There’s a deadline hanging over this edition. SXSW PanelPicker voting closes Sunday, August 23, and roughly a dozen Indie Agency News members spent the week making their case for a spot on the 2027 stage — which means this batch of member content skews unusually persuasive. Underneath the campaigning, though, is a week of agencies putting real numbers on things that usually get described in adjectives: what agentic buying actually does to CPMs, what AI actually did to a project timeline, what share gains actually mean when the discount ends. Plus a fried chicken panel, a deodorant campaign built on a logical fallacy, and a suitcase currently floating over the UK.
🗳️ Sunday Is the Deadline
Twelve members, one ballot, and about 72 hours.
Oberland is making the affordability case: 32% of Americans name it as the most urgent issue facing the country, and Co-Founder and CEO Drew Train wants to unpack what that does to brand positioning in Speak or Surrender.
Cutwater founder and CCO Chuck McBride is teaming with OBERLAND’s Bill Oberlander and INDIE at Large on The Rise of Independent Agencies, arguing that agility and specialized expertise beat scale.
Highdive put up two: one on what it takes to break through on the biggest ad stage of the year, and one on the fried chicken–fireworks–jackass collab that turned a movie premiere into something closer to a federal holiday.
Barbarian is also running two — Executive Director of Strategy Jo Hayes doing a live astrological reading of brand-creator compatibility, and Ben Kravitz on why rigid brand consistency breaks once AI interfaces and personalized feeds enter the picture.
Giant Spoon CEO Andrea Bendzick is joining New York Times writers Joe Coscarelli and Jon Caramanica for “The Nichification of Everything: The End of Mainstream”. Special U.S. Head of Social & Activations Rohit Thawani built a three-act thought experiment about the day the internet goes dark. CYLNDR Studios‘ Sylvain Tron and the Duke Lemur Center’s Sara Sorraia want to talk about AI-assisted wildlife storytelling that’s lighter on the habitats it depicts.
McGarrah Jessee Chief Strategy Officer Jen Hruska is on a panel arguing that expanding access to sports is an underrated way to build the next generation of women leaders. DNA&STONE‘s Alan Brown is pairing with BECU’s Jason Rudman on reading the forces behind consumer behavior, Charts + Darts and Yokohama Tire are pitching multi-year demand building over launch-week spikes, and Public Inc. is rounding up the social impact sessions it wants on the schedule. Innocean USA has a swipeable slate of proposed sessions, and Lupine Creative is just here to remind you to vote.
📊 Numbers That Did the Talking
A week of members showing their work.
Butler/Till extended its agentic media buying pilot into audio, running streaming and podcast inventory with iHeartMedia and delivering 42% more efficient CPMs than the client’s direct-buying benchmark. Notably, they’re keeping human strategy and governance in the loop rather than treating this as a set-and-forget experiment.
Klick Health‘s latest Klick Wire packs three numbers worth sitting with: 93% of healthcare providers have already bought vendor AI solutions (with budget, not ROI, as the main barrier), healthcare ads now surface in 29% of commercially oriented ChatGPT queries, and The New York Times covered MODDEN 26, the concussion mod Klick built with the Derek Sheely Foundation.
Delve Deeper flagged something every media team should handle before Q3: DV360 is adding Age (Targeted) and Gender (Targeted) metrics alongside the existing Adjusted ones. The gap between who you told the platform to reach and who it actually reached is where honest evaluation lives — and any dashboard pulling those fields by column name will break.
Chameleon Collective ran eight EdTech engagements this year and led with the specific one: ArtistWorks saw a 28% lead surge in thirty days after a paid media strategy rebuild.
Model B found a fact that stops you: Amerisure Insurance is 114 years old and just wrote its first purpose statement, aggregating $850M through just 160 agencies. Oink Ink Creative Audio passed along Nielsen data cited by iHeartMedia showing broadcast radio still reaches 90% of teenagers, which is not where most 2026 media plans would have guessed.
🍺 New Work, New Flavors
Beer, bagels, deodorant, and a hairbrush.
McGarrah Jessee designed an entire beer around an album. Ella Langley released Dandelion; MJ and Shiner released Dandelion Honey Kolsch — label, packaging, social rollout, merch, all of it, brewed with actual dandelion honey.
GYK brought together two New England institutions for Harpoon Brewery’s tenth Flannel Friday, redesigning the fall beer with L.L.Bean and its Bean boot iconography.
Party Land built a Right Guard campaign on a piece of pure deductive logic: the existence of Right Guard implies a Wrong Guard, therefore anything that is not Right Guard is Wrong Guard. Do not use Wrong Guard.
Cornett waited out the chicken sandwich wars entirely. Seven years after everyone else crowned themselves champion, A&W Restaurants arrived with a sandwich and a single instruction: pledge your allegiance.
Rethink put cream cheese cold foam in coffee. The Everything Bagel Latte, a Philadelphia x Ziggi’s limited-time collaboration, is either the logical endpoint of the morning ritual or a warning. The agency also marked A&W’s Burgers to Beat MS Day, a partnership with MS Canada running since 2008.
Mother decided summer is mentally over and named the in-between season for SONIC: Hotumn, directed by Mother’s own Martha Lees and Laura Dickie.
Mischief @ No Fixed Address opened The Retail Rejuvenation Retreat for JCPenney, a program where real off-price shoppers learn to heal from their unhealthy shopping habits.
Murder Hornet helped Rihanna take her own name off the bottle — Fenty’s new Fluid Flex foundation replaces the surname with the customer’s.
Chemistry Agency took the idea of gaps in family cancer history literally, placing messages for Georgia CORE alongside the cracks and overlooked spaces around Atlanta.
Skycar Creative connected the motion of football to the act of making art for Adobe and the NFL, shooting George Kittle on his home turf in Nashville and Travis Hunter in a Batcave in LA.
Saylor had a busy stretch — a Matt Damon poster-meme spoof for Water.org and Get Blue shipped while the joke was still peaking, and a DIY tutorial with Sanrio turning an ordinary hairbrush into something considerably less ordinary.
Brandon repositioned regional airports as the smart choice with If You Know, You Avelo for Avelo Airlines. Where Eagles Dare Co. brought back William Zabka for MIDAS IS THE BEST, round two. Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners served seconds of Kikkoman’s Unleash Legendary. Quality Meats Creative gave water a stop-motion ballad about everything SpringWell keeps out of your faucet. Raindrop landed a spot for Omnipod built around a memorable number: 100. McKinney‘s latest for Ross Dress For Less, “Summer’s Over,” points the camera at what happens after checkout. 270B got an Ad Age nod for Avo AI with Avocados From Mexico. And Dotted Line Agency expanded WNRN’s Independent As You Are campaign into Roanoke, on the premise that your Spotify algorithm knows your last thirty seconds but not your story.
🏆 The Trophy Case (and the Jury Box)
Wins, shortlists, and members grading everyone else’s homework.
Darkhorse was named PRovoke Media’s ANZ Agency of the Year at the SABRE Awards Asia-Pacific 2026.
Special Australia took Best of Show at the AWARD Awards for Uber Eats’ Build Your Own Super Bowl, plus pencils for Uber, Kitchen Warehouse Australia and PepsiCo.
Noble People made the very first edition of Ad Age’s new “5 Media Plans to Know About Right Now” with Mike’s Hot Honey’s first national campaign.
Highdive is shortlisted in two ADWEEK Team Visionary Awards categories — Legacy Agency Team and Technology/Innovation Team. Party Land‘s leadership team made the same shortlist, and had feelings about it.
Argonaut landed two spots in Ad Age’s latest Creativity roundup — one reframing a value proposition through an unexpected audience, one on AI and trust. DNA&STONE got an Ad Age breakdown of Meet Team You, built for Providence Swedish by an all-female team drawing on their own pregnancy and menopause experiences.
Giant Spoon‘s Candy Crush takeover of Intuit Dome was part of the King–LA Clippers partnership that won the NBA’s 2025–26 Team Partnership Innovation Award. Ad&Co. is shortlisted for a Glossy Fashion & Luxury Award for its EVEREVE and Z SUPPLY collaboration. Fuse Create made Strategy’s Agency of the Year – PR shortlist for the second year running. Yes& Agency was named the second-largest ad agency by revenue headquartered in Greater Washington by the Washington Business Journal. Gus picked up a Communication Arts Fresh feature. And 28 Davis+Gilbert LLP attorneys landed on the 2027 Best Lawyers in America and Ones to Watch lists.
On the other side of the table: Erich & Kallman co-founder and president Steven Erich is a Head Juror for the 2026 Jay Chiat Awards, where Laughlin Constable CEO Anthony Romano is judging the first-ever Automotive Strategy category — his old Porsche, Harley-Davidson and Volvo years finally paying dividends. LC’s CSO Katy Gajewicz also joined ADWEEK’s 2026 Innovator 50 jury. Barbarian Strategy Director Becca Stephenson is a Digiday Awards juror, and Hatch Creative & Brand Director Doug Murphy is judging the ANA Multicultural and Inclusive Marketing Excellence Awards. Meanwhile, Epica Awards — judged entirely by journalists and editors — has two weeks left on its early bird rate.
🤝 Deals, Names, and New Chairs
Including one agency that changed its name mid-week.
Fuse Create acquired a strategic stake in creator marketing agency Sway Group, bringing creative, communications, social, media and creator strategy under one roof. Both are Worldwide Partners, Inc. agencies, and the network called it partnership taken to another level.
Klick Health added Oxford PharmaGenesis, bringing the combined operation to 2,100 experts and more than 500 advanced degree holders — fresh off being named Healthcare Agency of the Year and Healthcare Network of the Year at Cannes Lions.
Buntin is now BastionBUNTIN. Same work, new name, new handle to follow.
McGarrah Jessee was named Turtlebox Audio’s first-ever creative agency of record, which is a good fit for a speaker brand built to survive boats, beaches and campsites.
George P Johnson Experience Marketing promoted Paolo Zeppa to President, GPJ Americas and Brian Neville to Global Chief Operating Officer, both effective as part of a broader growth push. Project Worldwide sent congratulations.
Rethink named Caroline Grayson its first Managing Director in New York, a newly created role. Super Nice added Raqib Sheikh (ex-Dagger, R/GA) as Chief Strategy Officer and Tiffany Lynch Kimicata as Managing Director, framing senior hiring as a deliberate counter-move while much of the industry cuts. Atlantic New York brought on Jared Barris as Sr. Account Director after 12+ years on Apple at TBWA\Media Arts Lab, and Corner Table Creative welcomed Jessica Killian as Creative Director.
New business worth noting: Zambezi helped Nex Playground become the official sleeve sponsor and active gaming partner of Wrexham AFC for 2026–27. Lafayette American is bringing Trek and Mazda together. TiNY signed OnDeck Partners, owners of the Montgomery Biscuits and Visalia Rawhide. And PJX Media is now powered by Talon.
🤖 AI Without the Hand-Waving
Less “AI is changing everything,” more “here’s the actual mechanism.”
Territorial is opening a pilot for its Brand AI Adapter, built on a premise most people skip past: generative AI doesn’t respect brand books out of the box, so scaling with it tends to erode consistency unless something sits in between.
Graybox Senior Developer Matthew Bardins wrote up five practical ways the team uses Claude Code on CMS migration projects — specific enough to steal from.
VIA made a sharp observation about the AEO era: the received wisdom is to make your brand clear, consistent and crawlable so AI relays it correctly, but what an LLM says about you is consensus, formed in about two seconds, and consensus is not the same as your messaging.
Goodway Group‘s Andrea Kwiatek told AdExchanger’s Alyssa Boyle that agentic AI is the shiny object and supply-path optimization is the reality check. Hunterblu Media‘s Donovan Vazquez made a related point at the BrandInsider Data & Programmatic Summit: define what you mean by agentic before you buy any of it.
A Force Unknown tackled the two problems that keep breaking AI filmmaking — character consistency and product accuracy — in a Genesis case study following one character through an entire morning, different shots, different angles, same face.
Legal+Creative | Toerek Law gets asked constantly how much you have to change AI-generated content before you can own it, and the answer nobody wants is that there’s no percentage and no threshold — only what you can demonstrate is human-generated. Agency Management Institute host Drew McLellan and Upshift founder Shawn Yeager went at the commercialization question on Build a Better Agency: not adopting tools, but redesigning what you sell. And Mother Bear Agency has a September 16 webinar on how GEO works and how brands surface in AI search.
🧠 Arguments Worth Having
Members picking fights with received wisdom.
SRH made the best case this week for billboards that ask something of you, grounding it in Gestalt closure and Robert Bjork’s theory of desirable difficulty: a tiny puzzle solved in two seconds anchors the memory. The agency also took aim at a LinkedIn stock character — the straw-man CFO who stomps around crushing growth, which SRH points out is unfair to Godzilla.
Siberia Managing Partner Chris Mele argued in Design Observer that chasing good vibes with clients is precisely how critical problems slip through, and offered ten lessons on which friction to keep and which to kill.
Left Hand Agency made the uncomfortable point about market share: heavy promotion creates a spike by pulling future purchases forward, so the real question is what happens when the discount disappears. CEO Lauren Ridgley separately explained why Trader Joe’s “doesn’t advertise” is a myth — they built a different machine, and hoping to go viral is a strategy only until you need to grow on purpose.
Praytell brought in YouGov’s Dr. Melissa Moore for The Personality Era, which argues that partisan media habits have fragmented audiences to the point where traditional mass reach no longer exists.
Iris London‘s Victoria Major looked at M&S’s Kathryn Turner — no following eight weeks ago, now effectively the brand — and asked whether companies are ready to give people permission to be influential rather than just a platform to perform on.
Fohr VP of Strategy Grace Murray Vazquez talked to Vanity Fair about the rise of the teen “tradwife”, and founder James Nord made the case to Net Influencer that influencer marketing needs a better balance of creativity and data.
Artemis Ward‘s Quinten Rosborough landed the line of the week — “It’s one thing to be advertised to; it’s another thing to be gaslit”. Household Executive Strategy Director Luke Weston unpacked the Disney x TikTok creator partnership. Obsessed Media‘s Danny Weisman noticed millennials who can’t afford a house going feral over System of a Down tickets they wanted in 2002, and suggested marketers look past Gen Z. H/L Agency VP Director of Strategy & Insights Kyra Caruso wrote an Advertising Week op-ed on the calculated, skeptical, resilient new consumer. Grain Group‘s Benjamin Jurist argued signal matters more than scale when impressions are no longer the end goal. And Serviceplan Group‘s Franziska Gregor wrote for Campaign Germany on why short-form micro dramas are becoming a serious brand storytelling format — the algorithm, she notes, wants drama.
🎈 And a Suitcase Took Flight
Plus tattoos, a 42-year career, and 10,000 samples of hot sauce.
Ardmore got a Campaign UK feature for the Send My Bag hot air balloon, shaped like a suitcase, now on the UK leg of a Guinness World Records attempt. It is exactly as good as it sounds.
Founders Agency told the story of Ben Goldstein, who got a tattoo as part of a job application and got hired by someone who understood the idea behind it. The agency’s disclaimer is worth reading: they don’t recommend tattoos, they recommend creative risk.
TRG celebrated Teri Jones, the “Mother Goose” of the agency, on her retirement after 42 years — complete with a hat statue erected in her honor. Response Media marked 26 years of Viola Keaton anchoring its finance department.
Attention Arc got more than 10,000 Texas Pete samples into NASCAR fans’ hands at the Cook Out 400 at Richmond Raceway. WH Inc. camped on top of Vail for Helly Hansen’s third annual Summit Sleepover. Kamp Grizzly is launching Momo Gordon’s book Desire Paths at KAMP Gallery, five years of tablescape illustrations collected in one place.
The One Club for Creativity continued its Creative Hall of Fame spotlight with Caroline R. Jones, the industry’s first Black female “Mad Man” and founder of one of the first Black woman-owned agencies in the US. Storythings (B Corp) had Specialist Holidays Group CMO Erin Johnson on Creative Crush to explain why The Devil Wears Prada treats clothing as personal armour.
For the owners: The Sutter Company has David C. Baker on the next Just Ask Jody Live, and Agency Outsight Coaching posed the question that answers itself — if you disappeared for 15 days, would your agency survive? Sellable, they argue, means the business runs without you in the room.
Every story here came from an Indie Agency News member. If your agency is doing work worth putting in front of a few thousand indie leaders, join the community and get in the next one.
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