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A Haunted House’s Dirty Little Secret and Other Lessons in Getting Remembered
Indie Spin: The one with fish kisses, a soup in a bag, and a monster called Brandnesia.
With Halloween two weeks out, Indie Agency News members have clearly been spending time in the dark. Horror shows up everywhere in this batch: in the creative, in the strategy posts, even in a panel at a horror film festival. But under the costumes there’s a more serious thread about memory and trust. Who remembers your brand, who believes what an AI tells them, and how many dashboards you can stare at before someone asks what the ROAS number is hiding. Throw in a Cannes ranking topped by an indie, a pile of new hardware, and a few agencies starting new chapters, and it’s a full week.
🏆 The Indies at the Top of the Table
The Cannes Lions 2026 Rankings are out, and indie names are near the top.
Rethink landed at the top of the Cannes Lions 2026 Rankings as both the #1 Independent Network and #1 Independent Agency, which is a nice way to end a week.
Alto also made the Cannes Lions list of the world’s Top 10 Independent Agencies, with a post that opened: “We like being independent. Apparently, the feeling’s mutual.”
Household took the time to write up its Creativepool Independent Agency of the Year win properly, covering what it submitted, what the judges saw, and what 22 years of building the agency has taught them. One jury comment stuck with the team: “the optimism our industry badly needs.”
🎃 Spooky Season, Professionally Speaking
Some agencies made Halloween work. Others used it to make a point.
Founders Agency gave tourism advertising an ominous twist for Netflix’s BELOW, complete with Josh Hartnett, suspiciously hot fishermen, and a welcome tradition sealed with a fish kiss. The work ran from Times Square to Jimmy Fallon, and the show hit No. 1.
Allen & Gerritsen helped Dunkin’ bring back Spidey D with Spidey D’s Horror House in Salem, featuring limited-time Halloween drinks, exclusive merch, and fortunes told by a Spidey D-themed Zoltar machine. It’s open through Halloween.
Quality Meats Creative is selling Herb Light, a 1 mg THC drink, with cautionary tales of overserved monsters, including a Swamp Monster who crushed his friends’ skeletal systems and a woman scrubbing ectoplasm barf off a bathroom floor after a 10 mg drink. Comment a horror story and you could win a stay in a real haunted house.
SRH turned the season into a three-part strategy lesson. One post argues that memory encoding is driven by emotional intensity, so “safe marketing isn’t.” Another names the villain: BRANDNESIA™, the natural human tendency to forget brands. The third shares the haunted attraction owner’s secret: profits come from people who visit once a year, not repeat visitors, which is a tidy way to explain the Law of Double Jeopardy.
Saylor Head of Social Nicole Stetter took the stage at the Screamfest Horror Film Festival for a panel on how horror finds its audience. One takeaway: the headline buried in your story is what travels on social.
📊 The Numbers Worth Bookmarking
Hard data from people who measure for a living.
Goodway Group shared a connected commerce case study for Riboli Family Wines’ Stella Rosa: incremental sales lift exceeding 4x media investment, performance 143% above Walmart Connect’s wine ROAS benchmark, and 56% new-to-brand buyers.
Not content with just that, Goodway CEO Paul Frampton-Calero told Digiday how the agency is working with Arima on synthetic consumer populations to test spend levels in a simulated environment before checking results with small live activations, rather than leaving a market dark as a control.
Delve Deeper released its Q2 2026 Digital Fundraising Performance Index, tracking Google Ads across 15 nonprofits. The headline: Actively Managed Search has outperformed automated PMax every single quarter for seven quarters running.
Klick Health‘s latest Klick Wire found 72% of patients learn about direct-to-patient programs through TV and 69% from their HCP. It also found company-controlled content appeared in 55% of AI Overview description boxes for the world’s top-selling drugs.
🔍 AI Gets You In the Door. Trust Gets You the Sale.
Several members landed on the same idea: an AI recommendation is the start of the journey, not the end.
Mower published research showing travelers routinely check what AI tells them against search, official websites, pricing, reviews and social content. Its report, “AI Starts the Trip. Trust Closes It.,” breaks down how that path differs for destinations, hotels, restaurants, airlines and tour operators.
Stella Rising flipped the logic on beauty discovery: the platform winning it is the one shoppers trust least. Skeptical TikTok viewers go verify on Google and Amazon, turning viral videos into search demand, which the agency will unpack in its StellaVision webinar on October 22.
Attention Arc Associate Director of Discoverability Urvashi Manral told Digiday why brands are leaning on original content to earn recommendations from AI platforms. Yes, Jimi Hendrix is involved.
🎬 Fresh Off the Production Line
New work that refused to look like the rest of its category.
Rethink launched the new Heinz Soup in a breakthrough bag design, positioned like a luxury fashion drop for the Fall/Winter lineup. Canned soup, they say, is so last season.
Serviceplan Group‘s Munich team built TEDi a Y2K pop video brand world set to a new take on “Barbie Girl,” with self-deprecating lines like “Needed one, got a ton.” It runs through the end of November across TV, online video, radio, social and OOH.
Iris London put InPost and Ann Summers into Discreet Mode, launching the partnership with 90s-inspired creative, Close Friends exclusives, and secret Ann Summers drops hidden inside InPost Lockers.
McGarrah Jessee is back as Shiner’s creative agency of record, and its first work is “Nothing’s Finer,” directed by Anthony Frattolillo and narrated by W.F. Strong of “Stories from Texas.”
HLoveCo helped Rhone and the NBA turn Hudson Yards’ Public Square & Gardens into Adult Recess, a day of pickup basketball, a live DJ, and NBA talent. Their pitch: adults never lost the need for play, they just stopped making room for it.
Those That DO took Guinness’s Thirsty Toucan, once billed as “the smallest pub in Dubai,” and moved it to the entrance of Barracuda, complete with a pull-your-own-pint moment timed to the start of the Premier League.
Klick Health‘s 867-5309 campaign for Cancer Support Community turned a song millions know by heart into a line to free cancer support, and the team walked MM+M through how it came together, including getting Tommy Tutone’s lead singer involved.
Meanwhile, if you need a rabbit hole for the weekend, Territorial‘s Strange Coordinates series unpacks the wild history of Sugar In the Raw, from medicinal cure-all to the rotting teeth of English royals.
🤳 The Creator Economy Grows Up
Less about posts, more about who audiences believe.
Fohr EVP of Strategy Grace Murray Vazquez told Business Insider that in a tough economy, audiences are gravitating toward creators who feel like an older sister: close enough to understand your reality, a step or two ahead.
ASMBLY Entertainment noted the average enterprise brand now spends $8.8 million a year on creators, and that money is starting to fund franchises, with FOX building creator ideas into IP and creators negotiating ownership as they enter Hollywood.
Reach Agency CEO Gabe Gordon shared the CreatorIQ Connect stage with leaders from e.l.f. Beauty, Peloton and Adobe, where the panel agreed everyone wants a viral moment, but few want to build the infrastructure that makes one possible.
🥇 New Hardware for the Shelf
Awards with specifics attached.
Erich & Kallman counted “two and a half” wins at the 4As Jay Chiat Awards: Gold in Automotive Strategy for Gulf States Toyota’s “Abuelita’s Food Truck,” Silver in Experiential for King’s Hawaiian, and a shortlist spot for Agency of the Year.
Unruled Outdoor Agency Chief Strategy Officer Cary Murphy took home Bronze at the Jay Chiat Awards in Brand Transformation for Raymarine’s “Earn Your Strikes.”
270B won MediaPost’s Excellence in Online Advertising award for Artificial Intelligence for The Prediction Pit, a football, guac and real-time sports predictions second-screen experience for Avocados From Mexico.
Rise and Shine and Partners brought home an OMMA Award for Influencer Campaign for “It’s Not Magic, It’s Mushrooms” with the Mushroom Council.
Those That DO also picked up Best Brand Collaboration at the QSR Media Awards for KFC’s Hawkins Fried Chicken activation, alongside Ogilvy Australia and KFC Australia.
Butler/Till landed three Digiday Awards finalist nods, including Agency Executive of the Year for Kimberly Jones and Best Partnership for its first autonomous campaign with PubMatic.
🔀 New Chapters
Wins, mergers, and knowing when to walk.
Joan Creative is lacing up the bowling shoes: its London office won the Hollywood Bowl creative brief, per Campaign UK.
Karsh Hagan and Madden Media have come together as KHM, with a new LinkedIn page to match.
Iris London CEO Zoe Eagle weighed in with Campaign on when agencies should walk away from an account, noting some Iris client relationships go back decades because the best partnerships flex and evolve.
Department of Creative Affairs launched a bigger version of itself, promising original research and a comprehensive map of the independent agency landscape over the coming weeks.
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