The Gate: Elastic Ideas For An Unboring New Era

When Helen James arrived at The Gate in September, she joined two of the agency's established leaders who had already spent years reshaping it.

CSO Kit Altin had helped transform the business into one of the UK’s most consistently awarded strategy shops; meanwhile CCO Lucas Peon had rebuilt its creative department around modern, multidisciplinary talent - securing the agency's first Cannes Lions awards (including Gold), and D&AD Pencils.

Now the trio are working as a tight, newly-configured management team under a new — and pleasantly original — positioning.

They have codified an offer built around "elastic ideas" and brands that are "defragmented and unboring". And, at a time when many agencies are leaning into "softer" tropes based around purpose, emotions, and feelings, The Gate seems to have found something original, different and interesting to peg their collective ideas on — and it's already been bearing fruit.

This positioning isn’t a mood board or a manifesto. It’s a working theory of how brands need to behave in the real world: everywhere at once, moving fast, adapting constantly, without losing who they are.

"Elastic ideas" is the sharp end of that thinking. These are ideas designed from the outset to stretch across channels, formats and moments - from long-form storytelling to fleeting social encounters. Differing from bland platforms, these creative systems are built to flex, mutate and keep showing up natively, wherever people actually are.

That idea of elasticity runs through everything The Gate talks about: its approach to creativity, its use of AI as infrastructure rather than novelty, and its insistence on integration not as a structure, but as a behaviour.

Equally, The Gate's focus on “anti-silos” is a philosophical approach. When disciplines collide properly, the work gets better. When agencies retreat into specialist bunkers, brands fragment and momentum drains away.

Here’s the thinking behind their thinking; how they came up with the new positioning and how its manifesting itself - in their own words.

“It started with these two”

Creative Salon: Helen, you joined The Gate in September. What made you take the job - and what have you found since arriving?

Helen James: The honest answer is: these two.

I’m a true believer in teams — in winning together and, sometimes, not winning together. For me, it’s about the people you work with and having the kind of relationships that allow you to get to brilliant creative work and proper partnerships with clients.

As soon as I met Kit and Lucas there was real synergy in what we value — how we work, what we think matters, how we want our teams to show up, and the role of creativity. With everything going on in the world, being able to talk about creativity as our differentiator, and having a shared belief in its importance, was huge for me.

Of course, we also care a lot about the “how”: using technology and innovation in the right way to unlock that creativity. But at the core you need shared values and an instinct for partnership. To get to brilliant work and brilliant relationships, you need brilliant teams.

The other big factor was the MSQ model. There’s so much change in the market right now - the Omnicom/IPG news is just the latest example. We’re seeing consolidation at one end, and independents growing in strength at the other. But independents don’t always have the money or time to invest in the future in the way they’d like.

MSQ feels like the best of both worlds. Each business has its own independence, individuality and personality, but you’re backed by technology, resources and capabilities that would be harder to build as a standalone indie. Clients want a personal team that’s in it with them, side by side, but they also want breadth, scale and global reach when they need it. MSQ’s model is set up for that.

CS: Had any of you actually worked together before this?

James: I’d met Kit before — we were judging something like the Gerety Awards together, across the table. But Lucas and I had never met before this process.

Transforming, not starting from scratch

CS: Kit, you’ve been at The Gate for eight years now. How has it changed in that time, and what phase are you entering with Helen on board?

Kit Altin: The change since 2017 is pretty radical. It’s fair to say the agency is unrecognisable now, in the best possible way. That was our brief at the time and it’s lovely to look back and feel we’ve delivered on it.

One of my little hobby horses is that transformations don’t get the credit they deserve in this industry. We get very excited by clean slates and start-ups and rightly so, it’s incredible when people go off and found something new. But we don’t talk enough about the magic of transforming something that already exists. And that’s actually what we’re doing for most of our clients: something already exists, and we have to help them change it.

We’ve been through a few phases here, and this feels like a particularly exciting one. Helen feels like the right leader for the right moment. Our clients want sharper thinking, braver creativity and partners who love joining the dots. She brings a rare mix of abilities and, in the best possible way, she has a builder’s mindset. She’s not here to tweak the edges - she’s here to build. That “let’s go” energy is infectious and it’s already shifting the mood.

So what does this new chapter mean? A couple of things:

First, an even more ruthless sense of where we add value. We’re doubling down on being a strategic and creative partner, not a supplier of stuff. We’ve said for years that we want to be a partner not a vendor, but this phase really commits us to that. The clients we love - and the clients we want - come to us for answers, not assets.

Second, it’s about a laser focus on creativity that actually changes things - creativity as a business lever. Everyone says “it’s all about the work”, but in a world of AI the real differentiator is going to be those moments of utterly original, commercially powerful creativity. That’s what we’re obsessed with.

Building a modern creative machine

CS: Lucas, you arrived in 2019 and have helped lead that creative shift. How has the work - and the team - evolved in your time?

Lucas Peon: From day one, the job has been to build a team that can do the best work possible. That’s what I joined Kit and The Gate to do: build a team and a culture that only shoots for work that defines us as a lead agency in the market.

Every hire has been made with that mission in mind. That hasn’t changed. What has changed is the world around us.

There’s been an incredible shift in how people live, how we consume content, the sheer volume of content we’re exposed to and the speed at which it’s made. We’re right in the middle of that transformation. We still aim for work that people notice and pay attention to - work that makes them stop and listen - but the environment is now AI-driven and hyper-fast.

Sometimes you stand out with something incredibly crafted. Sometimes you stand out with something incredibly fast that moves at the speed of culture. To do both, you need a more complex team than you did a few years ago. It’s no longer enough just to have “a strong creative department” — you need different types of talent, different ways of thinking and a lot of diversity in skills and backgrounds.

That complexity is what excites me. I love sitting in moments of change, building something, reaching for new things. And that’s the world we’re in —constant change, constant reinvention — which means the job stays exciting.

The AA: an elastic idea in the wild

CS: The AA feels like a good example of that - brilliant craft, but also smart use of AI and elasticity. Talk me through that as a case study.

Peon: The AA is exactly the kind of work we love doing. It started with a fantastic brief from a brave client at the right moment. They needed to move the brand on — modernise it, give it more character and swagger. They wanted to feel more contemporary and confident.

They needed a new creative platform, and we came up with “It’s OK, I’m with the AA”. It’s the sort of campaign you might assume was done in a very traditional way - a strong brand thought that holds all the messages and answers the business challenge.

But then you have to make it live in the real world we’re all in now. That meant building it as an elastic idea. It needed to work natively everywhere: on TV, where we could tell longer stories about the confidence you get as an AA member; on fast-paced social feeds where people are just flicking past content; in partnerships like Jurassic Park; in physical spaces like the Red Bull Soapbox; and even in gaming, where we did tactical work for the launch of Street Fighter.

In every one of those places, the idea has to feel like it belongs — not like some alien asset that’s been forced in. And at the same time, it has to keep building the brand.

For us, that’s the definition of an "elastic idea": you experience it in lots of different forms, but the core never disappears. It feels like it was created specifically for that moment, but it’s unmistakably the same brand.

We’ve then extended that strength across CRM and below-the-line channels, too. To deliver that at the speed required, we’ve brought in technology and our own proprietary AI system to support the team. That lets us produce a huge amount of good-quality content. Without that, either the quality would suffer or we’d have to do less. This way, we can have both quality and quantity.

CS: Helen, how are you thinking about AI across the agency and MSQ more broadly?

James: I’ve been really impressed by how MSQ and The Gate are using AI in a very practical way - not as a gimmick, but to make the work better and the process smarter.

The AA is a great example. Kit and Lucas did the hard yards on the insight, the strategy and the creative leap — “Always Ahead”, then “It’s OK, I’m with the AA”, the visual language, the tone. What we’ve layered on top is almost a spine of AI that runs through the process, helping with both efficiency and understanding.

We use AI at every stage: from brief-writing, to surfacing interesting insights, to drafting copy in more functional channels like email and direct mail. But it always has human curation — human judgement — over the top. It’s there to free up our brains to focus on the big, gnarly strategic and creative challenges.

It’s also been a really useful “show, not tell” case study for other clients. They can see what’s possible; where AI can speed up the process or take cost out and where you absolutely still need the human creativity.

The AA are private-equity owned, so they need to prove efficiency gains. But the way Sarah Fuller, their CMO, talks about it is very human: “Are we putting the right people on the right things? Are we putting the right ideas in the right places?”.

She wants Kit and Lucas focused on solving big business problems — and she wants the system humming around them.

We recently did a big strategic presentation with her. Over a drink afterwards she was incredibly generous about how the team has leaned into her challenges — around optimisation, evolution of tone, all of that - rather than going defensive. That, to me, is the proof that we’re using the technology in service of the relationship and the work, not the other way round..

“From a cold start to one of the most recognised effectiveness teams”

CS: Let’s bring in another “A”: the APG creative strategy awards. You’ve won more Golds than any other agency over the past six years, plus a joint Grand Prix and multiple special prizes. What’s the secret behind that success?

Altin: We do have tools and models - everyone does - but the real story is cultural.

When I started at The Gate, we had one brilliant planner — who’s still here — but we weren’t known for strategy, we weren’t known for creative, and we definitely didn’t have a planning or effectiveness culture. So that was the challenge: to build that from a cold start.

We had very limited resources. There were two of us, one WARC subscription and nothing else. So we had to be scrappy and inventive. We looked for insight in places other people weren’t looking — partly out of necessity, partly out of imagination. Some of our best insights came from that.

We were also completely relentless. We chased every brief, no matter how unpromising it looked on paper. I always joke about haemorrhoid cream - it’s the example people always use for “the brief nobody wants”. Well, that became an APG Gold. Whatever the brief, we treat it like a gift from the strategy gods and try to turn it into something stellar.

We didn’t have a bench of strategy gurus to lean on so we had to back our instincts. And that gave us the confidence to make bigger leaps in our thinking.

Now we’re in a slightly different phase. We’re more grown-up about codifying what we’ve learned so it’s not just “scrappy brilliance” but a repeatable approach. But the relentless bit hasn’t changed. There’s no point making work that doesn’t work.

What I’m most proud of is the consistency. Yes, we’ve won more APG Golds than any other agency over the last three cycles, which is lovely — three different juries, same outcome — but we’ve done it across multiple clients and categories. We’re not leaning on one hero client. We’ve also won multiple special prizes - for insight, for best writing, and so on. To go from a cold start to being one of the most consistently recognised teams in the country is something the whole agency can be proud of.

Anti-silo, defragmented, unboring - and elastic

CS: Let’s talk about the new positioning. You’ve got a fresh way of describing what The Gate does - can you walk us through it and what it means for brands?

James: We didn’t want to just create another bit of agency jargon. So we started by listening and talking to our own clients, CMOs, intermediaries — to really understand what they need and what they don’t need.

The merger of The Gate and MBAstack gave us a brilliant opportunity. It meant we could think seriously about delivering creativity across the whole customer journey, rather than just in one part of it.

Lucas said something very early on that really stuck with me: the idea of a linear journey — awareness, then consideration, then conversion - doesn’t really exist anymore. Brands show up everywhere, all the time. We’re hit by thousands of messages a day. So you need ideas, and an agency, that understands that reality and can show up with the right kind of creativity in the right way, at the right moment, for the right audience.

So we started to define three things: what we are, why we are that, and how we do it.

The “what” is: an anti-silo creative partner.

“Anti-silo” because we believe in the power of bringing everything together — specialists in their lane, yes, but collaborating to build ideas rather than sitting in their own little worlds. “Creative partner” because we want to be in the room solving problems, not just supplying assets.

The “why” is that we love brands defragmented and unboring.

“Defragmented” connects to being anti-silo — brands need enough consistency to build memory structures, but they also need room to flex and be best-in-class in every channel. “Unboring” because, frankly, if you’re boring you’re dead. You can’t afford not to make an impact any more.

And then the “how”: we do that through elastic ideas.

That structure — the what, why and how - has been really helpful internally. It’s given the teams a clear sense of what we’re here to do and the language has real stickiness for them as well as for clients.

CS: The language does feel unusually active for an agency positioning — it has real provocation, rather than vague warmth. Was that deliberate?

James: We definitely wanted language that felt motivating for our own people and interesting for clients. We wanted people in the agency to be able to say, “Yes, I want to do unboring things. I want to be anti-silo. I want to be a creative partner.”

I don’t know if we set out to be provocative - it’s more that we wanted to describe what we actually do and how we actually think. But I’m very happy if it feels active rather than passive. That’s very much my happy place.

Peon: And just to build on that — the positioning really is a truth for us, not a tagline we thought sounded nice.

We are genuinely allergic to silos. Whenever we’ve had to work in siloed structures, you can feel the potential draining away. The interaction between disciplines is where the magic happens — that’s as true for our external partners as it is internally.

On the “creative partner” bit: if you’re a vendor, you stop being an agency. Agencies should sit at the table as equals, challenging and pushing in the same way clients do. If all you want is execution, you can hire a studio or a robot.

“Defragmented and unboring” is also how we see the work. We love creativity across channels because that’s how people live. What drives us mad is when brands are fragmented because every agency or team wants to “own” their channel. Brands need to feel like themselves everywhere.

And unboring is non-negotiable. If you’re not interesting — wherever people encounter you - you’re invisible. So we want every expression of an idea, in every channel, to be the opposite of boring.

From big ideas to elastic ideas

CS: Elastic ideas vs brand platforms - this feels like a genuine evolution of the industry language. The AA is clearly one; you’ve mentioned Very as another. Could you expand on how that works?

Peon: With elastic ideas, we realised we were putting a name to something that had already been in our DNA.

Take Very. At its core, the idea is that the audience and the brand are flamingos in a world of grey pigeons. That’s the essence. But it shows up very differently at Christmas, in fashion, in hard retail, in social… Each time it feels native to that moment and platform, but it’s still unmistakably Very.

It might not yet have as many chapters as the AA in terms of examples, but it was born elastic. Over the years, we want to keep stretching it into new spaces.

What’s different from traditional “brand platforms” is that elasticity is baked in from the start. We’re not writing brand guidelines to tell you where the brand has to stop. We’re writing rules for mutation - principles for how the brand can flex, so that it feels native everywhere without losing its essence.

What to watch for in 2026

CS: Looking ahead, what should we be watching for from The Gate in 2026 as you push this thinking further?

Altin: There’s no APG until 2027, so you get a year off from us on that front!

James: We’re in heavy development on a lot of projects at the moment, but we’re genuinely excited about two or three ideas on the table that feel incredibly elastic and potentially award-winning.

Lucas mentioned Plan International and the next phase of the AA — they’re two we’re putting a lot of energy behind and supporting the agency to land properly in the world.

Peon: Plan International is a really good example of our approach. They’re a purpose-driven client with a lot of ambition - they want to make real change around girls’ rights globally.

The deeper we go into the insight and the reality of what girls are facing in different parts of the world, the more we feel the responsibility to find a genuinely powerful idea — one that doesn’t just shout loudly for two weeks and then disappear, but that has the stretch to keep working in culture over time.

We’re working on something there that we can already see stretching across channels and stretching forward in time — you can imagine future chapters of it. It’s one of those rare projects where every time we talk about it, it’s the best part of the day.

Altin: We’re also excited about work with Karo Healthcare. We’ve got a portfolio of healthcare and personal-care brands there. It’s a space we genuinely enjoy; the briefs that don’t always sound glamorous at first, like haemorrhoids or intimate health, but where you can make a huge difference with smart, human work.

We’ve done things like 'Replens — Sex Never Gets Old' before, and we’re now cooking up new work across their personal-health brands. It’s multi-market global work, which is a whole different challenge - making something that works at a global level but still lands locally.

And then, a slightly different thing: I’ll be representing The Gate at SXSW doing a session called “Look What You Made Me Do: Revenge as a Creative Catalyst”. That’s definitely on the more provocative end of the spectrum — but it’s very us.