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’s found a way through.
The way Hassell sees it, entertainment is the one part of the creative business that can’t be procured, optimized or automated. You can’t put a kids’ TV show through a procurement process the way you can a display campaign. You can’t performance-market your way to a hit. And whatever AI does to production costs, it can’t generate the rights, the talent relationships or the distribution that a genuine entertainment property requires.
So that’s what Ralph is building.
There’s a magazine, a podcast with Time Out, a TV channel and a labs division in development. Across comedy, music and food and drink, it’s developing IP with licensing, merchandising and distribution in mind. It’s also in production on a cartoon for a TV network and closing on a deal to revive one of the most recognizable kids’ brands around. He won’t say much else. Something about lawyers.
The harder question is whether the business model is keeping pace.
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.
“If your business model is still aiming to be fee-based,” he said, “you’re not really approaching it wholeheartedly.”
What he’s looking for from brands isn’t briefs or budgets.
The commercial model he’s pursuing runs on brand partnerships, direct subscription and direct purchase — or an audience with value in its own right.
“Everyone looks the same nowadays,” he said. The magazine, the channel, the IP slate are as much about that as anything else.
Ralph is further along than most, but it isn’t alone in the diagnosis.
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’s 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.
The changes Prince is making to get there are structural as much as creative.
The production partner roster is changing — 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’s 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’s the person at the brand — whether the CMO or partnerships lead understands the value of it enough to champion it internally.
“We can’t pretend that the world is not changing, just how everyone went from analog to digital, it’s a similar shift in how agencies behave.”
What Elvis hasn’t 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.
“Staying as a traditional advertising agency means you’re just going to get smaller,” said Prince. “That’s not to say that that work isn’t around, but it’s certainly not a growth area.”
It’s 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.
For Hot Topic — a U.S. retailer that had lost its footing with Gen Z — 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’s been commissioned for five further seasons.
For Dr Squatch’s 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.
The numbers suggest there’s 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, measured against a control group watching standard retail content. That’s enough to justify the approach. Not enough to settle the argument.
“It’s not that this is a new thing,” said Salkey. “It’s just that it’s more important.”
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’s 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?
‘We refuse to believe people don’t want human-led creativity’: Hassell on why Ralph is done being an agency
Hassell has more to say. What follows is an edited version of that conversation.
On Ralph transitioning from an agency that makes entertainment to an entertainment business
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. I refuse to believe that people don’t want human-led creativity and we intend to create and curate stuff that fits out world view of Fun Worth Finding.
On what that shift mean commercially
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’re also developing IP that generates new revenue streams across any and all areas that are possible… licensing, merchandising, distribution and beyond. You have to develop concepts, work with partners, build an audience and much more if you’re genuinely interested in being an entertainment business and not work-for-hire.
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’s going-down well with those that we are working with as we’re investing alongside them to make sure our approach is pure. We’re looking for partner brands not funding and not clients.
Where does the legacy agency infrastructure get in the way of becoming what you say you want to be?
It’s 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’ve 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 — 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.
What we’ve heard
“On asset-based pricing, we’re 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’re 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’t 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.” — Scott Spirit, chief growth officer and executive director at S4Capita, on the holdco’s AGM.
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