The story of Good Giant, one of the nation’s leading gaming-focused advertising agencies, starts in an unlikely place: a college freshman’s summer job in a hospital, and a piece of advice that redirected a career before it started.
Rich Sullivan, a native Mobilian, entered his senior year at the University of Alabama planning medical school. He had worked in hospitals every summer, and when he asked the doctors and surgeons he’d befriended which track to take, they gave him the same answer: if you aren’t completely on fire about being a physician, choose something else. He wasn’t. He added a fifth year of finance and accounting coursework, applied to Ivy League MBA programs — and kept hearing the same thing back. Get some work experience first, they said, then come back.
So he called his father, Richard Sullivan, who with partner Karen St. Clair owned the Mobile ad agency Sullivan-St. Clair. “I’ll do anything,” Rich told him. “I just want the work experience necessary to get accepted into my MBA school of choice.”
He never applied again.
From account services to the corner office
Sullivan-St. Clair had started in 1977 as Reynolds-Sullivan and was well regarded in Mobile, but it was what Rich describes as a lifestyle business — “an accordion,” with high highs and low lows depending on the client roster. Rich worked whatever the agency needed, gravitated to the creative side, and decided he liked the culture and economics of advertising too much to leave. “I liked the advertising business immediately. I liked the culture, and it is a fun business. Once I saw that I liked it, I started focusing on the economics of the business,” he says.
His climb was fast: account services, then creative director, then president after four years. The question that drove him was simple and impatient. “How do I build this company to compete at a national level?”
Part of the answer arrived through an unlikely extracurricular. During his fifth year at Alabama, a group of friends made regular treks to Philadelphia, Mississippi’s Silver Star Casino, and Sullivan fell hard for the gaming industry. “There is nothing in a casino I don’t like,” he says. “I never get tired of it.” It would matter more than he knew.
Red Square, over his father’s dead body
Sullivan began producing an agency newsletter called Red Square, named for the firm’s logo — a red square with the agency’s name reversed in white. The name got attention, and he became convinced the company needed it. His father’s response: “Over my dead body.” Rich persisted, and two years later — with some trepidation — Sullivan-St. Clair became Red Square Agency in January 2008.
The rename flipped a switch. “We changed our mindset and thought of ourselves differently. Dad caught a load of grief, but our first client as Red Square was the State of Alabama when Kay Ivey wanted to rebrand the 529 College Savings Plan. I knew we would be okay.”
The recession hit that same year. The agency doubled anyway, much of it rebranding work for colleges and universities — work that taught Sullivan the value of concentration: strong positions in selective industry sectors let an agency choose its projects instead of chasing everything.
Gaming: a category unloved
By 2013, gaming accounted for 80 percent of revenue, and Sullivan’s attempt to split the operation into Red Square Gaming and a separate general-market shop called RSQ backfired — “the exact opposite effect I expected, and it was a bust,” he says. The lesson stuck: one company, one brand, one strategy.
The category itself, though, was exactly right. “It’s a category that is unloved,” Sullivan says of casinos. “Casinos are a hard business. It’s fast-paced, with lots of volume. They operate 24/7, and it’s relentless. It’s like drinking from a firehose. Most agencies have a tough time with casinos, but I love it.” His analysis of the industry runs deeper than enthusiasm. Gaming has been state-regulated since Nevada legalized it in 1932, in the depths of the Depression; states crave the revenue, recessions reliably produce new licenses, and saturation makes advertising more valuable, not less. High barriers to entry, growing demand, regulation as a moat — for an agency, it had every key ingredient.
Chicago, then a merger
Being nationally credible from Mobile had a headwind, so in 2016 Red Square acquired We Can’t Stop Thinking, a Chicago digital design and development firm, and began winning significant national brand work. In 2017 Sullivan reassembled the company under one roof. “We try to stay nimble,” he says. “We continually think of ourselves as a brand new company, and that keeps us fresh.”
Then came March 13, 2020. Sullivan gathered the staff in the company gym and announced a move to remote work. Three days later, 989 American casinos — including 80 percent of Red Square’s clients — shut down within 72 hours. “Our clients went to revenue zero overnight, but they kept us on retainer, and 2020 was one of our best years,” Sullivan says. As states reopened piecemeal, Red Square worked each market’s restart — and Sullivan did something unusual for an agency chief: he called one of his biggest competitors, Reno’s Foundry Agency, to compare notes. The conversations, begun during the shutdown and continued in person at Lake Tahoe in August 2020, led to a merger agreement by the end of 2021. The deal closed June 10, 2022, and the combined agency rebranded as Good Giant — the ambition stated in the name, the culture stated in the motto: grow like a giant, operate like a small company.
Sullivan serves as CEO of the combined firm, structured as a holding company positioned to acquire other agencies. With more than fifty gaming clients, the shop’s credentials extend beyond its niche: the day before one recent interview, Good Giant won Best in Show at the ADDYs for a digital campaign for Skittles, of Mars-Wrigley fame.
Why Mobile works
Sullivan’s argument for building all of this from downtown Mobile — where Good Giant occupies the expanded former Red Square offices and where the company is a team-level member of the Innovation Portal’s startup community — is pragmatic. “I love being and living in Mobile. You can live anywhere these days and love where you live. We can compete with anyone from here,” he says. “It’s about the quality of life and the cost of living. This is an attractive area, as we have learned from the growth since the pandemic. I don’t see that changing.”
The three rules he’s distilled from two decades of experimentation sound like a manifesto: pick better horses — better talent; have clients who allow you to do crazy-ass work; and own a category. From a red square on Government Street to a national gaming powerhouse, Mobile’s Good Giant has done all three.