It was a big week for pencils and indies. Indie Agency News members swept significant honors at The One Show 2026, with Rethink alone hauling home 29 across gold, silver, and bronze tiers — plus both Independent Agency and Network Agency of the Year. A coalition of fiercely independent shops is heading to Cannes together under the Indie at Large banner. And Willem Dafoe is now in the business of selecting whisky based on what it makes him feel, rather than what it tastes like. Across the week, member stories share a thread: indies leaning hard into what makes them genuinely different — whether that’s creative ambition, collective presence at industry tentpoles, or trusting the audience to write their own tasting notes.
🏆 Pencils Everywhere You Look
The One Show 2026 was kind to the independents.
Rethink took home 29 Pencils — 7 Gold, 7 Silver, and 15 Bronze — and was named both Independent Agency and Network Agency of the Year at The One Show 2026.
Serviceplan Group brought home 2 Grand Prix, 5 Golds, 5 Silvers, and 4 Bronzes, taking Best of Creative Use of Data for Herconomy’s “Breastmilk Money” and Best of Experiential & Immersive for Grindr’s “I WOOL SURVIVE.” The group also ranked 2nd Independent Agency of the Year, 2nd Independent Network of the Year, and 4th Agency of the Year overall.
Mischief @ No Fixed Address took Best of Show with Coors Light’s “Case of the Mondays” Super Bowl work for Molson Coors Beverage Company.
Special U.S. was recognized as Best of Creative Effectiveness for Uber Eats’ “Football is for Food,” plus 7 Pencils for “Build Your Own Super Bowl Commercial” and “Get Almost Almost Anything.”
SpecialGuest added a Silver Pencil to the tally — “love keeps on winning,” in their words.
🇫🇷 Independents Heading South in Convoy
A coalition of fiercely independent agencies is converging on Cannes Lions this June under the Indie at Large banner.
Cutwater confirmed they’re part of the lineup, joining Oberland, Wieden + Kennedy, Mischief @ No Fixed Address, R/GA, COLLINS, VIA, Fig, Optimism BH, Chemistry, Bandits & Friends, Butler/Till, HYPHENATED-, Noble People, Miramar Agency, Tombras, Valerie, and Venables Bell and Partners. The site is still in beta but live: https://www.indieatlarge.com
Fig announced their participation with the kind of efficiency only Fig can pull off: “Epically excited for this. Join us!”
🥃 When the Celebrity Picks the Brief
Several IAN members shared celebrity-led creative this week — and the conceits got increasingly unusual.
Iris helped Laphroaig launch a 14-year-old Oloroso cask-finished single malt without tasting notes, intentionally. The whisky was selected by Willem Dafoe based on what made his “tastebuds and curiosity come alive the most,” and Laphroaig is now asking fans worldwide to submit their own interpretations through any creative medium they choose — with the boldest entry winning a role alongside Dafoe in the brand’s next short film.
Highdive unpacked their Jeep and Marvel Entertainment partnership for the new Wrangler America250 campaign on Breaking and Entering Media, celebrating 85 years of both American icons.
Pereira O’Dell rolled out a four-part “Art of Bourbon” series for Knob Creek’s Blender’s Edition 01, walking viewers through how master blenders narrow millions of barrels down to just 800 for a single blend.
Solve kicked off Bell’s Two Hearted “Catch You There” tour in Minneapolis with TikTok creator Old Time Hawkey, debuting an 8-bit bar game called Two Hearted Fishing — plus a high-stakes meat raffle hosted by OTH himself.
Mischief @ No Fixed Address also dropped Goldfish work with Grammy-nominated vocalist Durand Bernarr (“You CHEDDAR BELIEVE IT”) for The Campbell’s Company.
Alto announced an Electronic Arts partnership, noting they’ve “been prepping for it since [they] were 9.”
📊 Numbers That Actually Mean Something
Some member stories from the week worth marking down in the strategy notebook.
Ardmore brought Pennsylvania to Dublin last summer, embedding the state across the city around a Pittsburgh Steelers NFL game — choosing cultural participation over traditional paid media. The result, per National Travel and Tourism Office data: a 14% increase in arrivals from Ireland and a 3.6% gain in share.
SRH delivered a deep history of the 1970s–90s gum wars — when bubble gum went from 10% of all chewing gum sales in 1970 to 30% by 1978 — as a case study in how differentiation gets you in the door but distinctiveness wins the shelf.
Left Hand Agency CEO Lauren Ridgley made the case that CPG growth comes from reaching more shoppers, not from getting existing customers to buy more often — putting mental availability ahead of loyalty programs.
Saylor Head of Accounts Sean Reed broke down the rise of microdramas in Marketing Brew, arguing the format didn’t fail when Quibi flopped — the timing did.
TRG is hosting Justin Cohen from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for “An Afternoon With the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute” on Thursday, June 4 in Deep Ellum, Texas — a free session walking through the laws of brand growth.
🤖 AI Doesn’t Fix What’s Already Broken
A theme that kept surfacing across member content: AI exposure depends entirely on the foundation underneath it.
Delve Deeper ran Actionable AI events in NYC and DC and surfaced the same problem at every nonprofit they spoke with: donor data living in multiple systems that don’t talk to each other, with key staff building personal Excel spreadsheets to function. One attendee summed it up: “There is not one system of record. We try to piecemeal it together.”
McKinney President Gretchen Easton Walsh moderated a Mirren Live panel on agentic AI with leaders from OK Tomorrow, Board of Innovation, Stagwell / The Marketing Cloud, and Fluency — covering reimagined ways of working rather than just efficiency plays.
Chameleon Collective Partner Kim Walls and Expert Owen Walls argued that brand systems need to become machine-readable sources of truth, not just decks, to stay coherent across AI discovery surfaces.
Response Media framed the modern CMO as part strategist, part operator, part data architect — and warned that without CRM, CDP, analytics, media, web, mobile, and in-store data working together, AI will amplify the fragmentation rather than fix it.
Legal+Creative | Toerek Law flagged the recent OpenAI data-retention conversations as a wake-up call for agencies still uploading client strategy, confidential campaign data, and unreleased materials to AI tools without internal policies.
🥗 Notes From the Cultural Pulse
Member content this week often pulled directly from culture rather than commenting on it.
Saylor Head of Social Nicole Stetter wrote in Forbes that Gen Z doesn’t nostalgize the ’90s because they remember them — they nostalgize them because they never got to live offline.
Erich & Kallman rolled out “Get Your Salad Together” for Taylor Farms, leaning into the small moment of self-congratulation that comes with choosing salad for dinner. Ad Age’s Tim Nudd featured the work.
PB& partnered with Oregon Humane on a phone line you can call for instant mood boosts — pet ASMR, animal-themed haikus, no app, no signup — built after a recent survey named “stressful” Americans’ word of the year.
Cornett named and built Holler Cannabis Co., one of just 10 cannabis businesses licensed by the state of Kentucky — handling name, identity, packaging, and website.
Day One Agency Senior Director of Story Olivia Campana shared a working framework for creative blocks built around five conditions, including “betray your algorithm” and “let the boredom breathe.”
🥇 More Recognition, Different Stages
Awards season keeps rolling.
Drake Cooper made the Indie Agency News Top 40: Classic 2026 Final 40 with Challenge Dairy Products’ “The One With The Elk On It,” picked up a Category Finalist nod for ICCU’s “Life’s Greener Here,” and an Award of Merit for Challenge Butter social.
Territorial also landed in the IAN Top 40 — twice — for their Webby-winning Centivo work and Graphis Design Award–winning Suzy work.
Innocean USA won a Webby Award People’s Voice for “Refacing the Future,” a project led by VP CD David Mesfin focused on inclusive representation in media.
KSV picked up four MUSE Awards: Platinum in Video–Government and Video–TV Ad Campaign and Gold in Video–Sustainability & Environment for New York State’s “Easy to Love. Hard to Leave.” — plus Gold in Integrated Marketing–Nonprofit for CarShare Vermont.
Iris was shortlisted at the Marketing Society Awards in Performance Marketing & Growth for their work building a scalable search growth system with Nivea.
George P Johnson Experience Marketing notched 75 industry awards globally in the first five months of the year.
Lewis is a finalist in the 2026 Nappie Awards for Best Advertising Agency / PR Firm and Best Marketing / Events Company.
Cornett Chris Finnegan joined the jury for the 2026 Adweek Media Plan of the Year, with winners announced August 4.
👥 New Faces, New Roles
Some of the bigger people moves from the week.
JOAN Creative brought on Gerry Graf as Global Chief Creative Officer — covered by Ad Age — putting two heavyweight creative leaders side by side.
CYLNDR Studios named Leah Chaney Director of Influencer, with a clear thesis on the role: “Influencer has hit a ceiling because we’ve treated it as an output. The real opportunity is authorship.”
TogetherWith welcomed E Slody as Executive Creative Director, North America — joining from a track record that includes Suntory Global Spirits, PepsiCo, Reckitt, Caesars Entertainment, and EA Games.
Partners + Napier is 100 days in with Karen Carbone Kraut as Chief Strategy Officer, profiled in Campaign US.
Praytell Olivia Singer and Wondersauce Nicole Zaino both landed on Project Worldwide’s inaugural Rising Stars Class of 2026 — one of 21 leaders selected globally.
Cactus marked CCO Brian Watson’s 24-year run with the agency — junior copywriter to CCO, all at the same shop — on The Ad Podcast with Dylan Conroy.
The Indie Spin is curated from posts shared by Indie Agency News members. If you run or work at an independent agency and want your work considered for future editions, you can learn more about IAN membership here.
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