Guest · The future of agencies
Oli Bealby
Managing Director and Co-Founder, Stereo Creative
Oli Bealby is Managing Director and Co-Founder of Stereo Creative, the culturally charged creative agency with London roots and a California accent. Nine years after moving to San Francisco, he co-founded Stereo in June 2023 with a team that now has nearly 20 US staff and clients including the San Francisco 49ers, Nike, Arsenal, and OpenTable.
About
Oli Bealby is Managing Director and Co-Founder of Stereo Creative, a global creative studio with London roots and a California accent. He has been based in San Francisco for nine years, having moved from the UK with Iris, and co-founded Stereo in June 2023 with co-founder Matt after the creative product and US opportunity became irresistible.
Oli’s career began in sales, selling public sector exhibition spaces, which he credits as foundational: he learned what marketing is for before he learned what marketing is. The value of a brand becomes viscerally clear when you are making cold calls and discovering that conversations are a hundred times easier when the person on the other end knows who you are. From there he moved through JWT, where he learned strategic planning, a small indie B2B and tech agency, McCann for big idea thinking, and then Founded, which rebranded as Iris where he became Managing Director.
At Stereo, the founding thesis is that big ideas and great design should not be separated. That conviction became more urgent rather than less as generative AI produced what Oli describes as very average-looking work at scale. AI does not have a culture. It cannot understand the nuance that 49ers fans grip onto, or the way Crocs can show up authentically during Ramadan by partnering with the Muslim Sisterhood rather than reaching for religious cues. Stereo’s 49ers rivalry jersey campaign, a two-part reveal for the league’s first-ever rivalry jersey, is his most cited example of what cultural depth in creative work actually looks like in practice.
Career15 years
- 2023 to now Stereo Creative Managing Director and Co-Founder
- 2020 to 2023 Iris (formerly Founded) Managing Director
- 2015 to 2020 Founded Group Account Director
- 2014 to 2015 McCann Enterprise Senior Account Manager
Show earlier roles: DDM Ltd
- 2011 to 2014 DDM Ltd Account Manager
How Oli thinks3 convictions
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AI does not have a culture, and that is exactly where agencies like Stereo play
Oli’s central argument against AI as a creative replacement is not that it cannot produce content. It is that it cannot produce culturally grounded content. The 49ers rivalry jersey campaign required a depth of understanding about the team’s fan culture, its rivalry relationships, and the specific visual and tonal language that resonates with that audience. That depth is not in the training data. It is in the hours of conversation with fans, the cultural fluency built over time, and the creative instinct developed through years of working on sports brands. That is not something that can be prompted.
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The idea and the design are one thing, not two
Stereo’s founding thesis challenges the traditional advertising agency model of separating concepting from execution. Oli argues that in a world where average-quality content is now instantly generatable, the gap between ideas that are strategically correct and executions that are visually and culturally powerful has widened. The brands that win are the ones whose creative work is inseparable from its strategic intent. When the design thinks and the idea feels, the work lands differently. The Crocs Ramadan platform, three years running, is his illustration: the creative choice to be glamorous and vibrant rather than pious was both a strategic and a design decision simultaneously.
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Transatlantic teamwork requires positive intent as a declared operating principle
Oli’s approach to running a remote, transatlantic team is grounded in a single declared commitment: positive intent is assumed until proven otherwise. Without that commitment, Slack messages get misread, time zone gaps create friction, and the creative product suffers from the unspoken tension. With it, the team learns to dance, one person stepping back while another steps forward, building the trust that makes genuinely collaborative work possible. Quarterly in-person gatherings anchor the culture without requiring the overhead of a fixed office. The model has allowed Stereo to hire talented people up and down the West coast and in Texas without the cost structure of a traditional agency footprint.
