Welcome to Good Giant: Part two on how we got here.

Once we decided what not to do (stay a generalist agency), our team needed to refine our positioning and value proposition to the gaming market.

To do so, we used the “golden circle” strategic framework made famous by Simon Sinek in his book Start with Why. Sinek uses this model to frame up organizational purpose – but I’ve found it equally powerful in helping our clients derive clear positioning and advertising platform ideas. We have turned the exercise on ourselves.

While I’m on the subject of Sinek, I once gave a Zoom presentation to a client and cited Sinek. The client turned their computer camera around to reveal Simon Sinek sitting in the room, listening quietly and smirking. Apparently, they had hired him as a consultant, unbeknownst to me. (It was somewhat embarrassing and thoroughly surreal.)

The “golden circle” is composed of three concentric rings that each successively get to the essence of communications and human behavior. The outermost ring is labeled “what,” the middle ring is labeled “how” and the inner ring is labeled “why.” As you might imagine, the gold is buried in the “why.”

In thinking about how we position Good Giant, the surface level “what” is simple. We are a full-service advertising agency that focuses on casino gaming and related entertainment and hospitality clients. (“Full-service” is one of the most over-used phrases to describe agencies – so much so, I think it has lost its meaning. But we say it anyway, for lack of any better shorthand description that the market would comprehend. To the prospective client, it means “this agency can handle my entire account stem to stern, from strategy to creative to production to media.” Like I’ve said, the category positioning does a lot of the heavy lifting.)

“How” we do our thing gets a little more interesting. Like I mentioned earlier, our decision to focus on gaming did not happen overnight. It was like boiling the frog. We got into the business when the category was nascent in the early 2000s, looked up a decade later and said, “hey, we’re good at this.” Put our heads down for another decade, then looked up again, and there we were: one of the only gaming-focused agencies in the country, working with some of the biggest names in tribal and commercial gaming.

The “how” part of the golden circle at Good Giant is the know-how of our team, many of whom are recognized as experts in the gaming category (its rigors, nuances, regulations, operational idiosyncrasies, competitive landscape, technology and on and on). It’s also the systems and processes we’ve developed over the course of two decades in the industry that are custom-built for the category. Gaming, entertainment and hospitality advertising is 24/7/365 blazing-fast, always-on, heavy-volume retail advertising. You cannot dabble in this business. It will eat you alive. Over the course of the decades, we have honed our business to manage to the category. Lastly, but not least of all, our “how” is our technology. We’ve developed proprietary software to gain efficiencies that our competitors cannot match. All to service a niche.

The “what” and “how” are enough for us to compete very well in the market. But our “why” is what makes our firm special. It is our purpose – the thing that gets us out of bed every morning, the thing that drives us past the daily grind, the thing that we all are passionate about:

We build the most loved gaming, entertainment and hospitality brands in the world.

That’s a bold statement, but it’s what we set out to do for all our clients. We love the industry we serve and when we partner with clients who are equally passionate and make amazing things happen.

Good Giant is for brands that play to win.