You sent a deck that said hello to me by name.
It seemed only polite to reply in kind.
I know the format: decks are meant to be glanced at — six words a slide, for a world that reads the headline and skips to the end. This one asks a little more of you, because it isn’t really a deck. It’s a paper product. The thinking is the merchandise, and this document is the first sample.
So take it at your own speed, in any order, more than once if it earns it. And don’t worry — when we talk, I’ll walk you through the whole thing.
TL;DR: the future needs a studio that thinks. You’re closer than you know. Now read on.
Click anything to jump. Or just press → and trust me.
“Where are the easy wins? Where do you fit in? And what does the bigger, longer-term vision look like?”
— Gareth Brannan, 17 July 2026
They’re really one question wearing three hats: what is a post house allowed to become? I’ve spent twenty years working on that answer, so rather than take the questions one at a time, let me show you the whole map — the wins fall out of it on their own.
Easy wins included. Argument first.
Start with what changed. 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 that 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 a rival wearing a partner’s badge. Both sides feel the friction. Neither mentions it at the kick-off.
There’s a warmer way through that door.
Now follow the money, because this is the part everyone talks around. For most of a century the agency business was really a media business: the agency took a commission — classically 15% — on every placement it booked, and the creative came bundled in. The ideas were the gift with purchase: charming, celebrated, and never actually priced.
Then the model came apart. Media split from creative, commissions became fees, the platforms went self-serve — and the clients themselves became the media. 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.
The margin that paid for the ideas is gone. The ideas still aren’t priced.
The strategy consultancies saw this coming before anyone in our industry did. McKinsey bought Lunar, Accenture bought Droga5, Deloitte bought Heat — not out of love for the craft, but because they’d spotted the new buyer: in-house teams, and the management above them, who genuinely want to be guided through strategic thinking — at exactly the moment their agencies became awkward to ask.
But look at what the consultancies actually deliver: thinking at partner prices, with the making done somewhere else, by someone else. The diagnosis was right. The medicine is bloodless — strategy separated from craft ends up as a report, not a brand.
Right diagnosis. Wrong doctors.
So who’s left to fix it? Look at where the post house sits. It arrives after the politics are settled, it serves the people who actually make things, and its whole job is to make them look brilliant. Nobody guards the door against a post house — the in-house team holds it open.
That trust is exactly the distribution the consultancies spend fortunes trying to buy, and post has it for free. The only thing missing is the thinking layer that turns a trusted supplier into an indispensable partner.
Trust opens the door. Strategy is why you stay.
One direction the whole way: closer to the client, further up the conversation. Rascal is the fourth move.
When brokendoll crossed from TV into games, it wasn’t a reinvention — it was the same insight, applied where it was strongest. 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. The thesis called that move before the market did.
And it paid in the way that matters: clients who came back with bigger questions. 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 — and the same method, unchanged, shipped a phone for Nokia and a motion identity for Ericsson.
A right insight doesn’t respect verticals.
Now here’s the part of the map you’re standing on. Amazon has bought Human-meets-AI craft from you for five years — directly, with no agency in the room. That’s an in-house organisation at the biggest scale there is, at the company that just became the media, choosing a post house it doesn’t fear. Every piece of the thesis I’ve just walked you through is running live in your own building — you’ve simply filed it under core business.
Which means the Studio pivot doesn’t need to be invented. It needs to be named, priced, and given a thinking layer on top, so the next five Amazons buy a partnership instead of throughput.
The proof isn’t in this deck. It’s on your client list.
Your deck shows where you’re heading: an AI Generative Studio and a Creative Technology practice. Both real, both right, both already moving — and both selling to exactly the in-house teams this story has been about.
But pillars exist to hold something up. What’s missing is the roof: the discipline that decides what the work is for, who it’s for, what it’s called, and what it’s worth.
That’s where I fit in. On top.
So what is the roof made of? Not decks about decks — a practiced discipline: research, stakeholder interviews, alignment workshops, positioning, naming, identity. Documented, repeatable, and old enough to have scar tissue. Its first principle is hard-won: in twenty years, the single most important variable in every project I’ve run has been the degree of alignment among the key stakeholders — so alignment is what the method manufactures.
And because brand coherence is a perishable good, the method’s real deliverable is artifacts: a position that survives a re-org, a promise the product has to keep every day, personas with names so every meeting has a referee. Artifacts keep making decisions long after the engagement ends. The work keeps working.
Here’s the insight underneath all of it. People compare features, but they buy feelings — emotional campaigns outperform rational ones roughly seven to one over the long run. (Binet & Field, IPA) So the method hunts for one spot: where what your audience needs, what they want to feel, and what only you can claim all overlap.
And the timing matters: gen-AI is turning high-fidelity execution into a commodity — your own deck says so. When everyone can make the thing, the only defensible ground left is knowing what it should make people feel.
Features get compared. Feelings get chosen.
Let’s run the method on Rascal, right now. Under every post brief ever written sits the same unspoken need: “I want everyone to feel we’re cool.” That’s the feeling. The need is demanding work, delivered safely. The USP is your taste — the thing the showreels prove and the rate card never mentions.
A great post house is a high-end tailor. Two suits can share the same cut; only one fitting makes you stand differently. What clients are actually buying is the experience — the alignment, the journey, the effortlessly awesome taste and craft. That is what we’re selling. It has never been on the invoice.
You’ve been selling the suit. They’ve been buying the mirror.
Fourteen steps in the long version. One outcome: a company that agrees with itself.
Efficiency handed to the client as a discount is margin leaving the building in a gift bag — and remember where we started: creative has been the gift with purchase for a century. This is where that era ends.
The strategy layer prices the thinking in its own right, never as free pre-sales, because features get compared down to a rate while a feeling has no comparison column. Priced properly, it turns a supplier into a partner — the kind clients hand their next brand to, not just their next brief. That’s why partnerships out-earn projects.
Your own deck describes the operating model: “a core team, bolstered by a bespoke plug-in network.” That’s precisely the model I ran for a decade, and the best years of it ran on six people. A senior core owns the strategy and the creative direction; the network executes, but only once the revenue already exists to fund it.
That’s how fixed costs stay small while ambition doesn’t.
I’m not here to change your model. I’m here to aim it.
Games, then — and let’s be accurate about where you stand. You’ve touched games before: Xbox and others, through agencies, at one remove. The remove is the problem this deck has been describing — the work exists, but the direct relationships don’t. Those I’m carrying with me: Paradox, Sharkmob, Ubisoft, Massive, Tencent, Hazelight, EA — and a live line back into Minecraft, where Minecraft Live is a genuine near-term possibility.
Let’s also be realistic about the industry: games is in chaos right now — AI-averse in some layers, AI-positive in others. That’s not a reason to wait; a confused industry pays for clarity. And what almost nobody sells it is the campaign as one completed thought — strategy, identity, key art, dev diaries — which is also, conveniently, the body of work your AI studio says it needs. The reel gets a story instead of a montage.
There’s low fruit, too: Paradox strategy work could start early. Momentum first, machinery after.
Act One runs from California, where I live until mid-2027 — and where the biggest doors in the industry are currently open: major Valley tech brands buying AI automation and localisation with strategy on top, the motion you’ve already proven with Amazon. Every one of them has an in-house creative team behind the door. I won’t promise leads. What I will promise: when a door is ajar, I kick it open.
The first win doesn’t need a pitch. It needs a Tuesday.
In mid-2027 my family moves to Stockholm — where Rascal already stands. (Hej, Kalle.)
That’s when Act Two begins: growing the Sweden office into the Nordic games tier — Paradox, Sharkmob, and an alumni network twenty years deep — with the rest of Europe to follow.
My relocation isn’t a complication in this plan. It is the plan.
The division should carry its own name — Rascal-flavoured, clearly family, deliberately not “Rascal Strategy.” Here’s why: a sub-brand is a buffer. It gives us room to explore AI and agency-shaped thinking without ever appearing to compete with the agencies that still feed Rascal work today.
It protects in both directions — the new thing gets to be provocative while Rascal stays premium. And naming it is the first live demonstration of the method you’d be buying: the naming process’s first client is us.
I’ll bring a shortlist. Ten to fifteen, vetted — that’s the process.
brokendoll’s US company still stands — clean, domestic, and parked exactly where Act One happens. So here’s an option worth designing properly: the division acquires it and rebrands it as the sub-brand’s American home.
One signature buys three things: a genuine acquisition story to launch the division on, a US vehicle for contracts and payroll from day one, and a firewall — with an American company doing the American business, Rascal’s UK and Swedish companies never risk a US taxable presence, what the lawyers call Permanent Establishment.
The press release writes itself. I checked.
Phase one is a paid design engagement — weeks, not months. Together we design the offering, the pricing, the sub-brand and its name, and the first-year pipeline. You keep the blueprint either way.
Phase two is agreed before we start: I found the division and run it, with real skin in the game.
We can talk numbers when there’s a thing to number.
I won’t promise that client lists follow me. Nobody honest does.
What I bring instead: doors that open when I knock, a documented discipline that survived a decade of contact with reality, and the scar tissue of running this model through its best years and its worst one. Ask me about either — I’ll answer straight.
So here’s the long view. The consultancies bought their way into the client’s head. The agencies lost the margin that paid for their ideas. And the post house — trusted, tasteful, already inside — walks in through the front door, if it can learn to think as well as it makes.
London. Stockholm. A beachhead in the Valley. Craft that wins awards, technology that compounds, and upstream of it all, under its own name, the discipline that makes everything cost what it’s actually worth.
“While everyone else is still sleeping” — your words. Let’s be up early.
Every thesis has an end state, and this one’s 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 tailor 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. They also proved you need the margin discipline — which is, conveniently, what the rest of this deck was about.
That’s the dream. The division is how we earn it.
Thank you for reading. Let’s talk.