Panda Express in Fortnite, a Horror Film in the Oil Change Bay, and Other Notes From the Week After Advertising Week

Advertising Week New York has packed up, and Indie Agency News members came home with more than lanyards. A remarkable number of them came home with Adweek’s brand-new Agents of Change honor, which turned the inaugural class into something close to an indie reunion. The more interesting thread, though, is how many members spent the week being specific about AI and measurement — hours saved, percentages moved, metrics that answer the wrong question. Add a gaming strategy that moves purchase intent, a fresh wave of indie consolidation, and a horror film you can only watch while your oil gets changed, and it’s a full week to unpack.

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🏅 Agents of Change, Indie Edition

Adweek launched a new list. Indies showed up in force.

McKinney CEO Joe Maglio made Adweek’s inaugural Agents of Change list. Since taking over in 2018 he has grown McKinney’s revenue 3.7x, mostly through new business, before launching Cheil Agency Network.

Barbarian celebrated the same nod, noting that Maglio built the network “to connect agencies, not stack them,” and Attention Arc joined the chorus as another member of that network.

Zambezi CEO Jean Freeman and Cornett Owner & President Christy Hiler were both named for their work co-founding Own It, which has seen women ownership of agencies rise from 1% to 4% since 2022. Cornett added that Hiler is also a founding member of BLAC, which connects Black and underserved talent with agency internships.

DNA&STONE pointed out that Alan Brown shares the list with Paris Hilton, and backed up the honor with a stat: 92% of the agency’s hires last year were women, BIPOC, or LGBTQ+.

Also honored: Hatch Founder & CEO Jennifer Harrington, Highdive‘s Jen Passaniti, Innocean USA‘s David Mesfin, and Lupine Creative‘s Kate Wolff.

Meanwhile, over at Ad Age’s 2026 Leading Women, Lafayette American founding partner and Head of Design Meg Jannott and Hunterblu Media‘s Jessica Blumberg were both recognized.

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🎮 Don’t Watch the Brand. Play With It.

Gaming stopped being a stunt this week.

The Many has been building Panda Express’s gaming presence for years, and Marketing Dive dug into why it’s going always-on. Panda now reaches more than 220 million players a month inside Roblox and Fortnite, and awareness rose 3 points with purchase intent up 5 points in 30 days — enough to justify a permanent Roblox obby and Fortnite map drops through December.

Creativ Company CEO Wes Morton told Adweek’s On Background why in-game programmatic is about to take off, arguing video games could become the biggest advertising medium within five years.

Omelet helped Google launch Playground, an experimental gaming platform on Google Labs, home to a cozy ube latte game, a yarn-mageddon demolition derby, and a sloth platformer in very slow motion.

OS Studios helped bring the Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds World Championship to fans worldwide from Elsewhere in Brooklyn, alongside SEGA and Loaded.

And for interactivity of a more presidential kind, Lyda launched The Lincoln Experience, where you can ask Abe a question and he answers with short films that adapt as the conversation unfolds — the agency’s first exploration of conversational storytelling.

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🤖 AI, Minus the Hype

Real numbers, real tradeoffs, and a few warnings.

Goodway Group shared what 18 months of deliberate AI investment looks like: proactive notifications alone saved a 20-person team 20% of their week, and one search buyer went from spending 90% of his time on setup and 10% on strategy to the reverse. Anything with near-zero room for error, like hundreds of campaigns hitting exact budgets, stays human-led.

Not content with one session, Goodway also explained how it automated its brief-to-QA audience planning process with Optable’s infrastructure powering Passport One.

Madison and Wall‘s Luke Stillman told The Washington Post that AI is adding tens of billions of dollars to annual advertising investment.

Serviceplan Group‘s Nuno Pedro dos Santos told PR-Journal that deepfakes are moving from a cybersecurity issue to a reputation problem, and that the standard has shifted from “looks real” to “is verified”.

Davis+Gilbert LLP‘s Michael Lasky and Andrew Richman wrote for O’Dwyer’s on why your AI strategy is only as strong as the contracts behind it.

Graybox came back from Apollo NEXT surprised by how grounded the AI talk was — nearly every speaker stressed keeping a human in the loop. Left Off Madison made a related case: the more we rely on AI, the more we need to talk to people.

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📏 Numbers Worth Arguing About

The fastest metric isn’t always the right one.

Left Hand Agency CEO Lauren Ridgley looked at the speed vs. confidence tradeoff in CPG measurement — ROAS, velocity, lift, and brand health all answer different questions, and trouble starts when one is asked to do another’s job.

GTE Canada flagged that 53% of marketing decision-makers would spend more on CTV if they could prove it works, even as CTV upfront commitments passed primetime linear for the first time this year.

Stella Rising shared a stat that should rattle anyone living in the scroll: 72% of beauty consumers search Google after finding a product on TikTok, and only 7% buy in the TikTok app.

Goodway Group also came out of a session with Google and Mars warning that attribution models are misleading a lot of brands, mostly by crediting whatever happened last.

Fohr launched Predictive, built on 13 years and 5,000+ campaigns to forecast which creators will perform before a brand spends a dollar. And Vuja Dé Digital offered advice for anyone running a review: you’re not hiring for month two, you’re hiring for month ten.

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🏆 Hardware, With Context

Trophies are nice. The reasons behind them are better.

Special Australia was named Effective Agency of the Year at the Effie Australia Awards, taking the Grand Effie for Uber Eats’ “Get Almost Almost Anything” in Long-Term Effects — marking almost a decade with the client.

Serviceplan Group‘s “Breastmilk Money” for Herconomy won 2× Grand Prix and 2× Gold at Dubai Lynx. The idea translates the formula costs Nigerian mothers avoid by breastfeeding into real savings they can bank.

Doe-Anderson‘s “Where Wonder Lives” strategy for Georgia Aquarium earned a 4A’s Jay Chiat Award in Travel, Hospitality & Tourism Strategy. At the same ceremony, TRG executive strategy director Christopher Owens was named Visionary Strategist of the Year.

Sukle landed two campaigns in Lürzer’s Archive, including Generation Wild’s “Take Your Brain Out,” where kids play outside with friends who happen to be anthropomorphized brains. Its Wild Oats rebrand also picked up a GDUSA American Package Design Award.

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👀 Work That Makes You Look Twice

Oil changes, wardrobes, and one very patient newspaper.

TogetherWith made The Sludge, a 90-second horror film about skipped car maintenance that plays exclusively in Great Canadian Oil Change service bays, turning them into miniature drive-ins.

Mother signed off from a 16-year relationship with IKEA with “Storage is Sexy,” putting the PAX wardrobe on posters across the UK, doors open.

Drake Cooper turned a Rialto Theatre wall into Tucson’s first interactive AR mural for ICCU, with a hidden game where every play sends donations to the Rialto Theatre Foundation. It went on to make Ad Age’s 23 creative campaigns to know about.

Curiosity helped The Cincinnati Enquirer celebrate its 185th anniversary, which Ad Age noticed. Quality Meats Creative got Ad Age’s attention too, collecting cannabis “horror stories” for Herb Light with a haunted ScareBnB stay as the prize.

Meerkat unveiled its new name and identity, built on 76 years of work that includes seven LA billboards trying to convince LeBron to come to Minneapolis. And SRH ran a horror villain quiz to make a point about distinctive brand assets.

TiNY also dropped a new theme song for brands. Give it a spin.

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🚦 Speed, With Brakes

Move fast. Know who’s allowed to say stop.

Iris London‘s Pete Crothers argued in his latest Meaty Insight that relevance has a use-by date, and most approval systems were built for campaigns planned months ahead. Powell Communications, which booked six earned sessions at AWNY, came to a similar conclusion: culture now runs on a 24-hour window.

Hatch‘s Jennifer Harrington supplied the counterweight in MediaPost: less control does not mean less responsibility. Her four practices include empowering people to stop the work and culturally stress-testing before launch.

The regulators are adding brakes of their own. Davis+Gilbert LLP explained that New York City is now the first U.S. municipality with its own “Click to Cancel” rule, effective October 1, and broke down California’s new online child safety package, which restricts addictive features for users under 16.

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🤝 Indies, Joining Forces

Bigger, but on their own terms.

Chemistry Agency acquired Colossus, bringing a design shop and a new Boston home into the fold. Colossus put it plainly: acquired, but not by the holding company overlords.

Walrus CEO Frances Lumpkin Webster appeared in Ad Age’s look at why independents are merging, on the rise of “super-independents.”

Yes& Agency CEO Zihla Salinas Arbit talked on The Think Factory Podcast about integrating eight agencies without losing what makes each one great. Meanwhile, Founder Bob Sprague wrote in Fast Company that after six fully remote years, the agency is more productive, more profitable, and happier than ever.

Bridge Insights & Media told LBB how joining IKPN helps it compete with much larger agencies, opening doors to Amazon DSP and Google DV360. And Happylucky joined forces with its neighborhood instead, telling the Portland Business Journal why it turned an empty warehouse into a community pickleball court.

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📅 On the Calendar

Tonight, Goodway Group presents the Indie Show Off in Washington, D.C., hosted by Yes& Agency in partnership with Indie Agency News. Earlier today, Agency Management Institute‘s Michelle Ashby leads a webinar on building an agency emergency response plan at 11 a.m. MT.

Tomorrow, Grain Group‘s Benjamin Jurist joins Mogl and The Trade Desk on how independents scale and stay defensible, after a Prebid.org Summit fireside chat on agentic buying with Butler/Till CPO Manny Puentes. Chemistry ECD Hannah Williams also takes the stage at ARF Creative Effectiveness on performance that builds the brand.

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