There’s a thread running through this week’s member activity, and it’s a skeptical one. Several Indie Agency News members spent the week poking holes in the metrics everyone’s been reporting up the chain — store visits that don’t mean sales, rage bait that doesn’t move stock price, AI pilots that stall not because the tech is bad but because nobody fixed operations first. Meanwhile, the work that’s landing hardest is almost defiantly physical: a tote built for a rectangular pizza, a ten-foot magnetic fridge, a shelving unit that talks. And somewhere in between, a challenge that set a 400,000-mile goal and cleared 4.5 million in a week. Here’s what stood out.
📈 Numbers Worth Interrupting a Meeting For
Four member stories where the math did the arguing.
Innocean USA partnered with Strava on the Miles for Warriors Challenge, part of Hyundai Hope on Wheels’ fight against childhood cancer. They set a goal of 400,000 collective miles. In one week, participants logged more than 4.5 million, unlocking a $2 million donation from Hyundai. It runs alongside The Mark of a Warrior, which turned the Hope on Wheels handprint into warpaint and built its photography around five real childhood cancer survivors answering one question: “What kind of warrior are you?”
Guesthouse ran a clean experiment on behalf of Flexcar — put the spot on a national Thursday Night Football broadcast exactly once and watch what happens. What happened was traffic went up 22x instantly. Meet the sassy bird.
Familiar Creatures shared the receipts behind their Crunch Fitness partnership as client CMO Chad Waetzig picked up his Ad Age Midsize Brand Leader award in Chicago: a 25% increase in purchase intent, a 26% year-over-year increase in membership through April, a 31% increase in revenue and a 20% rise in trial sign-ups.
Delve Deeper ran UNICEF’s value-based bidding strategy head-to-head against a $50 target CPA strategy scaled for volume, same conditions, same audience. The cheaper, less sophisticated-sounding approach won on every axis: 43% lower cost per donor, 43% more conversions, 77% higher ROAS.
🍟 Newstalgia, Now With More Fry Mullets
Everyone went back in time this week, and the receipts are surprisingly good.
Partners + Napier took Checkers & Rally’s 40th anniversary back to 1986, teaming with Yung Gravy to reimagine “Danger Zone” as “Fryway to the Flava Zone” — an original song with a music video full of fry mullets, a Pontiac Fry-ero and a lot of ’80s Easter eggs. Ad Age and MediaPost both picked it up. As they put it: newstalgia.
Erich & Kallman went a slightly different direction on the nostalgia dial, casting Taylor Hanson in new work for King’s Hawaiian to introduce Cinnamon Swirl Bites. They also dropped a gladiator-themed Carl’s Jr. spot for the new Angus Maximus, because why stop at one.
Mother built KALLAX Storageborn for IKEA, a free downloadable Skyrim Creation that turns the shelving unit into a sentient companion character who organizes your inventory, voiced by Matt Berry. Fifteen years of Skyrim players being slowed down by carrying too many items, finally addressed.
Special Australia retired four years of “Get Almost, Almost Anything” and introduced Phew, a new Uber Eats platform that shifts from what you can get delivered to how it feels. The social films go back to 2013, B.U.E. — Before Uber Eats — when Redfoo was party rocking and Troye Sivan was not yet Troye Sivan.
🧊 Contrarian Corner
Four members arguing with the consensus, politely.
Territorial shared Anu Lingala’s work with the brand pros at Tracksuit examining what American Eagle got from the Sydney Sweeney campaign a year on: little to no stock bump, and hits on consideration and sales. Their framing — you can’t build brands with rage bait — is a useful counterweight to the earned-media math.
Left Hand Agency CEO Lauren Ridgley spent the week dismantling two metrics in a row. First, why a website visit isn’t a sale for a CPG brand that sells primarily in stores. Then, why foot traffic measures movement, not growth. Both are short and both will annoy somebody’s media deck.
SRH asked a good question and answered it uncomfortably: the average age of a new car buyer in the US is 53. That’s squarely Gen X. Their point is that over-indexing on a single cohort gets you in trouble, and they extend it to beauty and fashion, where the actual dollars are heavily dominated by 30- to 55-year-olds spending more per transaction.
Oberland put a number on the brand-values question with Speak or Surrender: 76% of what your audience wants is civic participation, not a political opinion. Drew Train calls it the lowest-risk, highest-return move on the list.
🤖 Turns Out AI Is an Operations Problem
The week’s most consistent theme, and the diagnosis is not about the models.
Legal+Creative | Toerek Law surfaced the stat agency leaders should probably print out: 52% of brands say AI strategy, enablement and governance is the number one thing they want from agency partners over the next five years. The second-place answer was 20 points behind.
Consiglieri founder Chris Noble makes the structural case in a piece on why only 9% of CMOs have cracked AI — and it isn’t the tools, it’s operations. H/L Agency VP of Data & Innovation Tim Schatz gets at the same thing from the other side in MediaPost, arguing mid-size independents are beating the Goliaths on AI execution because six approvals later, the capability you wanted to test is already outdated.
Bits&Letters put it into practice, publishing a rundown of how founder David Demaree built a miniature software factory using Cursor and Linear to work through 200-plus-page web projects without bringing in extra developers.
Chameleon Collective shared the most concrete client example of the bunch: Kim Walls built an AI underwriting copilot for DOTI Holdings that reads a property’s full transaction history, calculates a Maximum Allowable Offer tied to DSCR financing, and pulls rehab costs from actual local contractor pricing. Underwriting decisions went from days to hours.
GERTRUDE, INC.™ founder and CCO Otis Gibson weighed in twice, in Adweek on why AI might be the work/life balance everyone’s looking for and in Digiday on what AI can’t automate — namely, the relationship.
🧲 Ideas You Can Physically Hold
A strong week for things that exist in the actual world.
Household inverted the merch model for Stranger Things: The First Shadow at the Phoenix Theatre, building Hawkins, 1959 — a fan-first pop-up woven into the world of the play rather than a souvenir stand by the exit. Retail before the curtain rises, not after.
WorkInProgress identified a real problem with the new Domino: put a pizza in a tote and it stands straight up. So they made a custom tote designed to carry a Domino, or a stack of them. A few hundred limited-edition versions are floating around NYC during Fashion Week.
Quality Meats Creative printed out MapQuest directions to Lake Ontario from six specific city locations, on the grounds that it’s still Lake Ontario and MapQuest still exists. Campfire connected the same moment to a broader point about brands saying what they believe, noting MapQuest became the No. 1 app in the U.S. App Store after taking a stand.
Those That DO teamed with Special Australia to transform a flagship KFC restaurant into a neon-drenched, fully pickled Picklecore destination for the new pickle-everything menu. Make it your entire personality.
The Many turned a Panda Express billboard into a fortune cookie slip, and the fortune is about you.
🏆 The Indie Trophy Case
The Drum’s Indie Agency 100 dropped, and members are all over it.
Rethink took the number one spot on The Drum’s Top 100 Indie Agency list. Fuse Create came in at #40 globally, and Powers of Reasoning landed at #48.
Household had a second good night, taking Gold for Creativepool 2026 Independent Agency of the Year against a global field, with Exec Creative Director Katie Walmsley named one of the Top 100 Creative Leaders globally and the agency shortlisted for Best Agency to Work For.
Klick Health was named Most Awarded Agency at The Creative Floor Awards for the third year in a row. David&Goliath made Fast Company’s Best Workplaces for Innovators of 2026.
Laughlin Constable had the busiest week of anyone: the QuikTrip Home Bun Race got written up by Ad Age, named #1 Agency of the Week by Breaking and Entering Media, their Master Lock “Master It” work was shortlisted for a 2026 4As Jay Chiat Award in Brand Transformation Strategy, and LC was ranked on Crain’s Chicago Business Best Places to Work for 2026. BarkleyOKRP also picked up Jay Chiat shortlists with Suja Life, Red Lobster, Burger King and Inspire Medical Systems.
Special Australia CSOs Bec Stambanis and Dave Hartmann were jointly named #1 Strategists in B&T’s Best of the Best.
💙 Work With Something at Stake
Four projects where the brief mattered more than the format.
McKinney had two land at once. Wildlife Conservation Society’s Petition Papers — which turned ordinary butcher wrap at seafood counters into an active conservation tool — received an Honorable Mention at Fast Company’s Innovation by Design Awards, and Voices of Alzheimer’s “Check, Mate” won Charitable or Philanthropic Campaign at the 2026 Fierce Pharma Marketing Awards.
Klick Health revisited Stress Controller, a concept that turns a game controller into an ECG, using heart rate variability to identify changes in a child’s stress levels while they play. They also resurfaced The Curious Eye for back-to-school — a storybook co-created with ophthalmologists that uses the science behind the Ishihara test to help parents spot color vision deficiency.
Quirk Creative launched “Where Will Words Take You?” with Hooked & Company, a 360° brand campaign built around the idea that learning to read isn’t about what kids achieve in school but about where words can take them.
Mintz + Hoke joined 9/11 Day for the 25th anniversary, with team members packing meals as part of a nationwide effort to distribute more than 17 million meals across 51 cities in a single day. David&Goliath put the design thinking behind the same effort into words, explaining that the two I’s at the heart of UNIITE are a tribute to the Twin Towers.
🤝 Moves, Hires and the Business of Being Indie
Who’s joining forces, who’s joining teams.
Carson+Doyle announced they’re joining forces with The Variable, with business continuing as usual. Butler/Till named Marla Kaplowitz, former President & CEO of the 4As, Chair of their Board of Directors.
BarkleyOKRP welcomed PetSmart as their newest integrated partner on both creative and media — with credit going to Tuna, the star who closed the final pitch meeting.
Response Media launched RE:HEALTH, a health and life sciences practice, alongside AdherenceIQ, a behavioral intelligence platform. The premise: medication nonadherence costs the U.S. healthcare system as much as $300 billion annually, and the gap is understanding emotional barriers, not generating more prescriptions. Praytell meanwhile fused media, creator and social into one Centers of Influence department, bringing on Catherine O’Neill as SVP, Creator Marketing & Paid Media and Paige Weber as SVP, Media Lead.
Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners introduced Sinan Dagli as their new Chief Creative Officer — 17 years from Junior Designer to CCO at the same shop. Obsessed Media brought on Rebecca Sharon as Partner and Managing Director to lead new business and client relationships.
And Curiosity got Ad Age Executive Editor Judann Pollack on the Question Everything podcast to talk about the indie advantage and why small shops are teaming up to unlock bigger capabilities — plus whether Ad Age can tell when you’ve used AI in an award entry. (Sometimes.)
🎬 A Few More Worth Your Click
Bandits & Friends made the case for Staples with a sporting goods store that went the hard way and ended up with a “Golf Sharts” sign.
Venables Bell and Partners launched Scout Motors’ Harvester Range Extender with “Fish On,” directed by Jake Scott with RSA Films and shot along Oregon’s Clackamas River — rapids, a ravenous bear, a towering waterfall. Founder Paul Venables is also the latest subject of The International ANDY Awards Inspiration Series as VB+P marks 25 years.
Giant Spoon debuted Autodesk’s “The World Is Yours for the Making” on NBC during Patriots vs. Seahawks, framed as a welcome packet to Planet Earth with one instruction: make something.
Zambezi CEO Jean Freeman talked with Ad Age about how small agencies build the right client rosters — including how leaning into first-ever brand campaigns won them LPL Financial.
Colossus unveiled new brand identity work for the Boston Lyric Opera’s 50th, built on a color palette derived from the emotional range of the medium and leaning heavily on James Edmondson’s Forevs family.
Another Thing made Breaderment for Betterment, starring quarterback Drake Maye, baker Ann Michael Maye and a custom Perfect Spiral loaf inspired by Drake’s throw.
Grown moved into The Firehouse, a 126-year-old building in City Commons that’ll house their creative office and studio space, and rolled out a new custom wordmark by type designer Simon Walker.
Mother also rebranded Keen out of the crystal-ball business and into wellness tech, going maximalist in a category that’s minimal to the point of sterile.
Not a member yet? Indie Agency News exists to get independent agencies the attention they’ve earned — the work, the wins, the hires, the takes. If your shop is doing something worth reading about, come join us and get in the next Spin.
- About the Author
- Latest Posts
