There’s a version of this business where everybody plays it safe — sand the edges off the idea, buy the media that measures cleanly, wait for the holdco to make an offer. Then there’s what Indie Agency News members actually shipped this week: an ’80s parody music video for a fast-food chain’s 40th birthday, a ten-foot magnetic refrigerator on a trade show floor, and an Ad Age executive editor going on record about why small shops keep winning. Underneath the fun stuff, a quieter thread runs through almost everything — a lot of people are questioning what they’re measuring, who they’re partnering with, and whether the polished version of the work was ever the good version.
🍟 Work That Landed
Partners + Napier helped Checkers & Rally’s celebrate 40 years by recruiting Yung Gravy to reimagine “Danger Zone” as “Fryway to the Flava Zone,” complete with fry mullets and a Pontiac Fry-ero. It is exactly as committed to the bit as it sounds.
Ardmore built the Lidl Ireland campaign around Katie Taylor’s Croke Park fight, landing on the fact that this year marks ten years since Taylor turned pro and ten years of Lidl backing women and girls in Irish sport. Two timelines running parallel, then converging — that’s a brief you don’t get twice.
Innocean USA is behind “Flesh Impact,” presented by Genesis and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, which debuted at the Venice Film Festival. Variety covered the film alongside Ellen Burstyn’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement.
Special U.S. released new work for OpenAI with Biscuit Filmworks, and Hot Lava put Arrow Electronics on national television with an IndyCar season finale spot, plus the Arrow McLaren team’s new “Smart to Intelligent” livery at Laguna Seca. Their comment on the whole thing: “Next time we want to drive the car.”
😤 The Indie Question, Asked Out Loud
Curiosity got Ad Age Executive Editor Judann Pollack on Question Everything to answer whether holdcos should be afraid of indie agencies. Her read: small shops are teaming up to unlock bigger capabilities, which is a more interesting answer than the usual size-versus-nimbleness argument.
BarkleyOKRP made the case empirically — Ad Age broke down how they won PetSmart’s creative and media as an integrated partner, they landed on the 4A’s Jay Chiat shortlists with Suja Life, Red Lobster, Burger King and Inspire Medical Systems, and Ad Age also covered their Lucid Gravity spot. Not a bad stretch.
Chameleon Collective is sending Jackie Woodward to the Ad Age Business of Brands event in Chicago on September 15 to argue that fractional leadership isn’t a stopgap. Their internal framing, which is blunter than the stage version: “When you’re good, we’re gone.”
📊 Numbers Worth Stealing
based.marketing built a whole argument on one Ehrenberg-Bass Institute finding — about one in twenty B2B buyers is shopping in any given quarter. You can’t yell the other nineteen into the market, but you can’t afford to lose them either, which is the case they make for brand awareness spend.
Klick Health put a rough set of numbers in front of healthcare marketers in the latest Klick Wire: 82% of physicians report being overworked and 74% of HCPs say they lack the tools to fight misinformation. Those two facts sitting next to each other should worry anyone building HCP programs.
D/CAL flagged the IAB’s 2025 Creator Economy report projecting $37B in U.S. creator ad spend, alongside the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science noting brand leaders still can’t justify or measure the investment. Their response: “We’re gonna solve that problem. Stay tuned.”
Household did the math on Gamescom and found the headline number was the least interesting one — 368,000 people in Cologne, but 624 million digital views and 6.2 million interactions with the EPIX community experience. Their argument is that the event stopped being an event and became a fan platform.
🏆 Recognition With Receipts
Special Australia had CSOs Bec Stambanis and Dave Hartmann jointly named #1 Strategists in B&T’s Best of the Best, with an honourable mention for Celia Garforth. B&T’s phrasing: “Truly, there are none better.”
David&Goliath was named one of Fast Company’s Best Workplaces for Innovators of 2026, which lands in the same week they’re marking nearly three decades of taking on Goliaths.
Venables Bell + Partners founder Paul Venables is the latest subject of The International ANDY Awards Inspiration Series, timed to VB+P’s 25th year.
The Many found their Purple for the Planet campaign on Sambazon’s 25-year look back at the brand’s impact — the one where the ask was dye your hair purple, post the selfie, and help save 30 rainforest species in 30 days.
Barbarian shared that Pratham Desai, Head of HR at Barbarian India, was named “Pioneering HR Leader of the Year” at the 18th CHRO Association Confex & Awards 2026, Hyderabad Chapter.
🎨 Creatives Talking Shop
McKinney Co-CCO Omid Amidi gave Muse by Clios one of the better descriptions of taste we’ve read: “I like to think that I can feel when an idea has life in it. Even when it is badly explained. Even when the deck is terrible. Even when everyone else is staring at it like it was found wet in a parking lot.” The full conversation covers Share a Coke and why a point of view beats consensus.
GERTRUDE, INC.™ founder and CCO Otis Gibson had a busy week of interviews — Communication Arts on recent work and the challenges facing agencies, and LBB on 21 years of the shop.
Witness Me put Epoch Films director Tore Frandsen through LBB’s “The Work That Made Me,” where he traces his career back to 90s music videos and Stella Artois’ “Pilot” spot.
KDSP and director John Hillcoat talked to shots about how they made an inner monologue sing for Grow Therapy’s new campaign.
Epica Awards launched Young Sparks, a category open to work led by creatives below CD or CCO level, with an October 4 entry deadline. Related, and worth reading next to it: TEMPOMEDIA’s Vera Portz told Epica the real fight isn’t resources, it’s “the pressure to smooth every idea into something safe.”
🧠 The Owner’s Dilemma
Agency Management Institute — Drew McLellan devoted a solo Build a Better Agency episode to whether you should take on a business partner, and built a two-layer framework with nine universal non-negotiables any candidate has to clear. His warning is the useful part: partnership decisions made out of fatigue tend to be irreversible.
The Sutter Company is tackling a smaller but expensive problem on September 15 — account managers who hear the opening for more work and say nothing. Jenny Plant joins Jody Sutter on Just Ask Jody Live at 1:00 PM Eastern to talk about fixing it without turning AMs into salespeople.
Legal+Creative | Toerek Law hosted Battery Agency’s Stephanie Tillinghast on The Innovative Agency to discuss getting new business off the founder’s shoulders by sharing pitch metrics across the whole agency.
Agency Outsight Coaching brought Figmints founder James Kwon onto Agency Bytes to explain Slices, his performance-based framework for turning employees into owners without giving up control — and for making M&A earnouts less painful.
⚖️ Fine Print and Hard Questions
Davis+Gilbert LLP had two alerts worth flagging. Louis DiLorenzo and Paavana Kumar unpacked the FTC’s proposed enforcement policy on “surveillance pricing,” which would require businesses to disclose when customer data sets personalized prices. Separately, Gary Kibel, Marc Rachman, Ina Scher and Eva Jiménez looked at California’s SB 690 and what it could do to CIPA website-tracking litigation.
Young & Laramore VP of Strategy Kari O’Neill used the Good Good x Callaway “The Driver” fallout to lay out the questions brands should be asking about creator campaigns in MediaPost.
Delve Deeper made a case against platform lock-in as ad tech companies keep buying each other and signing exclusive deals, and separately argued that the biggest AI opportunity in fundraising is the donor database you already have, not acquisition.
Left Hand Agency CEO Lauren Ridgley asked CPG brands a question that should come up in more media reviews: are we measuring movement, or measuring growth? Foot traffic can look like a strong signal while saying very little about purchase behavior.
Campfire pointed at MapQuest becoming the No. 1 app in the U.S. App Store after taking a public stand, and made a related argument in their own journal about investing in media people would actually miss.
🎪 Big Swings and Strange Objects
Praytell decided the way to stand out on the SuperZoo floor for the Human Animal Bond Research Institute was a ten-foot yellow magnetic fridge with an interactive photo-printing booth. It worked, which is both funny and instructive.
HLoveCo took Rhone’s 12 Pursuits framework off the brand deck and into Times Square with a hype tunnel and a Pickle Pong Showdown during CityPicklePalooza — Athletech News covered why Rhone is betting on pickleball to build the brand beyond apparel.
Oberland worked with Beazer Homes to build an impact brand that employees could see themselves in, which became Hearts & Homes.
Quality Meats Creative extended their fake-organization-raising-awareness-for-a-real-organization PSA for Comic Relief into taxis, building sides, and the sky. They also invented the Herb Light X Ozzie Guillen Double Play Coozie, a tall coozie that stacks two cold cans, which we are choosing to believe is unrelated.
POKE THE BEAR™ named a single barrel bourbon after West Virginia University’s Blue Lot tailgate, finished it with Appalachian Mountain water, and pointedly refused to talk about mash bills. Cutwater went the other seasonal direction, building the campaign for the Bay Area Discovery Museum’s Goblin Jamboree running every October weekend.
🗓️ Worth Clearing the Calendar
The One Club for Creativity has a busy month: the Creative Hall of Fame returns to Capitale New York on September 16, Brand-Side 2026 hits Nashville September 30–October 1, and CapCut just came on as Premier Global AI Partner across the ADC Annual Awards, Young Guns, Young Ones and The One Show.
Another Thing Head of Strategy Mike Cassell takes the Brandweek stage with Mike’s Hot Honey’s Kate Guthrie Adams for “From Pizza Shops to Pop Culture” on September 16 at 4:45 PM.
Clever Creative founder Shannon Gabor is talking brand systems that hold under pressure on September 15 at 10am CT, and Chemistry Agency SEO Director Chuck Cramer hosts “The New Era of Search” on October 28 at 1pm EST.
RAYNE IX brings RIX Speed Networking back to Station 1846 in Milwaukee on September 17, October 22 and November 19 — sixteen women per session, $47, and a printout of who’s in the room before you sit down.
Serviceplan Group announced the CMO of the Year 2026 shortlist — nine nominees including marketing leaders from IKEA Germany, Deutsche Bahn and Nestlé Germany — with the winner named October 15 in Munich, the same day as their Innovation Day.
👋 New Names on the Door
Cornett hired Ashley White as Director of Social Strategy, bringing 15 years of social-first brand work across Cup Noodles, Four Roses and Rita’s. Their Jamon Deaver also told LBB why Salesforce and HubSpot aren’t closing your deals — people are.
George P Johnson named Matt McGinn Integrated Production Practice Lead and Robin Kleban Account Management Practice Lead.
Stoltz Marketing Group introduced new ACD Chris Watts, fifteen-plus years of copywriting plus a vault of rare comic books. Highdive promoted Danielle Murphy to Senior Account Director, and Founders Agency Global COO Maru Sokolowski talked to LBB about building a leadership style by watching other people do it badly.
🕯️ One More Thing
This September 11 marks 25 years. Mintz + Hoke team members are packing meals for neighbors facing food insecurity as part of a nationwide effort to pack more than 17 million meals across 51 cities in a single day, and David&Goliath is behind the UNIITE identity — the two I’s a tribute to the Twin Towers — as 9/11 Day calls for one million people to commit to one good deed. Both are open to anyone reading this.
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