There’s a specific kind of madness that runs through indie agencies — the kind you can smell on the stale coffee and half-baked briefs littering a WeWork desk. It’s the chaos of Slack threads that read like crime scene transcripts, and the spiritual hangover that comes from explaining to a client why “making a banner ad go viral” is not a growth strategy but a cry for help.

That’s where Graeme Blake began his journey — neck-deep in the creative trenches, surrounded by jargon, timelines, and clients who wanted champagne on a beer budget. I told him, half in jest, half in diagnosis: “So what possessed you to leap from selling ideas to building infrastructure for the idea sellers?”

Graeme’s reply came with the wry exhaustion of a man who has stared into the abyss of client revisions and decided to code his way out. “Clients kind of drove me to want to get out of advertising,” he said. You could almost hear the PTSD in his tone — the kind only creatives get after one too many rounds of “just a few minor changes.”

Like most great revolutions, Blutui started not with vision boards or funding rounds, but with pure, unfiltered frustration. Graeme and his team hit the point every agency eventually reaches — where the chaos outweighs the creativity, and you start fantasizing about running away to join a SaaS startup.

So they did.

They took the pain, packaged it, and shipped it as a product. “We experienced a lot of pain in our own agency and figured we’d fix that pain point,” he said. And because misery loves company, they canvassed agencies around the world — asking if they too were drowning in miscommunication, outdated tech, and bad client math. Spoiler: everyone said yes.

That’s the origin of Blutui — the therapy session that became a software company. Think of it as agency PTSD meets API therapy. Instead of another overpriced tool built by people who’ve never met a client, Blutui came from the inside — a platform born in the war room, not the boardroom.

Graeme built it for the overworked, underpaid creative class that’s too busy “circling back” to notice they’re bleeding profit.

This isn’t just another story about “disruption” or “AI-powered transformation.” This episode of The ADOTAT Show is about redemption — the moment you stop being the product and start building it.

We’re diving deep into why agencies are sitting on a gold mine of digital product revenue — and why most of them are too busy chasing trends to dig it up. In our conversation, Graeme lays out the unspoken truth every agency CEO should tattoo on their forearm: “There is margin in digital — they’re just too afraid to look for it.”

Over the next sections, we’re unpacking how fear, stubbornness, and legacy thinking turned the creative industry into a museum of missed opportunities.

Blutui isn’t just another tool in the stack. It’s what happens when an agency survivor decides to turn trauma into architecture. A platform built for creatives by someone who’s actually read their Slack DMs and lived to tell the tale.

What Graeme’s done isn’t sexy in the Cannes sense. There are no yachts, no NFTs, no “agentic activations.” But there’s something infinitely rarer: a business model that actually respects creativity.

So, yes — this episode is about code. But it’s also about catharsis. About taking the industry’s worst habits — the Slack chaos, the tech phobia, the fear of change — and turning them into a playbook for survival.

As I told Graeme at the end of our chat: he didn’t just build a platform; he built a lifeboat. And if you’re still on the sinking ship of “billable hours,” you might want to grab an oar.

Because in the next part, we’re going to talk about the one thing every agency has but refuses to admit — the untapped gold mine beneath the briefs.

Agencies are sitting on a gold mine, too busy tripping over Slack messages to notice.

That line isn’t hyperbole; it’s the quiet truth that keeps adland’s accountants awake at night. Beneath all the campaign chaos and “urgent” client requests lies a hidden economy of digital product value — work agencies already do, but don’t recognize as ownable, scalable, or billable beyond the next project.

Graeme Blake spelled it out like a man who’s lived through the spreadsheet equivalent of trench warfare. Agencies, he said, keep taking “one of two paths when it comes to digital work.” Either they build massive in-house teams with all the overhead and chaos that come with it — or they outsource everything and slap on a tiny margin that evaporates faster than a Cannes cocktail budget.

That’s not innovation. That’s self-inflicted poverty.

Every agency says they want to be digital-first — but most are still running on business models that treat technology as an expense instead of an asset. They’re chasing relevance, but missing ownership. They’ll design a beautiful digital experience, ship it to a dev shop, and then walk away while someone else turns it into recurring revenue.

It’s not that they lack talent; it’s that they lack a framework for turning creativity into code, and code into profit.

Take Method in Motion in Singapore — a quiet success story Graeme mentioned, and the perfect example of what happens when an agency decides to stop bleeding margin and start acting like a builder. Using Blutui, they turned project chaos into creative order: bringing in global talent on demand, serving other agencies as well as their own clients, and cutting through the bureaucratic fog that kills productivity.

They didn’t need a hundred developers. They needed one platform that didn’t punish them for being small.

It’s the kind of efficiency that doesn’t make headlines but makes payroll — the unglamorous kind of innovation that actually changes balance sheets. And while we’ll go deep into how they pulled it off in ADOTAT+, the takeaway is clear: there’s real money in structure.

The irony? Agencies love talking about innovation almost as much as they hate implementing it. They’ll spend a week at Cannes talking about “agentic creativity,” “AI-integrated storytelling,” or “the metaverse’s spiritual comeback tour,” yet treat their own internal tech stack like an aging office printer — essential, unsexy, and always out of toner.

The creative industry has built an identity around buzzwords and borrowed conviction. Everyone wants to be “on trend,” but few want to confront the terrifyingly dull work of process redesign. It’s easier to promise “AI-powered engagement” than to admit you don’t know what half your tools actually do.

In a world where agency leaders are allergic to change, Blutui isn’t just software — it’s an intervention. It’s what happens when someone finally points out that the emperor’s tech stack has no clothes.

The story of unrealized revenue isn’t just about bad math; it’s about fear — fear of change, fear of failure, fear of being left behind by the next shiny acronym.

And that’s exactly where we’re headed next.

In the next section, we’ll peel back the polite excuses and get to the core pathology of modern agencies — the tech phobia, the legacy thinking, and the myth of the “creative maverick” that keeps even the smartest shops broke.

Because if there’s one thing more dangerous than ignorance in adland, it’s nostalgia.

You’ve read the free part — now see what agencies don’t want their clients (or CFOs) reading.

In ADOTAT+, we go beyond the polite diagnosis. You’ll get:

If you think your agency is modern, you might just be the case study.
👉 Join ADOTAT+ — where we name the ghosts still haunting your tech stack.