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Thermal Cameras, Vinyl Voicemails and a Six-Pack for Your Congressperson
Indie Spin: The one with an undercover Knick, a 17,000-pixel sphere, and zombies who forgot what they're good at.
It’s been a loud week. Election results landed, Black Friday is three weeks out, and the holiday campaigns are arriving in waves. But scroll through what Indie Agency News members posted and a quieter pattern shows up: a lot of the most talked-about work right now is slow, physical and hard to fake. Clay, vinyl, one-take films and a 300-page printed book are getting attention at the same moment everyone is arguing about AI. Meanwhile, the data people are doing the math on peak season, the media people are sizing up a $17 billion grocery deal, and a few agencies are just having fun with fried chicken. Here’s what caught our eye.
✂️ The Handmade Comeback
Turns out “it took forever” is a selling point again.
Mischief ECD Greg Hahn made the case in The Wall Street Journal’s look at pencils, clay and stop-motion as the ad industry’s antidote to AI: when anyone can prompt two sentences into something that looks “good enough,” work where every frame is thought out becomes more valuable.
Cornett is living that thesis. Its new national campaign for Stearns & Foster, a brand that has been handcrafting mattresses since 1846, made Ad Age’s list of 20 creative campaigns to know about, grouped alongside Porsche and Studio Underd0g as brands betting on craftsmanship.
Argonaut brought back Vinyl Voicemails for Cricket Wireless, pressing people’s saved voicemails into one-of-a-kind records on-site at Brooklyn’s Vinyl + Thread. The experience generated 840K social impressions and 9.8K engagements.
100Percent went full analog for a very digital client: a 300-page coffee table book for Microsoft Azure called Silicon to Systems, tracing cloud computing from raw materials to custom chips. The agency handled photography, print design, copy, editing and production.
Day One Agency shot three one-take films for L.L.Bean’s “Give Presence” holiday campaign, and CCO Jamie Falkowski told Ad Age the team skipped the fast cuts and dramatic sound design most holiday ads lean on, because something quieter better matched the idea.
VaynerMedia opened its Future CMO Summit recap with Gary Vaynerchuk arguing that the counter to extreme digitization is the rise of analog, then laid out why rising marketing leaders are prioritizing in-person time.
🗳️ Election Week, Indie Edition
Ballots, budgets and one very civic beer.
Happylucky brought back Mark the Ballot, the animated character it created with Washington’s Secretary of State in 2024, with a bigger world and new content for the midterms. The agency is measuring what people learned and whether they feel more confident about voting.
Madison and Wall CEO Brian Wieser was featured in Adweek’s breakdown of where this cycle’s political dollars went: CTV overtook cable in political ad spend for the first time in a midterm.
Fohr EVP of Strategy Grace Murray Vazquez asked who explained the midterms to you, pointing out that for a growing share of Americans it was a creator, not the nightly news.
Creativ Company ran 96,842 comments across YouTube, Reddit and news sites through its ellain platform to measure reaction to the results. The overall perception score came in at −14.09%, and both national party committees landed in negative territory.
Quality Meats Creative gave Election Day a hemp twist with Cheers Against Prohibition for Herbert’s Beverages: buy a 12-pack of Herb Light, add a six-pack for your congressperson, and it gets shipped with a letter about fair hemp beverage regulation ahead of a potential federal ban in December.
📊 Doing the Math Before Peak Season
The numbers worth knowing before the busiest weeks of the year.
White Rabbit Group put together a six-point Black Friday readiness check, noting shoppers spent $16 million a minute during peak Cyber Monday hours last year and Adobe expects $47.5 billion in US online spend for Cyber Week 2026. In a follow-up post, it cited Portent research showing a 1-second site converts 2.5 times better than a 5-second one.
Delve Deeper looked at two years of nonprofit Google Ads results ahead of Giving Tuesday and packed the findings into a one-pager: brand search returned 2.90x in Q3, non-brand cost per donation rose about 50% last Q4, and managed search beat PMax eight quarters out of eight. The team also broke down Google’s new Household Reach reporting in DV360 and CM360, which finally counts CTV and digital exposure the way TV always has.
Department of Creative Affairs shared a stat for anyone writing a brief this week: a 2020 Effie report found Gold-winning cases averaged 3.6 objectives versus 4.3 for non-winners. Fewer goals, better odds.
🛒 Retail Media Gets Consolidated
A $17 billion deal and what it means for everyone else.
Goodway Group VP of Brand and Commerce Media Briana Finelli was everywhere on the DoorDash–Instacart deal. She told Adweek that consolidation was always going to be retail media’s end game, then wrote an AdExchanger column naming three things to watch, including ad tools built for the smallest merchants and grocers keeping the freedom to work with any delivery platform.
Grain Group came back from Criteo’s CPG Edit event with a useful set of takeaways, including the detail that Albertsons is now showing sponsored products inside its AI recipe tool, reaching shoppers right as they decide what to cook.
🍗 Holiday Chaos, Served Hot
Fast food, famous faces and a pickle you can collect.
Mother had a two-chicken week. In London, it launched a KFC collaboration with Marvel’s Doctor Doom available in more than 100 countries. In Los Angeles, it staged a holiday romance movie plot twist at a SONIC starring Chad Michael Murray.
Special Australia launched KWENCH by KFC, the chain’s new specialty drinks sub-brand, by performing “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” using only the sounds of the drinks: sips, slurps and all.
Chaos x Magic introduced a different kind of A.I. for Nike x Sports Direct’s “Unwrap Potential”: Athlete Intelligence, a top-secret gifting operation run by Erling Haaland, Leah Williamson, Dina Asher-Smith and Henry Pollock.
VaynerMedia helped bring back Jimmy John’s Picklewich, this time with collectible Pickle Pal blind-box plushies attached to the Triple Pickle meal deal.
Birdie Mgmt negotiated the celebrity deal that put Colin Jost in Kay Jewelers’ new holiday campaign from The Martin Agency.
🎬 Ideas That Make You Look Twice
Thermal cameras, office noise and a very convincing disguise.
Unruled Outdoor Agency shot Teledyne FLIR’s “Sea Differently” entirely through thermal imaging, which is one way to make a marine camera commercial stand out.
Rethink turned endless pings and alerts into Workestra for Dayforce, a classical composition built from the sounds of workplace chaos.
Serviceplan Group‘s Cologne team turned Eintracht Frankfurt players into zombies for Indeed: Mario Götze, Ritsu Doan and Robin Koch play workers who forgot what makes them special. The actors were filmed for real, with the environments built in post using AI.
Skycar Creative designed Orbie, a playful sphere meant to make agentic AI feel tangible, for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit keynote openers, delivered at 17,000 pixels wide across seven screens. Phone Arena’s editor-in-chief came away writing that Qualcomm remembers how to be cool.
Praytell and Motive, both part of Project Worldwide, took a viral case of mistaken identity (fans thought Knicks player Tyler Kolek was just another fan at the championship parade) and sent him undercover at Fanatics Fest for DICK’S Sporting Goods’ ScoreCard+ launch, rewarding fans who recognized him.
Allen & Gerritsen wrapped the Voice of Logan contest for Massport after more than 6,000 submissions. Chris Donisi’s voice will greet travelers at Boston Logan this holiday season.
Strike built a campaign for La Maison des femmes Marseille Provence around a simple comparison: Marseille just raised €2.8 million to renovate the Bonne Mère basilica, so why not show the same generosity to women who need help? The film is voiced by singer Clara Luciani.
🏆 Wins Worth the Specifics
New business, big lists and a 12-for-12 night.
Highdive was named T-Mobile’s new lead creative agency, and also marked its 10th anniversary with an original piece by Chicago artist Dwight White II.
JOAN won creative agency of record for Mizkan America, with a mandate to return RAGÚ and Bertolli to profitable growth.
Obsessed Media co-founder Barry Dan was named Digiday’s Media Leader of the Year. He and Danny Weisman have grown the shop from two people to a team of 14+ in a year and a half.
Special Australia co-founders Tom Martin and Julian Schreiber took the #1 spot on B&T’s Best of the Best Indie Creatives list for the second year running.
Sukle picked up six honors in the Graphis Design Annual 2027, including a Platinum for the City and County of Denver’s Denver Climate Project. Only 10 Platinums were handed out globally.
TogetherWith went 12 for 12 at Argentina’s FePI independent advertising festival: 5 golds, 4 silvers and 3 bronzes for work with Maní King, which was also named Advertiser of the Year.
Campfire and Allagash Brewing Company, two Maine companies, won in London, taking the Campaign and Ad Net Zero award for Best Practice in Sustainable Media Planning for the Americas.
Eight Oh Two Marketing won a 2026 Search Engine Land Award for Best Commerce Search Marketing Initiative – PPC for Pure Hockey, its third award for that partnership this year.
Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners took a Clio Bronze and two shortlists for “Living with Bracketbrain,” its ESPN Tournament Challenge campaign, which treats March bracket obsession as an unrecognized medical condition.
🎙️ Straight Talk from the Top
Pitching, doubt, fixed fees and who owns production.
Mischief founding partner and ECD Kevin Mulroy took on the pitch process in an Ad Age op-ed unveiling what he calls a new agency growth model.
Curiosity picked up the same thread from another angle. After swapping designers with Iceland’s Brandenburg for its ShopSwap program, host Ashley Walters sat down with creative director Jón Ari Helgason to discuss why no other global market is as obsessed with pitching as the US.
Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners (BSSP) CEO Tracey Faux Pattani told Christy Hiler on the Own It podcast that she once held herself back from a managing director role because she didn’t check every box, and later had an executive tell her she would never be an MD. She’s now CEO.
Highdive Head of Production Jen Passaniti told Ad Age that as brands bring creators in-house, the producer’s job still comes down to craft and execution.
Laughlin Constable co-CCOs Jon and Pat Laughlin talked with LBB about leading a family business as the agency turns 50.
Madison and Wall‘s Agency Business podcast hosted Alan Brown, founder of DNA&STONE, on merging two very different agencies, the AI tools his team is building, and why they’re moving to fixed fees.
Saylor Head of Social Nicole Stetter unpacked Instagram’s new Features test: horizontal videos up to 90 minutes, eight years after IGTV. No brands are in the test yet, but the agency’s thinking is that short-form becomes the trailer and long-form becomes the show.
And on our own air, Napier CEO Courtney Cotrupe and CCO Rob Kottkamp joined Doug Zanger on Meet an Indie Agency to talk about the agency’s new name and its Rochester roots.
🕯️ Vale Mark Green
Special Australia paid tribute to Mark Green, co-founder of The Monkeys, who died this week. The agency credited him as one of the first in Australia to champion the power of independent creativity, and said it likely wouldn’t be what it is without his example. Our thoughts are with his family, friends and colleagues.
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