under one roof, with no agency in between.
Nobody is better placed than a trusted post house. In-house teams hold the door open for post, but see classic agencies as rivals; collaboration is the key.
Before the script is written, we write the brief.
Option 01 tells a story. Option 04 invites the tax office.
Over the last fifteen years the clients quietly built their own creative departments. In 2008, 42% of big advertisers had an in-house team; today it’s 82%. (ANA, 2023) The work moved inside the building, and the budgets followed it.
The agency model was never designed for this world. An agency is built to own the idea, the relationship and the credit. So when it’s invited in to help an in-house team, it arrives as creative competition dressed up as pseudo-collaboration. Both sides feel the friction, and the trust required for great work is nowhere to be found.
In-house teams don’t need another rival. They need a collaborator who delivers.
Cameras, tools, templates and now gen-AI have democratised production value, turning high-fidelity execution into something anyone can buy, or prompt. The thing that used to be scarce isn’t.
When everyone can make it beautiful, beauty stops being the differentiator. The value moves upstream, to knowing what to make, who it’s for, and what it should make people feel. People compare features, but they buy feelings: emotional campaigns outperform rational ones roughly seven to one over the long run. (Binet & Field, IPA)
Features get compared. Feelings get chosen.
For most of a century the agency business was really a media business: a commission on every placement, with the creative bundled in as the gift with purchase. Then media split from creative, commissions became fees, the platforms went self-serve. And the clients built channels of their own.
Retail media passed linear TV in 2025. (GroupM) Amazon now sells $68.6 billion of advertising a year; the biggest agency group ever assembled, Omnicom after absorbing IPG, earns $25 billion in total. Even the consultancies read the shift and bought their way in: McKinsey, Accenture, Deloitte. Strategy at partner prices, execution left to someone else.
The margin that paid for the ideas is gone. The ideas still aren’t priced.
The games industry is in open chaos: layoffs, cancellations, and an AI debate running hotter than anywhere else. It’s AI-averse in the creative layers and AI-positive in production and operations.
Underneath the chaos, the structure holds: a game studio is an in-house creative team at maximum scale. Hundreds of makers, very little patience for agencies, and a genuine hunger for strategic guidance. A confused industry pays for clarity, and pays best for partners who can think and deliver.
As feeds fill with generated content, brands are spending on the one thing an algorithm can’t scroll past: experience. It shows up as installations, live events, pop-ups and virtual production. Experiential with tech is where craft, technology and brand meet in person.
It rewards exactly what a post house with a thinking layer has: real production muscle, technical depth, and now the strategy to decide what the experience should mean. It’s also a natural bridge between the games world, the brand world, and the Nordic scene.
Three times before, I’ve built a 360 offering for post-heavy companies: taking craft companies upstream into strategy, direct to the people who commission the work.
It’s been one direction the whole way: closer to the client, further up the value chain.
This goes beyond writing and creating concepts. It’s brand-based: positions, platforms and identities that campaigns get built on. Before the script is written, we write the brief.
And it’s 0-to-1 thinking: naming, positioning and building from a blank page. It’s the hardest brief, and one of the most rewarding.
The relationships already exist: since Crusader Kings III, Paradox has asked me personally to define every grand-strategy brand they own. A Sharkmob tone-of-voice workshop grew into naming and brand copy. Minecraft kept me embedded for eight years, Eurovision reached 200 million viewers, Microsoft made us a Preferred Supplier.
While the offerings and the work are great, your deck undersells the thing global clients value most: a history of action and robust delivery at scale, across the versions and aspect ratios that break lesser pipelines.
And the pitch reveals the classic post-house approach: selling time and efficiency. Faster, cheaper, more. It’s the language of a supplier, priced like one.
The shift is to increase the focus on problems solved and business generated. Lead with what the work did for the client’s numbers, not how quickly it rendered.
The why becomes as important as the what and the how.
Growth runs on freelancers and existing talent first. The network executes while the core stays small, and hires follow revenue:
Fixed costs stay small. Ambition doesn’t.
Before I leave the US, the goal is to have established a US sales presence with a connected delivery hub, servicing US clients in their own time zone.
On return to Sweden, the goal is to grow the offering into the Swedish startup and AI scene and the games market. All while closely servicing the London-based clients and the UK team.
My relocation isn’t a complication in this plan. It is the plan.
Every thesis has an end state, and this one’s ending is beautiful. If owned channels beat bought ones, the final move is to own the brand itself: a lifestyle brand grown out of the studio. A travel journal, a restaurant, a fashion label, a record producer. Culture made on our own taste, with our own craft, where every client engagement quietly doubles as R&D.
It’s the studio at full scale: a brand that exists purely to make people feel cool, owned by the people with the taste. The nearest anyone came was Vice, when Vice was hot: a zine that became a culture that became an empire. They proved the dream is real.
That’s the dream. The division is how we earn it.
Thank you for reading. Let’s talk.