Podcast Ep 311: Rural Ireland creative and founder of The Brill Building in Clare Roisin Keown is investing €1.1m in a Dublin 8 creator space.
When Roisin Keown decided to leave her position as head of creative at a Dublin advertising agency in 2018, she made an unusual choice. Rather than launching another city-based competitor, she moved her family to rural County Clare and started building what she calls Ireland’s first cloud-first creative agency.
Now, five years later, Keown’s gamble appears to be paying off. The Brill Building, her multi-award winning communications agency, is investing €1.1 million in a state-of-the-art creative hub in Dublin 8, marking a significant expansion for a business that deliberately rejected traditional industry geography.
“We’ve always had the mantra ‘scale is no barrier to ambition’”
“Five years into the big adventure that is The Brill Building, having created many nationally and internationally successful marketing campaigns in that time, this is our agency’s first investment in a physical space,” Keown said.
Breaking with tradition
-
Listen to the ThinkBusiness Podcast for business insights and inspiration. Latest episodes here. You can also listen to the Podcast on:
-
Spotify
-
SoundCloud
-
Apple
It’s perhaps ironic that Keown escaped the city-centric advertising life for the country, but is now investing in a creative space in Dublin. There is method in her thinking.
Keown’s path to entrepreneurship began after she decided to leave DDFH&B, the Dublin agency where she worked as head of creative. The agency was undergoing mergers, and Keown, who had gained insights into global advertising trends through her role on the European Creative Council saw systemic pressures affecting the entire industry.
“I really took the opportunity to throw all the cards up and see where they landed,” she explained. “I had an insight into the global landscape, and I could see that a lot of the pressures in advertising were not just local pressures – less budget, tighter timelines, more demands.”
The decision to relocate to rural Ireland was initially driven by lifestyle rather than business strategy. “I call it immigrating from Dublin,” Keown said. “I actually thought maybe I might not even have to work again.”
However, work found her. Early clients, brought through connections allowed Keown to test her hypothesis that quality advertising work could be delivered without traditional agency infrastructure.
Cloud-first model proves resilient
The Brill Building’s approach centres on what Keown describes as “harnessing the world’s best talent around any problem.” Rather than maintaining large in-house teams, the agency operates through a curated network of freelancers and specialists, many of whom were already moving toward independent work.
“The principle of what we do is really being able to harness the world’s best talent around any problem,” Keown explained. “There’s the core team for personal stewardship and local contacts, and then being able to access an amazingly accessible worldwide talent network, including among the Irish diaspora.”
This model proved prescient when the pandemic forced traditional agencies to rapidly adapt to remote working. The Brill Building’s campaigns during this period, including work for Bord Gáis Energy and the National Dairy Council, demonstrated that high-impact creative work could be delivered without traditional office structures.
For Bord Gáis Energy, the agency created the “Zenergy” campaign that transformed consumer reluctance about smart meters into significant sales growth. For the National Dairy Council, they developed a grassroots movement addressing sustainability concerns that lifted brand approval ratings from 47% to 84%.
Dublin investment signals industry shift
Lord Mayor of Dublin Cllr. Ray McAdam reviewing the plans at the new The Brill Building site in Inchicore with CEO Roisin Keown. Photo: Leo Byrne
The new Dublin facility represents a strategic evolution rather than abandonment of the cloud-first model. Located in Inchicore, the space will function as what Keown calls “a production hub, rather than an office.”
“We’ve always had the mantra ‘scale is no barrier to ambition’,” she said. “Until now, harnessing virtual production could only be accessed on the largest scale. Now with new technologies, you don’t need a huge footprint or a team of hundreds in-house to create world class work.”
The facility will serve multiple functions: a production studio for the agency’s own work, a collaboration space for clients, and a hub for Ireland’s broader creative community through both membership and rental models.
Dublin Lord Mayor Ray McAdam welcomed the investment, stating: “This €1.1 million investment in Inchicore from The Brill Building is exactly the kind of forward thinking Dublin needs. It brings new life, jobs, creativity and opportunity to a neighbourhood that has real potential.”
Industry transformation accelerates
Keown’s approach reflects broader changes in the advertising industry, where traditional large-agency models face pressure from both technology platforms offering self-service tools and client demands for greater efficiency and specialisation.
“In the traditional structure, what I had seen was really a great waste of time, money, talent and resources,” she said. “One of the analogies I use is a factory setup not to make the product. You’ve got the milk at one end and the milk bottle at the other and all of these layers that aren’t just getting the milk in the milk bottle.”
The agency’s research indicates significant client appetite for this approach. According to their findings, 64% of Irish marketing executives identify AI upskilling as a top need, while one in three prioritise finding skilled talent who can “lift the business.”
IAPI President Siobhan Masterson endorsed the expansion: “This is the sort of development we are excited to see for our commercial creative industry in Ireland. At IAPI, we’re committed to scaling the influence and reach of our members, not just nationally but internationally.”
Balancing creativity and commerce
Throughout the conversation, Keown emphasised that commercial creativity and business success are not opposing forces. “The best creatives in commercial creativity are problem solvers,” she argued. “I talk about advertising often as a competitive sport, the only one I’ve ever been any good at, because it rewards hard work as much as talent.”
This philosophy extends to her embrace of emerging technologies, including selective use of artificial intelligence in production. “You have to really understand AI to make sure that you’re creating original work through it,” she said. “We use it selectively and cautiously, but enthusiastically.”
The investment in physical space, supported by Bank of Ireland financing, represents confidence in a hybrid model that combines technological capability with human creativity and collaboration.
As the Irish creative industry continues to evolve, The Brill Building’s journey from rural startup to Dublin investor suggests that geography may be less important than agility, talent and the ability to adapt to rapidly changing client needs.
“There’s massive studio lots in Hollywood currently being sold off, because you don’t necessarily need a massive studio lot anymore to tell big stories,” Keown noted. “We’re betting that there’s going to be real appetite for the focus and intensity and nimbleness of really having all of that creative firepower at your fingertips.”
-
Bank of Ireland is welcoming new customers every day – funding investments, working capital and expansions across multiple sectors. To learn more, click here
-
For support in challenging times, click here
-
Listen to the ThinkBusiness Podcast for business insights and inspiration. Latest episodes here. You can also listen to the Podcast on:
-
Spotify
-
SoundCloud
-
Apple
