Sectors · Media, entertainment & creative industries
We open the US market for creative content, creative services, and related technology companies — through the platforms, agencies, and brands that decide what gets made, bought, and seen.
Practice lead — Carlo Cavagna, Los Angeles
The challenge
Your content wins audiences at home. Your creative services or technology tools are proven in Europe. But the American market — the one that changes a company’s trajectory — keeps not happening. Not for lack of quality. For lack of the room.
The US entertainment economy isn’t impenetrable or opaque. But it has evolved to filter an extraordinary volume of noise and to manage substantial risk in the world’s most mature market. It is relationship-gated in ways companies from abroad usually underestimate:
We work from inside this ecosystem. AXEL’s practice here is led from Los Angeles by a partner who spent a decade directing the UK’s relationship with this industry — and years operating in it.
What we unlock
Four places we can open doors. Not a menu — if what you need sits between them or outside them, say so.
How commissioning, representation, and packaging actually work here, and where your project or company realistically fits. Introductions where we hold a genuine relationship — and an honest answer where we do not, rather than a promise that wastes your quarter.
Writers, producers, directors, showrunners, and the production and post community around them — the working relationships that turn an idea into something a buyer can say yes to. This is the deepest part of the network and often the most useful place to start.
Previsualization, production, post-production, localization, rights management, marketing, and audience-engagement tools — we reach the operators who run pilots and sign vendor agreements.
Where entertainment meets commerce: brand integrations, platform deals, and the partnerships that turn creative assets into recurring revenue.
How we work here
Think slow — find the story America buys. Before any meeting, we work out the translation: which of your properties or capabilities maps to what US buyers are actually commissioning, acquiring, or licensing — and in whose language you must pitch.
Act fast — use the rooms we’re already in. Two decades of Los Angeles relationships compress the years it takes to be seen from outside.
Win big — build for the long term, not the one-off. One deal is a start. We position for the ongoing relationship: the output arrangement, the preferred-vendor status, the partnership that deepens across projects.
Straight answers
Do we need US representation before anything can happen?
Not always first — but representation adds credibility. What matters is sequencing: which meetings need an agent or manager in the room, which are relationship introductions, and which are straight commercial sales. Getting that wrong is the most common expensive mistake.
We’re a technology company, not a content company. Does this practice fit?
Yes. Creative services and technologies are half the practice. Previsualization, production, post-production, localization, rights management, marketing, and audience-engagement tools are all vetted and sold through similar networks of relationships.
Does everything run through Los Angeles?
Though content production is increasingly taking place elsewhere, industry decisions concentrate there, which is why the practice is led from there. Games, publishing, music, and brands have their own geographies, and the approach follows the buyer, not the map.
How long until something real happens?
Companies that arrive prepared can see meaningful conversations inside six months — but effective messaging, targeting, and representation is key. Deals follow the industry’s calendar, not ours.
If your work wins at home and America keeps not happening, we should have a conversation. AXEL assesses fit before committing. The conversation is the first step, not the commitment.
Begin a conversation →