Studio Goico — Deal & Strategy Notes

Last updated: March 11, 2026. For Alex, Mike, and Pascal only.

The relationship

Victor Jon Goico runs Studio Goico out of Stuttgart. ~10 person production house — strategy, concept, film, websites. Pascal introduced us. Victor and Alex Butaud (TankTank, Hamburg) have worked together for years on BMW.

Current contract: Onboarding to a 3-5 year BMW Motorrad contract. His team shipped the first fully AI-generated TV commercial for BMW — one creative, two weeks, replacing what used to take six weeks and a 50-person crew.

Prior free work: We took audio recordings from a 3-day BMW workshop and delivered a mini-site with structured summaries and action items. Victor loved it. That's our proof point.

What we learned on the prep call (March 11)

Pascal's four modules. He framed the agency's core fears as four roles no agency can afford to staff full-time:

  1. Competition    What is Honda/BMW's competitive set doing?
  2. Consumer       What does the target group want? How is it shifting?
  3. Channel        Does this creative work on Instagram? Connected TV?
  4. Brand          Is the output on-brand? Does it match the CI guide?

These aren't features — they're lenses that should be applied to every brief, every creative review, every client delivery. Pascal described them as "four employees I would hire if I could" that check the work at every stage of the project lifecycle: briefing, quotation, alignment calls, quality checkpoints, handover.

The brief intake problem. This is the most tangible pain point. Victor's agency converts messy client briefs into actionable creative briefs — and that conversion is where all the waste lives. Wrong direction, unclear scope, contradictory requirements. Pascal said reducing the try-and-error from unclear briefs would cut costs by 30%.

Mike's approach. Don't build a product and bring it to them. Take ownership of the next few briefs, build the AI tooling as we go, and the product becomes emergent from doing the work. This avoids the "lots of buttons, learning curve" problem and means we deliver value from day one.

The aha moment problem. Mike flagged that "we'll make your briefs" might sound thin to Viktor. He needs to see the ambition. Pascal's four-module framing solves this — "the work of four specialists for the cost of one" is a compelling pitch even before we've built the tools.

Strategy

Phase 1 — Do the work. Take the current BMW project (brief intake + competitive matrix) and build the AI tooling alongside Viktor's team. We need access to: the current BMW brief, brand CI guide, competitive context, ideally the Teams channel. We build taste packages for BMW and Studio Goico as we go — that's the infrastructure that makes everything else possible.

Phase 2 — Four modules live. Competition, consumer, channel, brand — running continuously against Victor's work. Each one is an agent that checks output against its lens. This is where the value becomes undeniable: every delivery is better because it's been pressure-tested from four angles.

Phase 3 — Self-service. Victor's team uses the tools directly. Brief intake becomes a pipeline: client submits raw brief, system identifies gaps, asks clarifying questions, produces an actionable creative brief enriched with competitive/consumer/channel/brand context. The Jira-like system Pascal described, but collapsed into three steps.

Deal mechanics

Model: Monthly retainer. Pascal's framing: "You pay for one person, you get the support of four." Cost needs to be coverable by the BMW project budget.

Month 1: Pascal suggested free to prove value, then commit to 4-5 months. We need to decide if we're comfortable with that or if we want to start paid from day one.

Pricing: TBD. Needs to feel like "one person's salary" to Viktor — probably in the 5-8k/month range depending on Stuttgart agency norms. Pascal would know.

Ownership: They own everything we build. Data stays on their infrastructure.

Viktor's infrastructure (messy)

Microsoft stack — Teams for client comms, PowerPoint for everything. Viktor syncs his file structure between three systems: his own NAS, Teams, and something else. Brand hubs built in Miro by his VP of Product — visual but flat, not interactive.

This is both a problem (scattered context) and an opportunity (we can be the connective tissue). We don't need to fix his infrastructure — we just need to ingest from it.

Adjacent opportunities

TankTank (Alex Butaud, Hamburg): Same BMW orbit, same needs. Pascal: "They all need the same thing."

Sabrina: Pascal introduced us. She liked us, needs the same kind of custom-built solutions. Pascal told her to call us whenever she has a task. Not a paying client yet.

Competitive intelligence as product: Mike's idea — a Bloomberg terminal for marketing. Continuous scanning of what competitors are doing in specific verticals (automotive, luxury, etc.). Could be a newsletter, a licensed dataset, a self-service tool. Every marketing department at every manufacturer needs this. Long-term play, but the infrastructure we build for Viktor feeds directly into it.

Newsletter: Pascal suggested: take every call we have, pretend we solved the problem, write it up. Monthly newsletter showing "this was the task, this was the solve." Doubles as marketing and as proof of capability.

Open questions

1. What data does Viktor actually have in structured form? How much BMW brand DNA is documented vs. in people's heads?

2. How bad is the Teams/NAS/file sync situation? Can we get read access or do we need exports?

3. Is the first month free or discounted? What's Pascal's read on what Viktor expects?

4. Does Viktor want to present this to BMW as "AI services" line item, or keep it internal to the agency?

5. Who at Studio Goico is the day-to-day contact? Viktor is in client calls all day — is there a PM or ops person?

Next steps

March 12, 10am: Call with Viktor. Share the one-pager beforehand (Pascal to review first).

On the call: Walk through the one-pager, get Viktor's reaction. Ask for access to current BMW materials. Agree on retainer terms.

After the call: Get the BMW brief, brand CI guide, and competitive context. Start building.