Dan Beaumont.
Dan Beaumont, formerly of The Royals and The Monkeys, has spent two years building a self-funded, one-person creative advisory, GAME, and now has 10 active clients who keep coming back.
“I have no full-time staff apart from myself. All the expertise comes from freelance staff who don't want to work in big agencies any more,” Beaumont told AdNews.
“It's basically my black book of experts who are creatives, producers, directors, photographers, PR people, art directors and designers.
“It gives clients access to senior, experienced staff who solve the problems and work on the business, rather than handing briefs off to more junior staff.
“GAME can't be a creative agency because it operates differently. It doesn't have the layers that a traditional agency might have, nor do we charge like one.
“But at its heart, it's still a strategic and creative company to help clients build their brands in interesting ways, so that they can positively impact business."
Since launch, GAME has created the strategy and design work for IT brand Rhubarb, worked on the Super Rugby competition with Rugby Australia and New Zealand and is looking to reposition the Natio Beauty brand.
GAME also created a fully-AI TVC for EveryPlate, leaning into the 100% distinct AI product to not confuse consumers.
“AI is everywhere. I don't think we can avoid it now,” Beaumont said.
“You can run a four Cs diagnosis, which is company, category, consumer, and competitors, in five minutes now with Claude, where before it would have taken you weeks.
“AI is extremely useful for researching strategy upfront when helping a client to diagnose their business, and brand.
“With EveryPlate, we weren't trying to pull the wool over people's eyes and pretended it was real.
“The industry's still trying to work it out. I don't think we're 100% comfortable with AI yet, as it keeps changing.”
Part of approaching and understanding clients is also being transparent in AI usage.
“Even when I'm going through strategic processes with clients, and I prompt Claude or ChatGPT to produce a report, I'll share that with the client to say, 'Look, this is AI generated. Here is my prompt.'
"I'm very transparent as to what has been generated by AI, how much that's influenced my thinking, and when I hand over strategic documents.
“Clients always know their businesses better than agencies do, and I can't rely on AI 100% to get it right.”
Previous to GAME, Beaumont spent 10 years as the managing director of The Royals. He also worked as the director of client service at The Monkeys, now Droga5 ANZ, and George Patterson Y&R.
With an agency background, Beaumont believes the biggest shift in the industry is the way clients approach agencies: fewer retainers, more project-by-project work.
"Which means that agencies have to shift their model to make money out of that,” he said.
“The margins that we might have been making a decade or so ago are very hard to come by in 2026.
“Hence, the legacy systems have had to change because you can't make money the old way with new clients.
“That means more senior people are in the room. It means value-based costing and charging a fixed fee for what you're worth, and then still building relationships with clients so that they keep coming back and trust you.
“But what hasn't changed is that clients still need to do a good job of marketing, to prove that good creative thinking adds value to business. That hasn't changed.”
In the next five years, Beaumont aims for GAME to be known and recognised in the industry for producing great work for clients and have a great model that is efficient and effective.
“If I have to hire some people in the future, then so be it, but it won't be any more than five people to help me coordinate projects and manage a greater volume of work,” he said.
"We will keep doing more of what we're doing. For bigger and smaller clients."
He said the industry’s future is dependent on what the economy does.
However, Beaumont believes that good quality creative work will continue to flourish.
“The quality of the work in Australia is still high. We have an above average ranking for the size of our industry and the money that's spent in this market,” he said.
“It's something to be proud of. It's a continuing problem to try to link that level of creativity to business performance, and I think that's a huge part of what GAME focuses on, but also what the industry in general needs to focus on as well.
“Everybody needs to continue to try to enjoy what we do and even bring some fun back to advertising.
“People work hard. All of the best intentions are there. We just need to enjoy it as much as we possibly can.”
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