When Rich Sullivan joined his father’s Alabama-based ad agency Red Square after graduating from college, he wanted to do great work and help build the company into a national brand.
But how could a recent college graduate transform a business that had been successful since its founding in 1977?
Sullivan recognized that many ad agencies in 2000 were “generalists,” subject to fluctuations due to changing market conditions. He wanted to find a specific area and perhaps one that was under the radar. During his last year at the University of Alabama, Sullivan started visiting the Silver Star Casino in Philadelphia, Mississippi and found he enjoyed the gaming atmosphere.
Sullivan, an avid card player, then made the best bets of his life.
“I made a couple of assumptions,” Sullivan says. “I knew that the category, if we were to concentrate on it, didn’t have a lot of agencies after it. It’s a hard business, it’s retail, it’s 24/7, and it’s hard to sort of dabble in the casino business. My bets were that the category would grow, that states would continue to generate new licenses, which would create market saturation and make marketing and advertising more important to those properties because they would have to compete more rigorously.
Sullivan also thought digital gaming would come into play.
“All of those things spelled opportunity to an ad agency if you could get in the business quickly,” he says.
And all of Sullivan’s bets proved to be winning tickets.
Starting in 2002, Red Square Agency began to establish itself as a premier ad agency for casino operators, with clients including Foxwoods Resort Casino, Wind Creek Hospitality, and Cherokee Nation Entertainment. The company announced a merger with the Reno, Nevada-based ad agency Foundry in October 2022.
The merger was born from a longstanding, albeit competitive, relationship between the two companies. Sullivan says he became friends with Foundry Chief Marketing Officer Jim Bauserman, and when the COVID-19 pandemic struck in the spring of 2000, “Jim was my first phone call. I could not think of another human in the exact same spot as me, and we stayed in fairly constant contact. Just things like what are you doing about this, what are you hearing.”
Once properties began to reopen, Sullivan went to Reno to spend time with Bauserman and began to discuss “what would it look like if we put these two things together.” They decided their philosophies and approach to the gaming industry meshed.
The name reflects their mutual desire to be good partners to the gaming industry and to stand out in the field.
“Our goal with Good Giant is to is to build a company that is more than an ad agency to the gaming industry,” Sullivan says. “We certainly want advertising to be our core business, but we want to add analytics, we want to add all sorts of predictive modeling. We want to click up the value chain of our clients and become more of a partner, and not necessarily just an advertising agency, for our clients.”
