The most interesting thing about today’s haul of Indie Agency News member content is how many agencies landed independently on the same unglamorous finding: AI starts conversations it doesn’t finish. Travelers ask it for recommendations and then go check. Brands get mentioned by it without getting recommended. Search results and LLM results disagree far more often than anyone budgeted for. Underneath all that, there’s a lot of new work launching, a California law that deserves more attention than it’s getting, and one agency putting real money behind a bear.
🔍 The Machines Start the Conversation, Not the Sale
Everyone’s studying AI search. Nobody’s finding quite what they expected.
Mower Agency surveyed AI-using travelers and found AI is nearly even with Google as a starting point for trip planning — but only 5% say they book exactly what AI suggested. After the recommendation lands, 59% search Google, 49% visit the official website, and 40% compare prices across multiple sites. The journey isn’t AI instead of search. It’s AI followed by all of it.
Stella Rising built ChatTrak to track brand presence, sentiment and share of voice across AI engines, led by SVP of Search & Innovation John Morabito. The number behind the build: their own consumer research found traditional Google search and the LLMs agree on a brand only 33% of the time.
Attention Arc‘s Associate Director of Discoverability, Urvashi Manral, is taking the Small Talks stage at Ahrefs Evolve with the distinction that matters most here — whether AI is merely mentioning a brand or recommending it.
VaynerMedia‘s Ryan Erwin, Director of SEO & AEO, argues on the VaynerX Hot Seat that search isn’t dying but splintering into answer engine and generative engine optimization, with the conversations moving to TikTok and AI chat interfaces.
Butler/Till‘s Maggie Leathersich and James Scruby took the same question to pharma at Fierce Pharma with Verve For Advertisers, making the case that identity and intent signals aren’t an either/or, and that patients asking AI specific health questions have moved brand discoverability somewhere new.
Klick Health’s latest Klick Wire reports 83% of U.S. health providers are now using AI, alongside a revised 12.3% digital media growth forecast for 2026 and the finding that 74% of consumers expect AI-generated ads to be indistinguishable from human-made ones within a year.
Iris London‘s Pete Crothers used his latest Meaty Insight to point out the algorithm isn’t the enemy, but it isn’t the creative director either: feed it the same signals and you get the same hooks, the same edits, the same Christmas twist in a new coat. Algorithms spot patterns. Breaking them is still a human job.
⚖️ Meanwhile, the Lawyers Have Been Busy
A new California law, a contract gap, and a $150,000 reason to check your music license.
Davis+Gilbert LLP flagged that Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 1050, making California the second state to require disclosure when advertisements feature AI-generated synthetic performers. Sara Edelman, Gary Kibel, Paavana Kumar and Samantha Rothaus break down the required disclosure language, the coverage of audio and audiovisual ads, and the obligations that land on media distributors.
Not content with one alarm bell, the firm also has Michael Lasky and Andrew Richman in O’Dwyer’s on why agency contracts drafted before AI became routine may no longer describe how agencies work, and Paavana Kumar heading to the 2026 Page Society Annual Conference for a session with Mike Fernandez and Nanne H.C. Bos titled “Will AI Put You in Jail?”
Made Music Studio laid out the music licensing cheat sheet — sync and master for video, blanket for in-store, public performance for live events — with the detail that should focus the mind: fines run up to $150,000 per infringement, and a song being available on TikTok doesn’t mean a brand holds commercial rights to it.
Territorial made the case against AI voiceover by having a Shakespearean actor sell a cheeseburger, on the grounds that a computer has never eaten one.
📊 Numbers Worth Sitting With
Six findings that argue with the conventional wisdom.
Chameleon Collective‘s Carrie McCament makes the case that 70 to 80 percent of year-over-year revenue comes from clients you already have, not the ones still in the pipeline — and that most teams still reserve their fastest response times for prospects.
DCA picked up a companion figure from Erich Joachimsthaler: only 7% of growth comes from stealing share from competitors, which is why he pushes brands toward demand spaces outside their category entirely. The agency also read the IPA’s latest Making Sense report and found media consumption patterns have held remarkably firm over 20 years — audio in the morning, OOH during working hours, video in the evening.
Delve Deeper went looking for donors outside the usual charity audiences for UNICEF, targeting premium news readers, investors and finance audiences with no explicit charitable interest. Five custom segments, one test flight: 742% higher ROAS, nearly 12x higher conversion value, 19% lower cost per conversion.
Sea Salt Marketing has three years of numbers on Christou Homes: 235 leads through Meta at a $159.92 average cost per lead, with average build value up from around $400K to $1M+. The builder now chooses which jobs to take.
GTE Canada tracked young Canadians moving to ad-supported streaming and found the share went from 87% to 92% in a single year among 18-to-34-year-olds.
StayGold opened a piece on restaurant brands with a statistic that explains a lot of indifferent hospitality: only 27% of employees believe in their company’s values.
🎬 New Work, and One Agency Counting the Turnaround in Days
Protein, pizza crunch, a Sistine Chapel locker room, and a prison sitcom.
Cutwater framed the week’s most useful production lesson: OpenAI’s ad for its new Astra model hit 100M+ views on X along with real backlash from 3D artists and game developers, and Goodwipes turned it into “Asstra” in four days. Their point isn’t whose ad was funnier. It’s that brands usually miss a cultural moment because the process can’t move fast enough to use it, not because the idea was missing.
Zambezi won Quest Nutrition in a competitive pitch three months ago and launched “Feed Your Athlete” during Thursday Night Football, a masterbrand platform built around everyday “Performance Maxxers.” President Laura Stayt called the ninety-day turnaround proof of what’s possible when agency and brand teams operate with total alignment.
Gus launched Klaviyo’s new brand platform, “Your Brand’s Best Friend,” starring D’Arcy Carden and directed by Tripp and Jenna Watt. Birdie Mgmt handled the celebrity deal plus the insurance wrap policy, talent contracts and script review — the unglamorous machinery a campaign like this runs on.
Witness Me shared that World War Seven’s JamsBash — the directing duo of Jamaal Parham and Bashan Aquart — directed Nationwide’s NFL Kickoff spot “Locker Room,” reviving Peyton Manning’s “Paintin’ Manning” alter ego alongside Saquon Barkley in a Sistine Chapel homage.
Highdive put out two new State Farm football spots and reported that making Fernando Mendoza look like a bad boy was roughly as hard as getting Curt Cignetti to smile.
Argonaut built Cricket Wireless’s WWE Thumb-Disputed Championship, a 60-second texting showdown between Alexa Bliss, Johnny Gargano, Kiana James, Kit Wilson, Penta and Michin, with a public version fans can enter at thumbdisputed.com.
McKinney and CYLNDR Studios made a Ross Dress for Less docuseries called On My Way, following emerging musicians Ian Cobiella and Bryce Fleming as they turn works in progress into original songs, with guidance from Khalid.
Mischief @ No Fixed Address cast JCPenney’s new fashion campaign with real teachers as the models.
Here Be Monsters made Interchange 360’s first U.S. public-awareness campaign by playing with Colorado clichés before landing on something most residents share — driving, and the fact that used auto containers can be recycled. It’s rolling out in video, social, streaming audio and OOH.
Ardmore took Northern Ireland’s Department for Infrastructure road safety campaign into the virtual production stage at Studio Ulster, focusing on the risks children face stepping off school buses into live traffic.
Mnstr hijacked the official visual codes of France’s Ministry of Justice to launch the Disney+ prison comedy Surveillant with Audrey Lamy and Jean-Pascal Zadi.
G7 Entertainment Marketing loaded buses of fans and creators out of New York and ended the day with Teddy Swims singing against a Montauk sunset for White Claw.
🏆 The Trophy Case
Emmys, Halls of Fame, and a holiday album with a pun buried in the title.
Iris London won Bronze in the 2026 PRINT/OUTDOOR – INTERNATIONAL category at the Shark Awards for Leave Space, an OOH campaign for STAMMA that used the empty space on billboards to mirror the pause people who stammer need in conversation.
Schafer Condon Carter (SCC) got Giordano’s nominated for Outstanding Achievement for a Commercial Single Spot/Campaign at the 2026 Television Academy Foundation Awards, for work built around the crunch of tavern-style pizza.
411 Music Group contributed custom compositions to The Traitors, which just won its third consecutive Emmy for Outstanding Reality Competition Program.
The One Club for Creativity inducted rosie arnold, Janet Champ, John C Jay, Caroline R. Jones, Joyce King Thomas and Piyush Pandey into the 2026 Creative Hall of Fame, with Michael Conrad entering the Educators Hall of Fame. The evening also made Apple the first brand ever inducted into the club’s newly established Brand Hall of Fame, with Tor Myhren accepting.
Serviceplan Group took three golds, four silvers and a bronze at cherrypicker’s “THE BEST AGENCY” Awards, for work including “Sheep Happens” for PENNY Deutschland, “The Roblox Unbox” for Playmobil and “Interactive Intermission” for OTTO.
Mintz + Hoke got its holiday album, Here We Come A-WassAIling, shortlisted for The Drum B2B Awards — songwriting, music production, illustration, packaging and a surprise vinyl pressing included.
Fortnight Collective‘s package design for Gaia Herbs won a 2026 GDUSA American Graphic Design Award.
Erich & Kallman has two strategists up at the 4A’s Jay Chiat Awards: Neeti Newaskar for Visionary Strategist and Uzodinma M. for Emerging Strategist.
Mower Agency‘s 2025 Green Heart Fridays campaign for the Arthritis Foundation is a finalist in two categories at PR Daily’s 2026 Nonprofit Communications Awards: Advocacy or Awareness Campaign, and Purpose-Driven Communication.
Bridge Insights & Media won the Austin Chamber’s Austin Gives Award for its Day of Sharing program — 158 volunteer hours across seven Austin nonprofits over the past two years.
Yes& Agency landed on the 2026 Atlanta Business Chronicle Pacesetters list, an honor awarded to Modo Modo Agency, now part of Yes& following the acquisition.
Day One Agency was named to Diversity Action Alliance’s 2026 DAA Power Collective.
On the judging side, McKinney Associate Creative Director Cheyenne Hidalgo was named a juror for the Shorty Impact Awards under this year’s “What Matters” theme, and Esto es Marte founder and CEO Juan Felipe Puerta joined the jury of Effie Awards Guatemala 2026.
🧰 How Agencies Are Running Themselves
New chairs, a fifty-year-old name being retired, and some uncomfortable questions about operations.
Rethink named Dustin Tomes Chief Creative Officer, following Mike Dubrick’s promotion to North American CCO. Tomes starts October 19 and will work with the Toronto and Vancouver creative leadership; Tara Lawall continues to oversee the New York portfolio as CCO there.
Oberland promoted Jeff Prince to President after he joined as Client Lead in early 2026, bringing two decades in brand marketing, growth and agency leadership.
Serviceplan Group added Christian Necker as a Managing Director of Serviceplan Boosting Health, working with Dr. Dörthe Besse on healthcare consulting and the use of AI in marketing and communication processes.
Agency Engines helped Dutch agencies Admix and Bomondo merge into REIWA, retiring the Admix name after more than fifty years. Bert Hagendoorn worked on the positioning, which centers on closing what they call the Marketing Value Gap.
KDSP co-founder and strategy lead Mollie Partesotti took Ad Age’s 10 Questions, covering the work that shaped her and her run captaining the boys’ golf team in Mississippi.
Chameleon Collective‘s Jackie Woodward joined Lisa Mann and Patricia Pieretti on an Ad Age panel hosted by E.J. Schultz about what CMOs, recruiters and fractional CMOs are facing, where the case for interim leadership as a real strategy rather than a stopgap came up.
Sakas & Company updated Karl Sakas’ Agency Services Framework, which sorts every service an agency sells into strategy, enablement or implementation and traces how that mix determines margins, staffing and scalability.
Agency Management Institute had operational efficiency expert Michael Greenberg on Build a Better Agency to walk through his five-level framework for agencies drowning in disconnected tech stacks, tribal knowledge and manual processes.
BarkleyOKRP came back from Ad Age’s Business of Brands conference with three takeaways, the sharpest being that CMOs are now growth leaders who need agencies to bring boardroom-ready metrics, not marketing metrics.
🎪 Big Rooms and Bigger Screens
Dreamforce, a virtual production stage, and a residency for exactly one creative director.
OS Studios ran the broadcast operation connecting stages, venues, content and audiences across Dreamforce 2026 for Salesforce. Project Worldwide noted the degree of difficulty involved in making multi-venue production look effortless.
100Percent helped Certinia bring its expanded brand to the same event, building the visual system, motion, website, assessment tool, brand film and more than 600 assets.
George P Johnson Experience Marketing‘s Project APAC CEO Ben Taylor told Branding in Asia that experiential used to mean taking a logo, slapping it on a backdrop and checking the color temperature, and that brands now want design and technology used in a way that deepens the experience rather than distracts from it.
Gear Seven launched MAKE THE DAMN THING, a production platform whose first expression is a six-month Creative Director Residency: one creative director brings the ideas and point of view, GEARSEVEN brings the production firepower.
Chemistry Agency‘s EVP of Experiential & Influencer, Kameron J. McCullough, argues the invite needs an idea — that the future of influence is knowing why a creator should be in the room, not how many of them are.
Skycar Creative spent two days in LA with Lenne Chai for Adobe, staging women “swimming” in soup broth and turning sketches into surreal composites. Her working theory: an interesting life makes for interesting work.
Another Thing took the stage at Brandweek with Catherine Krueger of Mike’s Hot Honey to talk about how a brand goes from word of mouth to “Drizzle the Mike’s” and a category of its own.
Allen & Gerritsen is helping Massachusetts Port Authority find the next Voice of Logan, a Boston voice to welcome 43 million travelers a year.
Worldwide Partners, Inc. wrapped IGNITE Copenhagen with 98 attendees, 45 agencies and 26 markets over three days, where John Harris laid out an ambition built on what he calls return on connection. Hydrogen Advertising was among the crews there.
🐻 The Human Stuff
Including an agency that has publicly picked a side in Fat Bear Week.
Mother Bear Agency is backing Fat Bear Week with a $1,000 gift to Katmai Conservancy, on the reasoning that a bear defends its title by getting heavier all summer with nobody clapping — which is more or less the agency’s theory of tenacity. The bracket dropped today and voting runs the 22nd through the 29th.
Saylor teamed up with Get Blue to support Water.org, pointing at the 2.1 billion people who still don’t have access to safe water.
Propac Agency spent North Texas Giving Day behind the Melville Family Foundation’s $25,000 goal for career readiness, food security and academic programs across the Dallas area.
Butler/Till took its Employee Communications Committee and Ali Kramer to Machine Tool Research to sit down with 70+ employee owners and talk about what an ESOP means day to day — the stated goal being to make ownership feel like something other than a concept.
Stoltz Marketing Group marked International Equal Pay Day by recapping AAUW’s latest research on a pay gap that is widening at different rates for different groups of women.
Praytell welcomed four fall interns — Addison Schmidt, Liv Huffman, Laaibah Shoaib and Mia Helpert — into six months across PR and social, creator marketing, analytics and content creation, plus roughly 180 new names to learn.
Young & Laramore summarized Field Day 2026 as hot dogs, creek dives and bee stings, plural.
Fuse Create‘s Head of Strategy Jon Crowley went on ON Strategy Showcase with Fergus O’Carroll, where he and Joe Burns pitched campaigns for Depop and PlayStation — two brands neither of them has ever worked on.
📅 On the Calendar
- NABS Canada runs a free workshop on creating a more sustainable way of working, September 23, 12–1:30 p.m. ET, facilitated by Arshein Brar
- Delve Deeper‘s Duncan Stewart takes on Actionable AI in Fundraising at the Boston Nonprofit Summit, September 23
- Superheroes hosts the AI Creative Challenge in Amsterdam, September 24
- Epica Awards opens its new online series with Creative Territories: Europe, September 28 at 3 p.m. CEST
- Rethink‘s Vancouver office hosts ADCC Craft Club’s Art of the Edit, moderated by Don Shelford, September 29
- Mower Agency‘s energy team is at the E Source Forum in Denver, September 29–October 1
- The One Club for Creativity hosts Takeaways: Advertising Futures with OCAD professors Angela Bains and Sugandha Gaur
- The Sutter Company brings in Robert Patin for a session on the financial side of agency growth, October 20
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