The Monkey’s Paw of “Ship My Pants” and Other Tales Told Around the Agency Campfire

It’s the day before Halloween, and Indie Agency News members are in a storytelling mood. Some of it is spooky by design: haunted retail turnarounds, horror-poster soda and a pumpkin carver on the payroll. Some of it is spooky because it’s about AI search. Fewer than a third of Google searches now send anyone to a website, and LLMs still account for less than 1% of site traffic, yet several members land on the same cure for both: be the brand people already say out loud. Elsewhere, a long partnership closes its final chapter, a seven-year awards streak ends with real grace, and a fifth of American households are rewriting their grocery lists.

🎃 Tales From the Agency Crypt

Campfire stories, each with a marketing moral.

SRH spun a bedtime story about Kmart’s 2013 “Ship My Pants” campaign as a monkey’s-paw wish: the pun sent crowds into stores whose creaky point-of-sale software and supply chain couldn’t deliver what the ads promised. Not content with one fable, the agency followed with a Frankenstein tale of Abercrombie & Fitch’s resurrection, walking through the Four P’s that took the retailer from “assuming room temperature” in 2017 to record net sales near $5 billion.

Day One Agency helped poppi turn its limited-edition Sour Apple flavor into horror movie posters, complete with a swipe to find your own.

Rise and Shine and Partners partnered with a professional pumpkin carver to create the promotional art for the Minnesota Zoo’s Jack-O-Lantern Spectacular, which glows through this Halloween weekend.

Curiosity launched HOT TAMALES’ “Live on Flavor’s Edge” campaign for Just Born, built entirely on hand-drawn illustrations.

Optimism BH goes live on Zoom today at 10am PT with “Brand Momentum After Dark: The Science Behind the Scare,” using its Brand Momentum Score to unpack what put horror fans in seats for a recent release.

🪞 Say My Name

Mirror, mirror, which brand does the chatbot pick?

SRH also compared LLM brand discovery to summoning something through a mirror. The agency notes that LLM referrals drive less than 1% of website traffic today, but because models predict answers from consensus, the brands people already talk about are the ones that make it through the glass.

Bridge Insights & Media says fewer than a third of Google searches now send a click to a website, and when an AI summary appears, the no-click share passes 80%. When client TERP paired upstream awareness with digital capture, website traffic rose 135% and funded grants rose 215%.

Left Hand Agency CEO Lauren Ridgley wrote in MediaPost that AI isn’t a shortcut, it’s a mirror, digging into early research on which brands AI tools recommend and finding the answer points back to old-fashioned brand building.

Chemistry Agency Lead Content Strategist Kelly Brown ran hundreds of searches and found that AI-generated content won’t help a brand show up in AI search. Human insight worth citing is what wins, so she rebuilt her content framework around it.

Vuja Dé Digital asks who you’re marketing to if AI does the shopping, arguing the best salesperson in your category already works for ChatGPT or Perplexity and cares about clear product pages and strong reviews, not ad budgets.

Red Door Interactive President John Faris points out that websites now serve two audiences, people and bots, and some of those bots bring security risks and higher hosting bills. The agency digs in at its November 4 Speaker Series, “Do you even need a website anymore?”

👋 Closing Credits and New Openings

Goodbyes, rebrands and fresh paint.

Mother said goodbye to IKEA after 16 years, and Campaign UK let 16 of the people who made the work tell the stories behind it: 100 cats loose in a store, a Matt Berry-voiced shelf in Skyrim, and 500 FRAKTA bags taken apart by hand.

Napier Agency rebranded last week with a new visual identity and mission, per MediaPost. CCO Rob Kottkamp and CD Scott Allen also stopped by Indie Work to break down Checkers & Rally’s “Fryway to the Flava Zone”.

Terri & Sandy CCO Amy Ferguson told Breaking and Entering Media that clients won’t take the agency’s advice if it can’t take its own, so the agency took hers and rebranded. There’s a notebook for proof.

TRG is marking 50 years of building brands by giving its own some love, with a brand-new website and more features promised.

SKINNY, A BRAND STUDIO developed “Greater Together,” the strategic platform at the heart of the Greater Philadelphia Chamber’s rebrand.

🎬 Fresh Off the Edit Bay

New work, from small business dreams to a cranberry good-luck charm.

Special U.S. has new work for Gusto about small business dreams, covered by Ad Age’s Tim Nudd, with MJZ and Nick Ball among the credits.

Special Australia‘s first work for RACV was named The Drum’s Ad of the Day. Meanwhile, its global Movember campaign, “Make a Growmitment,” made it onto the big screens in Times Square days before the month begins.

TRG also rolled out a cinematic campaign for Charles Schwab about the preparation before a trade, from the muffled calm of “Noise” to the launchpad countdown of “Liftoff.”

Brandon turned a side dish into the main event with a moody, close-up-heavy spot for Idahoan Ultimates.

Fortnight Collective launched season three of its Sun Valley Resort work, and this year the mountain community is running the camera.

Mnstr helped Mars’ Freedent and Hubba Bubba swap a snacking ritual for a lifesaving one during Pink October in France, with a QR code that drops a monthly breast self-exam reminder straight into your phone’s calendar.

Laughlin Constable‘s LCPR work wishing the Milwaukee Brewers “Berry Good Luck” for the Wisconsin Cranberry Growers Association made Ad Age’s 21 Creative Campaigns to Know About Today. The luck held: Left Hand Agency, wrapping up a team week in Milwaukee, congratulated the Brewers on their first World Series title.

📊 Numbers to Bring to Your Next Meeting

Stats worth stealing for the next deck.

Goodway Group notes that more than a fifth of U.S. households now include someone on a GLP-1. Since brands can’t see medication status, it suggests watching behavior instead: shrinking baskets, protein gaining share and selective indulgences. Its Where Growth Leaks report also tackles why one shopper bouncing between an AI tool, Reddit, a creator video and a store aisle can look like four different people.

Stella Rising won a 2026 Search Engine Land Award for Best Integration of Search Into Omnichannel Marketing for L’Occitane, where video drove a 21% lift in branded search and 14x ROAS from search. The agency is also a 2026 BeautyMatter Awards finalist for both Best Marketing Agency and Best Digital Agency. And on DoorDash’s plan to acquire Instacart, Associate Director of Retail Advertising Joshua Presnall advises brands to start planning last-mile as a single channel now, even though the deal isn’t expected to close until late 2027 or early 2028.

Saylor developed a social-first “This or That” interview with Lando Norris for Hilton and McLaren Racing that pulled more than 341K views and 36K likes across TikTok and Instagram.

Household spotted a volunteer-run “Cosplay Hospital” at London’s MCM Comic Con, armed with glue guns and sewing kits, and tied it to its Future of Entertainment research: 64% of fans say they’ve already written, drawn or built something that adds to a world they love.

Yes& Agency closes out Cybersecurity Awareness Month noting that 79% of ransomware incidents start with a compromised identity or a legitimate login. Not a break-in. A login.

Klick Health‘s Curtis W. connects 38% off list price, three new Medicare and Medicaid pricing models and a 2026 law cutting pharmacy benefit managers out of drug-price profits into one structural reset of U.S. drug pricing.

Delve Deeper says that with budget season putting donor acquisition on the chopping block, telling a CFO that new donors pay back their cost in 14 months lands better than CPA and ROAS.

🧑‍🎤 Ask the Humans

Creators, Gen Z and a reality check on synthetic audiences.

Fohr surveyed more than 250 creators about posting politics, brand deals and paid political work, and found that creators want in on the midterm conversation, but most haven’t been asked.

Day One Agency CEO Josh Rosenberg told LBB about Group Chat, the agency’s youth insights focus group. When the agency asked members how they define the American Dream, most said it either no longer exists or is so far out of reach it might as well not.

McKinney Chief Strategy Officer Jasmine Dadlani looks at Gen Z’s growing interest in the trades and what it means for marketers well beyond brands that sell trucks, tools or lunch.

RP3 Agency Head of Media and Performance Jono DeCosta told The Outcome that before AI-generated audiences guide media decisions, planners need to know those audiences reflect how people behave.

Glow Creative Agency‘s Kat King argues that in the race for faster, cheaper content, brands helped “slopify the feed,” and suggests measuring how many viewers choose to come back as Instagram tests longer-form video.

🏆 The Trophy Case (With a Twist)

Wins, juries, and one streak that ended in style.

Rethink was the first agency to win Strategy Magazine’s Agency of the Year seven years running, and took this year’s Silver with a cheerful “You can’t win them all,” alongside Gold for PR Agency of the Year (Rethink PR) and Digital Agency of the Year, plus Silver for Design Agency of the Year.

FUSE Create celebrated Effie Gold and Grand Prix wins for Maple Leaf Foods’ “Look for the Leaf,” crediting No Fixed Address for the idea and noting Canadians were still hunting for the leaf after a 48-hour media blitz.

Innocean USA Chief Digital Officer Steven Nishimura was named Technology Leader of the Year at the 2026 Digiday Awards, and the agency’s social team brought home Adweek’s Team Visionary Award in the Agency Social category.

270B‘s Prediction Pit for Avocados from Mexico won Gold in Virtual & Immersive Experiences – AI Creative Integration at the Davey Awards.

Tilt Creative Studio‘s Audi Gingerbread Village, made with Stoopid Buddy Stoodios, is shortlisted for the International Motor Film Awards and The Drum Awards.

Highdive Co-Founder and Co-CCO Mark Gross is headed to Austin, with “How to Break the Playbook, not the Brand” selected for SXSW 2027. Chief Strategy Officer Nimisha Jain was also named to the Global Grand Jury for the 2026 Effie Awards Global Best of the Best.

Praytell Global President Katelyn Driscoll was named one of Ragan Communications’ 2026 Top Women in Marketing.

Hydrogen Advertising landed at #32 on the Puget Sound Business Journal’s list of the 100 fastest-growing businesses.

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