A Horror Movie You Can Only Watch During an Oil Change (and Other Ways to Get Remembered)

With Halloween four days out, Indie Agency News members are leaning hard into the idea that fear is memorable — and not just in the haunted-house sense. One agency built a horror short you can only watch while your car is on the lift; another made the neuroscience case that “safe” marketing is the scariest option on the table. Around that, the numbers this week are pointed: a 54-point gap between how good agencies think they are and what clients believe, and a Klick lab that turned voices into pictures to look for diabetes. And as Adweek’s shortlists and the Cannes rankings land, a few indies are asking a sharper question than “who owns us?” — namely, what independence is supposed to be for.

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🎃 Fear Is a Media Plan

Four days until Halloween, and the indies are not playing it safe.

TogetherWith turned a routine maintenance reminder for Great Canadian Oil Change into The Sludge, an original horror short film drivers can only watch inside participating service bays. Gated content, but the gate is an oil change.

Allen & Gerritsen helped Dunkin’ bring back Spidey D as Spidey D’s Horror House in Salem, complete with limited-time drinks, exclusive merch, and a Spidey D-themed Zoltar machine telling fortunes through Halloween.

SRH made the case that we remember more when we’re frightened, pointing to research tying memory encoding to physiological arousal — and to The Babadook as proof you don’t need chainsaws to stick. Their bottom line: safe marketing isn’t.

Quality Meats Creative kept the Herb Light horror spots coming, including a swamp monster who should have reached for a 1 mg THC drink instead of the chocolate bar. The real scare is on the calendar: hemp-derived THC drinks become federally illegal December 11 unless Congress acts, so buyers can now add a six-pack that gets sent to their congressperson with a handwritten letter backing the Beverage Regulatory Parity Act.

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📊 Numbers Worth Stealing for Your Next Meeting

Bring these to the client meeting. Maybe not the 77% one.

Cactus founder and CEO Joe Conrad weighed in on a stat that should sting: 77% of agencies believe they’re delivering what clients need, but only 23% of brands agree, in The Drum’s Vox Pop on closing that gap.

Chameleon Collective started from Optimove data showing 70% of consumers recently unsubscribed from at least three brands for oversending, then had Mel Pacheco lay out three interview questions that reveal whether a beauty marketing leader knows when to stop.

Stella Rising flagged a neat paradox in beauty: the platform winning discovery is the one shoppers trust least. People don’t trust TikTok, so they go verify on Google and Amazon — and the brands waiting there with answers win the demand.

Creativ Company ran 24,170 fan comments through its Ellain tool around LeBron’s move to the 76ers. Sentiment swung from −6.80% at the signing to +9.12% after game one, but the night’s real winner was Tyrese Maxey at +26.33%.

Madison and Wall took a lap around Formula 1’s business: Apple is paying roughly $150M a year for U.S. rights, up from about $90M under ESPN, even as early figures suggest fewer people are watching. The reason it still pencils out — F1 has almost no natural ad breaks, which suits subscription far better than ad-funded TV.

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🩺 Klick Health Had a Week

Peer review, a phone number everyone knows, and a trust problem.

Klick Labs published peer-reviewed research in the IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics that turned 14,759 smartphone voice recordings from 461 adults into spectrograms, then used transformer models to look for vocal biomarkers of Type 2 diabetes in the images.

Not content with just that, Klick Health walked MM+M through how the 867-5309 campaign for Cancer Support Community came together, right up to getting Tommy Tutone’s lead singer involved.

Meanwhile, new Klick primary research found only 18% of HCPs believe leading pharma brands understand women’s lived realities, and 38% of women consumers can’t name a single health company they’d call a leader.

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🥫 Things You Can Hold

Soup bags, vinyl voicemails, and a glove made of fruit.

Rethink launched Heinz Soup in a new bag format and treated it like the hottest drop of the fall/winter fashion season instead of showing up like every other soup brand.

Argonaut helped Cricket Wireless turn saved voicemails into one-of-a-kind vinyl records, giving the voices people won’t delete something to live on besides a phone. Creative Review gave it a spin.

Laughlin Constable and the Wisconsin State Cranberry Growers Association built a 100-by-115-foot baseball glove and ball out of freshly harvested cranberries to wish the Milwaukee Brewers luck — and got ABC News Live to come look.

Corner Table Creative saw two podcast hosts put a real phone number on a Times Square billboard asking for dates, then concepted and designed a billboard for The League in under 24 hours to rotate in right after it at 41st & 7th, potential dates included.

Drake Cooper made Ad Age’s creative roundup with “This Is An Anti-Drug Ad”: 16 spots, 14 Idaho creators, six weeks, and no scare tactics — just everything you’d miss.

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📺 Press Play

Two you should watch, and one that skips the B.S.

Saylor teamed up with the LEGO Group on a YouTube-first campaign celebrating 15 years of NINJAGO, from early concept art to the fan-favorite moments.

Serviceplan Group‘s Munich team leaned into every cliché about discount retailer TEDi, wrapping the shopping trip in a Y2K pop music video set to a new take on “Barbie Girl,” with lines like “Needed one, got a ton.”

Cactus, meanwhile, is marking Arapahoe Basin’s 80th season with “No B.S. Just Skiing.”, a campaign about the personality that’s kept skiers coming back for nearly a century.

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🤖 AI, With Adult Supervision

The machines are doing more work. The question is whether it’s the right work.

D/CAL co-founder adam j. wilson told LBB he gives AI credit for exactly one thing: finally killing the waterfall approach to creative agency work.

Campfire founder Chris Marine told MediaPost that after six months evaluating 15 major DSPs, agentic buying tools left to their defaults produce pretty generic media plans. Train an agent on a brand’s own standards, though, and one test saw investment in brand-suitable placements rise 5x.

Goodway Group is working with Arima on a synthetic population of consumers to test spend levels in simulation before checking results with small live activations — an alternative to going dark in a control market. CEO Paul Frampton-Calero walked Digiday through it.

Davis+Gilbert LLP partner Gary Kibel told Bloomberg Law that plaintiffs suing OpenAI are borrowing the social media litigation playbook — with one big twist: the content in question comes from the chatbot itself, not third-party users, which could change which defenses are available.

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💌 Doing Good, With Receipts

Fundraising that shows its math.

Delve Deeper‘s new Digital Fundraising Performance Index tracked Google Ads across 15 nonprofits for seven quarters. Actively managed Search beat automated PMax every single quarter.

Yes& Agency won Gold at the 41st AMA Baltimore MX Awards for a Carpenter’s Shelter direct mail piece that raised more than $50,000, extending a relationship with the Alexandria, Virginia nonprofit that’s lasted almost two decades.

Public Inc. brought together SickKids, the Canadian Medical Association, Amanda Todd Legacy and others for Six Clicks, which argues Canadian kids are never more than six clicks from harm and asks people to push their MP to back the Safe Social Media Act (Bill C-34).

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🏆 What Independence Is For

Report cards, new names, and one deadline worth hitting.

Rethink topped the Cannes Lions 2026 Rankings as both the #1 Independent Network and #1 Independent Agency, while Alto landed among the Top 10 Independent Agencies in the world.

BarkleyOKRP is the only agency on Adweek’s 2026 shortlists for both Independent Creative Agency of the Year and Independent Media Agency of the Year.

Noble People, a finalist for Adweek’s Independent Media Agency of the Year, had CEO Greg March take on the harder questions: independent from whom, and independent to do what?

Household wrote up its Creativepool Independent Agency of the Year win properly — what it entered, what the judges saw, and what 22 years of building the agency has taught it.

Partners + Napier is now NAPIER: shorter name, bigger ambition. Karsh Hagan and Madden Media have come together as KHM. And Ardmore welcomed ModusBPCM, a London content and culture agency with 40 years in luxury communications for clients like Rosewood, Aesop and Kering Eyewear.

Highdive is turning 10, and co-founders Mark Gross and Chad Broude sat down for 10 Questions with Ad Age on a decade of work and why specificity beats safe.

RAYNE IX (RIX) has four days left on the State of Women Agency Owners survey, the first study built entirely around women who own agencies. It takes 20 minutes, closes October 31, and finishers see the results first.

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