Ralph, a creative agency with an emphasis on entertainment, hired Gareth Jones for its newly-created role of global chief growth officer earlier this month.
Jones, who recently served as SVP, global marketing director at VML and WundermanThompson, will also be Ralph’s acting managing director of its New York office.
“Gareth and I have known each other for many years,” said Chris Hassell, Ralph’s CEO and founder. “We’ve always shared the same values of wanting to put creativity first.”
As the five-year anniversary of the Covid pandemic approaches, Hassell and Jones have observed that both the type of content and agency landscape have changed over this timeframe. For example, when it comes to changes in the type of content users consume, the lockdown led to the rise of now-popular social media platforms such as TikTok.
“Covid turned the lights off to the rest of the world,” Jones said. “That desire for rich, narrative-led high quality content kind of strayed away.”
Jones and Hassell told Campaign US that the rise of short-form content is like a whirlpool that’s “hard to get out of,” especially due to users being stuck in the “dopamine loop.”
“We’ve gone so far down that whirlpool, people don’t realise there’s other kinds of content,” Jones said.
But now that longer-form content on platforms such as YouTube are back on the rise again, Jones said he noticed that “people generally want to move away from that notion of addiction.”
“There needs to be a broader spectrum of content that connects on an emotional level,” he added. “Social content should be about attention, not addiction.”
In terms of changes in the agency landscape, Jones said that he hopes to bring back humanity and emotion into Ralph’s content.
“In the agency world, we’ve forgotten the importance of human instinct and impact,” he said. “There’s a huge opportunity to tap back into that and make it fun again.”
Hassell echoed Jones’ statement and stated he aims to connect with people more emotionally with Ralph.
“Is the best way to just target people by their demographics?” he said. “There’s also emotions that connect people. What connects people on an emotional level?”
Ralph’s past collaborations with brands include an interactive brand activation for the show Mrs. Davis—a fictional exploration of the tension between religion and technology—in which the agency had a group of nuns take over SXSW 2023. Ralph also directed, filmed and edited a custom shoot promoting the Squid Game Experience in October of last year.
