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A £50,000 Chicken Test and Other Acts of Devotion
Indie Spin: The one with fried chicken loyalty, contract fine print, and a bear named Backpack.
Indie Agency News members spent the end of September testing how far people will go for the things they love. One KFC fan base is competing for £50,000, another got a restaurant drowned in pickles, and a 141-year-old Texas candy shop is betting a new generation will fall for it all over again. Underneath the fun, a more serious thread runs through the week: clients are rethinking what they pay agencies for, agencies are rethinking what their contracts say about AI, and a surprising number of shops are going back to the evidence on how advertising works. Devotion, it turns out, is something you have to earn on both sides of the relationship.
🍗 Finger Lickin’ Fall
Three agencies, one bucket of chicken, very different recipes.
Mother launched Don’t Crack, a KFC Original game show for KFC UK & Ireland, where 30 real fans face four escalating tests of devotion for the title of Ultimate Believer and £50,000. Pablo Rochat directed through ICONOCLAST.
Those That DO wrapped its neon-drenched Picklecore takeover of KFC Richmond, working with KFC and Special Australia to turn a flagship restaurant into a fully pickled destination. They’re hinting at “Big Tender Energy” coming next.
Not content with pickles, Special Australia also had a big night at the APAC Effies, taking the Grand Effie plus Gold for Uber Eats’ “Get Almost Almost Anything,” along with Agency of the Year and Independent Agency of the Year for Special Sydney.
🤝 The Fine Print Is Having a Moment
Client relationships and contracts are both overdue for a rewrite.
DCA flagged a WFA and Agency Mania Solutions poll of around 70 multinationals: 49% disagree that their agency arrangements are fit for purpose, and only 3% strongly agree. Even so, just 20–22% say they’d pay a premium for strategic thinking or top talent.
Legal+Creative | Toerek Law doesn’t buy Adweek’s figure that 39% of agencies lack AI language in their agreements — they think it’s higher, given that 94% or more of US agencies are using or exploring generative AI. Their on-demand session on reducing agency AI legal risk walks through what to add.
Davis+Gilbert LLP partners Michael Lasky and Andrew Richman made a similar case in O’Dwyer’s, laying out how agencies can adapt agreements and vendor relationships as AI moves into daily operations.
Uncharted co-founder Laura Jordan Bambach told 300+ indie leaders at Agency Hackers what two years of running an outcome-based commercial model has taught them — chiefly that getting paid for results moves conversations away from line items and toward business problems.
🧮 Back to the Evidence
A few shops are doing their homework, and showing it.
TRG became the first independent agency in North America to sponsor the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, gaining access to 70-plus years of research and more than 60 of its marketing scientists. Meanwhile, 14 TRG staffers just graduated from Eff Pack, the agency’s 90-day effectiveness training program, with a second cohort already underway.
StayGold argues that B2B marketers focused only on performance are leaving 90% of returns on the table, and followed up with a look at how James Hardie spends differently.
Sea Salt Marketing pointed to a study of nearly 44 million Meta ads showing that ads under 50 characters and ads of 250–500 characters both beat the single paragraph most home builders default to.
Drake Cooper shared its “Pause Before the Pill” media case study for the Idaho Office of the Governor: 5.36M contracted impressions, plus 2.5M bonus impressions at no extra cost.
🤖 Humans Still in the Frame
AI is everywhere this week, but the interesting work keeps people at the center.
Arts & Sciences director Matt Lenski’s “The Last Commercial”, shared by Witness Me, is a black-and-white satire about AI replacing commercial production — in which real actors’ performances drive the AI-generated characters. The film is SAG-AFTRA-certified and built on improv.
Superheroes turned its Amsterdam Hideout into the arena for the AI Creative Challenge with Google and The One Club, where eight creators got 10 minutes per secret brief. Saber Aidarus won and heads to the World Finals in New York.
270B took Silver for Best AI Creative Integration at the Academy of Interactive & Visual Arts for Avocados From Mexico’s Prediction Pit, a second-screen game day experience mixing sports data, football, and guac.
Butler/Till picked up two AdExchanger awards, including Best Use of AI or Technology by an Agency for agentic media buying with PubMatic.
Mower Agency found that travelers will hand AI more responsibility until the stakes rise — a reminder that recommending a trip and booking one are not the same thing.
📬 Media Hiding in Plain Sight
The best buys this week weren’t always the obvious ones.
Giant Spoon‘s The Stir made the case for newsletter ads with beehiiv COO Dan Krenitsyn, who compares a feed ad to a billboard passed at 70 mph and a newsletter placement to an invitation.
Attention Arc Co-President Swapnil Patel wrote in MediaPost about the media opportunities brands already own — trucks, storefronts, packaging, apps, and emails.
Cutwater argues Coach’s smartest buy this fall is a bus and a playlist: the Tabby Tour hitting campuses from the US to Japan, plus a Spotify hub that turns your listening history into a personalized “Courage Sign.”
VaynerMedia declared the non-follower era of social, asking whether you’d rather report a 5% bump in passive followers or one post that reached 500,000 net-new people.
Campfire is a finalist for the Campaign US & Ad Net Zero Awards for sustainable media planning in the Americas, for work with Allagash Brewing showing lower carbon and the same reach.
🍬 New Chapters
Relaunches, mergers, and new business with a sense of humor.
McGarrah Jessee is teaming up with Delightful Development to relaunch Lammes Candies, a Texas favorite with 141 years of history.
Saylor and Mutiny are joining forces as one integrated creative agency rooted in gaming and entertainment.
WorkInProgress was named agency of record for Humann after a media-led pitch run by Eden Collective — a process during which one of its CDs described the client’s brand as “cool Cheerios,” apparently to good effect.
Two Things hired Katie Birkel as Head of Growth after 20 years in business development at R/GA, Huge, and Publicis Production.
Gus had a big press week: Campaign US featured the six-year-old agency alongside Nick Gallo of LOOP.co and Noel Cottrell of Murder Hornet on how indies keep business momentum, and LBB ran a 2,500-word profile covering the agency’s Vimeo origin story and its “mural test” for brand ideas.
🛋️ Designed Around Real Life
Work that starts with how people live, then builds the brand around it.
Household designed Molton Brown’s first standalone Scent Pavilion at Bluewater, organized into three rooms — Cleanse, Wear, and Live — instead of product categories, with Scent Stylists guiding shoppers through each.
Serviceplan Group turned the November 19 launch of a major open-world game into an official educational leave course for Dein Bildungsurlaub, where participants study game mechanics and community dynamics for lessons in storytelling and collaboration.
Agency Noir built a messaging framework and discussion tool for DoorDash that helps managers talk through compensation, vesting, and the rest of the finance jargon in plain terms.
Mischief @ No Fixed Address paired Rula with Taskrabbit so that new patients booking a first therapy session get a $50 Taskrabbit credit — one less errand standing between people and care.
🐻 And Finally
Because not everything needs a framework.
Mother Bear Agency congratulated Backpack, bear 89, on winning Fat Bear Week 2026. Rangers weren’t sure he’d survive past age two; his mother Holly won in 2019.
Young & Laramore hosted its 6th annual Unreasonable conference, bringing together brain science, scholars and marketers in Indianapolis to take a deep dive into the mind of the consumer.
TiNY launched its latest SLoGaN SLaM for a rare orange shark caught and released off Costa Rica. The shark was two meters long. The prize is a sunset photo; runners-up get a picture of a small bag of oyster crackers.
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