Indie HQ members won a bunch at the Ad Age Small Agency Awards, which you can see here. But set the trophy talk aside for a minute — underneath award season, Indie Agency News members were busy making the more interesting kind of news. A movie tie-in turned into a rooftop stakeout in Queens, the AI conversation finally got specific enough to be useful, and a health shop dropped a stat that should reshape how pharma thinks about patients. There’s a thread running through a lot of it: the work that stands out right now is the work that’s unmistakably human. Here’s what caught our eye.
🕷️ Spider-Man Swings Into the Feed
With Spider-Man: Brand New Day hitting theaters July 31, members went all in on the tie-ins. Giant Spoon staged a rooftop stakeout at Silvercup Studios in Queens, gathering creators from around the world to catch a total blackout of the iconic Silvercup sign as Spidey crashed his own event.
Witness Me‘s CHROMISTA director Kasra Farahani — a Marvel production designer by trade — teamed with Samsung and Sony Pictures on a cinematic spot starring Jacob Batalon as Ned Leeds, blending original story with real film footage inside a recreation of Peter Parker’s apartment.
🤖 Humans Still Hold the Pen
The AI conversation among members has gotten refreshingly specific. Charts + Darts‘ head of AI and systems, Brian Lerche, told LBBonline why the shop trains its own models on client imagery and insists that “Spielberg storytelling starts with human experience, not a prompt.”
White Rabbit Group offered the sharpest data point: an engineer with no DevOps background rebuilt the voting infrastructure behind The Game Awards, finishing about 90% of a 180-hour job in roughly 80 hours — with AI filling in the commands he hadn’t memorized, but the human making the call on what should exist in the first place.
And Dotted Line Agency‘s Head of Media and AI, Mark Pavia, argued in LBB’s Magic Numbers series that the smartest brands treat data as a brief, not a directive.
📣 Creators Became the Whole Strategy
Cutwater‘s Head of Media & Communications, Lizzy R., told LBBonline that creator content has evolved from a one-off influencer post into “a scalable engine that can drive relevance, paid performance, and real business impact across the funnel.” Attention Arc‘s Nicole Williams, featured in Net Influencer, pushed on how to preserve authentic creator voices while maximizing performance.
But Highdive offered the useful counterweight. Group Strategy Director Erin Wong, writing in Ad Age, calls the emerging H2 shift “Frontline Authority” — consumers wary of paid creator content and reaching instead for firsthand expertise. Dermatologists over beauty influencers. Former CIA agents over commentators. And to prove ideas still beat scale, Curiosity broke down Charli xcx’s album rollout as a template for “anti-marketing” — putting the hype in the hands of fans.
🩺 The Health Beat
Klick Health made a structural move, acquiring Oxford PharmaGenesis to bring scientific depth and medical strategy under one roof. Its weekly Klick Wire also surfaced a stat worth sitting with: 52% of patients now request medications by name, and 92% of HCPs say virtual Rx management is okay.
McKinney Managing Director Michael McNamara told The Drum about the risk of leaving Havas four years ago to build a healthcare practice “betting on the fact that advertising in health had to leave the Pharma bubble” — and winning the Manny’s Agency of the Year three years later.
🎪 Worlds, Words, and One Very Nice Lab Coat
TiNY is running on world-building — CCO Mike Rovner’s rule is “build a world, live in it, and invite people in.” For client American Century Investments, that meant a new prize for its American Century Championship: the winner gets a lab coat, worn well by Mardy Fish. The shop also had fun with PetIQ’s Minties Freshbites, aimed at any dog “with breath that could knock a buzzard off a garbage truck.”
Young & Laramore invented words — Tubstantial, Chunksistent, Scooperior — for United Dairy Farmers’ “more is more” Homemade Brand ice creams. Drake Cooper‘s Dylan Amundson wrote for LBB on why mascots are one of the smartest investments a brand can make. And 8AM Creative put the corporate lexicon on blast with a buzzword word search — synergy, bandwidth, low-hanging fruit, and the rest of the graveyard.
🎟️ Out in the Wild
Experiential members turned up everywhere this week. Need Pastel drew more than 3,000 members of LA’s creative community to City of Champions, a two-day exhibition timed to the biggest global soccer match, featuring 100+ artists and archival Dodgers photography from Jon SooHoo.
Day One Agency built a three-day Nike Golf experience for the men’s U.S. Open in the Hamptons — player lockers, a mini “tour truck,” and a custom putting green ringed by real grass dunes and fescue. And OS Studios is handling the live broadcast for Ultimate Sevens, a new four-city rugby sevens format launching this September.
🏀 Everybody Wants LeBron in Philly
LeBron’s reported move to the 76ers gave members a cultural moment to grab. Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners joked that LeBron should have announced the news on LinkedIn. Allen & Gerritsen went further, staking a cheeky claim to their 2018 Power Home Remodeling billboards in Cleveland — the ones that racked up 2 billion impressions and a reply from LeBron himself — as the real reason he’s Philly-bound. They’re biased, they admit, toward great work.
💡 Fresh Work & Sharp Takes
Special U.S. rolled out comfy new work for Hanesbrands, covered by Ad Age’s Tim Nudd. Optimism BH handed a celebrated chef the keys to the kitchen with Habit & Co., a Habit Burger & Grill residency program launching with first resident Jet Tila. ASMBLY Entertainment‘s “This Is My Oura Story” — a docuseries for ŌURA built on the idea that a brand’s best stories are already being lived by the people who use it — got a nice write-up in LBB. Campfire‘s latest journal entry, “The Tin Can Telephone & the Return to Real Media,” argues the future of media has less to do with the next platform and more with trust and human connection. And over in Sydney, Special Australia picked up a Mumbrella award for “Mum-nipulate the algorithm” with Kitchen Warehouse — built on the finding that 87% of mums have pretended to like a gift.
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