<\/p>\n
Chris Hassell launched Ralph in 2010 wanting to make cool things and get paid for it. Fifteen years of running an independent shop in advertising made that harder than it sounds. Now he thinks he\u2019s found a way through.<\/p>\n
The way Hassell sees it, entertainment is the one part of the creative business that can\u2019t be procured, optimized or automated. You can\u2019t put a kids\u2019 TV show through a procurement process the way you can a display campaign. You can\u2019t performance-market your way to a hit. And whatever AI does to production costs, it can\u2019t generate the rights, the talent relationships or the distribution that a genuine entertainment property requires.<\/p>\n
So that\u2019s what Ralph is building.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a magazine, a podcast with Time Out, a TV channel and a labs division in development. Across comedy, music and food and drink, it\u2019s developing IP with licensing, merchandising and distribution in mind. It\u2019s also in production on a cartoon for a TV network and closing on a deal to revive one of the most recognizable kids\u2019 brands around. He won\u2019t say much else. Something about lawyers.<\/p>\n
The harder question is whether the business model is keeping pace.<\/p>\n
Revenue is still skewed toward work-for-hire. The agency is still the engine. Hassell is upfront about that. But entertainment, he argued, is a longer-term investment by nature. You develop concepts, build audiences and find partners. Ralph has created investment vehicles specifically to fund that side of the business.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIf your business model is still aiming to be fee-based,\u201d he said, \u201cyou\u2019re not really approaching it wholeheartedly.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
What he\u2019s looking for from brands isn\u2019t briefs or budgets.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The commercial model he\u2019s pursuing runs on brand partnerships, direct subscription and direct purchase \u2014 or an audience with value in its own right.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cEveryone looks the same nowadays,\u201d he said. The magazine, the channel, the IP slate are as much about that as anything else.<\/p>\n
Ralph is further along than most, but it isn\u2019t alone in the diagnosis.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Elvis, the London creative agency, recently hired a head of entertainment specifically to navigate the shift. Claire Prince, who came up through TV development before stints at BBH and WPP\u2019s media operations, was brought in because the agency had already reached a conclusion: staying as a traditional advertising agency means getting smaller. Entertainment is where the growth is.<\/p>\n
The changes Prince is\u00a0making to get there are structural as much as creative.<\/p>\n
The production partner roster is changing \u2014 Banijay and Fremantle where it might once have been Stink and Pulse. That shift has a knock-on effect inside the agency: how briefs get written, what a strategist\u2019s job looks like and how much of the creative lead comes from inside the building versus outside it. Every project, in other words, requires its own calibration, and that complexity is compounded by the sales cycle. Some brands get there quickly. Russell Hobbs, JD Sports and SharkNinja are running entire annual marketing slates through social series, for instance. Others take the better part of a year just to greenlight a single project. The difference, she said, is rarely the brand. It\u2019s the person at the brand \u2014 whether the CMO or partnerships lead understands the value of it enough to champion it internally.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can\u2019t pretend that the world is not changing, just how everyone went from analog to digital, it\u2019s a similar shift in how agencies behave.\u201d<\/p>\n
What Elvis hasn\u2019t yet produced, at least publicly, is a body of work that proves the model. Prince was five days into the job at the time of this conversation. That may be the most honest thing about where most agencies actually are with this.<\/p>\n
\u201cStaying as a traditional advertising agency means you\u2019re just going to get smaller,\u201d said Prince. \u201cThat\u2019s not to say that that work isn\u2019t around, but it\u2019s certainly not a growth area.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a thought not lost on Dan Salkey and Harvey Austin, the ad execs who launched Small World in 2021. They built the agency on an approach they call entertainment-first creativity.\u00a0<\/p>\n
For Hot Topic \u2014 a U.S. retailer that had lost its footing with Gen Z \u2014 that meant assembling a cast of five creator-writers, putting them in a writers room with a showrunner, and producing a social-first sitcom series. It\u2019s been commissioned for five further seasons.<\/p>\n
For Dr Squatch\u2019s U.K. launch, the same thinking was applied to a TV campaign: a comedy creator co-wrote and starred in the ad. It plays like sketch comedy.<\/p>\n
The numbers suggest there\u2019s a lot of runway with the approach. Viewers of the Hot Topic work were 16% more likely to visit a store, 12% are more likely to buy online, while 6% are more likely to see the brand as cool,\u00a0measured against a control group watching standard retail content. That\u2019s enough to justify the approach. Not enough to settle the argument.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not that this is a new thing,\u201d said Salkey. \u201cIt\u2019s just that it\u2019s more important.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
The oldest problem in advertising is also the most persistent: how do you make something people actually want to spend time with? For most of the industry\u2019s recent history, the answer was volume. More reach, more frequency, more spend. The machine was optimized for scale, and scale was optimized for the machine. Then the platforms that promised infinite reach started charging for it. Then procurement arrived and turned creativity into a line item. Then AI came along and offered to do the executional work for almost nothing. The industry, having spent a decade making itself cheaper and more efficient, found itself staring at a question it had successfully avoided: what, exactly, is it for?<\/p>\n
Hassell has more to say. What follows is an edited version of that conversation.<\/p>\n
On Ralph transitioning from an agency that makes entertainment to an entertainment business<\/strong><\/p>\n We at Ralph are investing, a lot, into both the structure of what the group looks like in the future and into format and IP development across audio, video, print and events. We believe in bringing to life what we say and want to do, hence the creation of Ralph Magazine and the soon to be released Ralph TV, Ralph Labs and more at www.ralph.world<\/a>. I refuse to believe that people don\u2019t want human-led creativity and we intend to create and curate stuff that fits out world view of Fun Worth Finding.<\/p>\n On what that shift mean commercially<\/strong><\/p>\n Commercially we are looking to build an audience that builds value in its own right through suitable brand partnerships and direct subscription or purchase. Then on top of that we\u2019re also developing IP that generates new revenue streams across any and all areas that are possible\u2026 licensing, merchandising, distribution and beyond. You have to develop concepts, work with partners, build an audience and much more if you\u2019re genuinely interested in being an entertainment business and not work-for-hire.<\/p>\n Our revenue is still skewed toward work-for-hire but our investment in entertainment shows our commitment; we have created investment vehicles to do this and also allow us to correctly assess the ongoing success of the work-for-hire business. We are in the early stages of building commercial partnerships with brands for our entertainment investments and it\u2019s going-down well with those that we are working with as we\u2019re investing alongside them to make sure our approach is pure. We\u2019re looking for partner brands not funding and not clients.<\/p>\n Where does the legacy agency infrastructure get in the way of becoming what you say you want to be?<\/strong><\/p>\n It\u2019s a hard evolution, for everyone, to look towards longer term success markers instead of the short term P&L of work-for-hire and having clients define what we do. However we\u2019ve been on this path for at least a couple of years and a genuine evolution is taking shape. We can see how the business of building the Ralph brand and having our own IP are enhancing the agency image \u2014 especially when everyone looks the same nowadays. We are seeing more and more opportunities for clients to get involved across both the legacy and future business, which is great as it means rather than splitting into two we are moving forward as one brand that wholeheartedly delivers the promise to both consumers and brands that we are and we deliver fun worth finding.<\/p>\n \u201cOn asset-based pricing, we\u2019re increasingly seeing clients accept rate cards which are based on a cost per asset without the time and materials attached to that asset. These are all new models that we\u2019re certainly not the only ones experimenting with them. I think that the industry is moving in that direction quite quickly. We get a lot of traction with clients, particularly the marketeers at clients. The challenge is often with procurement departments who obviously don\u2019t like to see changes in models. They like to be able to compare apples to apples. We see some pushback there and some delay there in terms of understanding how these models work. I think this is very much the way the agency landscape will work, and I think many service industries will head in that direction.\u201d \u2014\u00a0Scott Spirit, chief growth officer and executive director at S4Capita, on the holdco\u2019s AGM.<\/em><\/p>\n 99.1<\/a>: Average number of daily minutes watched on YouTube<\/p>\n $3.8 billion<\/a>: The total projected revenue microdramas are expected to make in the U.S. by 2030<\/p>\n 69%<\/a>: Percentage of AI chatbot users that are Gen X, compared to Gen Z (65%)<\/p>\n 17<\/a>: Days until Cannes Lions<\/p>\n X\u2019s advertiser base is beginning to resemble its pre-Musk era<\/a> Tariffs forced Temu to slash its U.S. ad spend on nearly every platform<\/a> \u2018They\u2019re going to be extinct at some point\u2019: Why the chief AI officer is a transitional species<\/a> In Graphic Detail: Why the best brands are relearning how to entertain first, advertise second<\/a> YouTube overtakes Netflix in average daily viewing around the world<\/a> KSI\u2019s departure highlights new challenge for creator collectivesWhat we\u2019ve heard<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Numbers to know<\/strong><\/h2>\n
What we\u2019ve covered<\/strong><\/h2>\n
X\u2019s big-name advertisers who fled after Musk\u2019s takeover are back \u2014 Sensor Tower data confirms it for the first time, with Comcast, Amazon, Google and the NFL among the top 10 US spenders.<\/p>\n
Tariffs and the end of the \u201cde minimis\u201d rule pushed Temu to slash US ad spend across nearly every platform \u2014 down 95% on X, where it fell from top advertiser to 51st. The exception is Pinterest, up 66%, as it shifts toward higher-intent, conversion channels.<\/p>\n
The chief AI officer is a deliberately temporary role, IAB UK\u2019s James Chandler argues \u2014 a champion needed only until AI is so embedded that every function owns it, much like mobile before it. But full autonomy is still far off: marketer trust in AI-generated creative more than halves without human oversight.<\/p>\n
Years of performance optimization made marketing effective but forgettable, and the evidence for brand-building is overwhelming; the hard part is breaking clients\u2019 short-term habits.\u00a0<\/p>\nWhat we\u2019re reading<\/strong><\/h2>\n
YouTube has overtaken Netflix in average daily viewing across 20 markets (99.1 vs 93.4 minutes), driven by a shift to TV screens, according to The Guardian. Netflix still leads narrowly in the U.K. and is moving into video podcasts to fight back.<\/p>\n
<\/a>KSI\u2019s exit from the Sidemen after 13 years exposes a gap maturing creator collectives weren\u2019t built for: what happens when a founder leaves. Groups that started as friends on YouTube are now real businesses, raising messy questions over equity, IP and likeness rights \u2014 pushing the savviest to adopt startup-style governance and succession planning, per The Daily Influence.<\/p>\n