It’s football season, and Indie Agency News members have noticed something about who gets the brand deals: sometimes it’s not the guy with the helmet. Elsewhere in this week’s feed, agencies kept circling the same tension from opposite ends. Half the posts are about getting found by machines (AI search, LinkedIn’s algorithm, synthetic performers that now need a disclosure). The other half are about getting people away from screens entirely, with fishing lessons, hydro boards and a lot of vinyl. Throw in some hard programmatic math, a CEO-grade measurement pitch and an agency that funded its employees’ beer idea, and the pattern starts to look less like a contradiction and more like a hedge.
🏈 Football Season Is a Couples Sport
Somebody tell the quarterback he might be the plus-one.
G7 Entertainment Marketing‘s Christian Henderson, Senior Director of Talent Partnerships, talked with The Boston Globe about athlete spouses becoming brand partners in their own right, and why brands are signing both halves of a couple.
The Mayes are Exhibit A this week. Day One Agency helped L.L.Bean welcome Drake Maye and Ann Michael Maye to the roster with a film imagining the couple as L.L.Bean retail employees, plus a photo shoot in the brand’s fall gear.
Another Thing took its Betterment “Breaderment” spot with the Mayes off the screen: the campaign’s Perfect Spiral loaf is free at select Flour Bakery + Cafe locations Oct. 2–8, while supplies last. The password at the register is “Breaderment.”
Erich & Kallman wants football to make quarterback slides an official statistic, with King’s Hawaiian as the GSIFOAT (Greatest Slider In Football Of All Time). Eli, per the agency, is “C-tier at best.”
Highdive gave Jersey Mike’s Stacked & Jacked: The Danny DeVito Story, in which DeVito lifts heavy subs, gets a “super jacked golden arm” and becomes the greatest QB of all time.
📊 Numbers Worth Stealing for Your Next Deck
The CFO-friendly portion of the program.
Goodway Group built Goodpath to clean up its programmatic supply chain, and laid out the results in AdExchanger: 28% more ad spend flowing to working media, a 25% to 30% improvement in verified human traffic and CPM reductions of up to 40% across CTV, online video and audio.
GTE Canada‘s Jenny Croswell wrote for Gaming International Online that extending a linear TV campaign into connected TV can drive an 84% jump in first-time depositors at barely any change in cost per acquisition. The audience is there, too: 91.1% of Ontario’s online gamblers now play on regulated sites, up from 83.7% a year ago.
Delve Deeper tied World Food Program USA’s Google Ads and Facebook Ads data to Salesforce in a single Looker Studio report, and the weekly view surfaced a RoAS shift that monthly reporting would have buried. Google Ads ended August 31% above its RoAS target.
Household surveyed 350 UK and US entertainment fans for Future Fanscapes and found 64% are already extending the stories they love by writing, drawing and building beyond the official canon. This from the team behind the first standalone Harry Potter store in New York.
George P Johnson Experience Marketing launched the Experience Intelligence System (EIS), which rolls audience participation, brand sentiment and business impact into one plan built for the C-suite.
🤖 Your Next Reader Might Be a Robot
Writing for algorithms, answer engines and, now, disclosure laws.
Drake Cooper offers a quick test: ask a few AI platforms what they know about your brand, and if the answers don’t match your website, you’ve got an Identity problem. Steve Norell’s opener to the agency’s BrandAPI series argues that “consistency beats cleverness when machines are the audience.”
Yes& Agency SVP of Innovation Chrissie Koeppen is taking the same question to government buyers, with a GAIN ’26 session on why GEO is the new front door for GovCon marketers. The test: when AI is asked about the problems you solve, does it recommend you or a competitor?
VaynerMedia says LinkedIn is cracking down on “AI slop” and generic jargon, and after months of testing it published the six things the algorithm rewards right now. Tip one: talk to your audience like your favorite coworker.
Davis+Gilbert LLP flagged that California’s SB 1050 now requires a clear disclosure when synthetic performers are prominently featured in ads, and compared it with New York’s existing framework. Anyone casting AI talent has a new compliance line item.
Territorial had Melissa Dunn on Strange Coordinates to dig into software marketing, and she delivered the week’s cleanest line on AI claims: “Everyone’s already tired of ‘AI-powered’ as a headline. That fight is basically over.”
📴 Log Off, Go Outside, Catch a Fish
Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum.
Not content with decoding LinkedIn, VaynerMedia also makes the case that analog is the biggest “trend” of the year: vinyl, hobby clubs and a return to the theater, all driven by the people who grew up on social. The agency’s read: the more AI and tech we’re faced with, the more we seek out human experiences.
Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners started with a stat, that 85% of people admit to skipping their lunch break entirely, and answered it with Wild Planet Foods Lunch Offline. The team took over Seattle’s Lake Union Park, handed out ready-to-eat bowls and offered fishing lessons from the pros at Emerald Water Anglers.
Gravity Road‘s new research, The Nostalgia Codes, argues people use nostalgia to solve problems with the present, reclaiming things they feel modern culture has taken away. The advice: “Don’t start with what you can bring back. Start with what your audience wants back.”
Iris London took WillPowders’ salty, glow-in-the-dark Electro_Ice pop to Ibiza and built the whole campaign around the first-taste wince: Commit to the Hit. The best detail: a waiter on a hydro board delivering pops to boats and yachts across the Med. Separately, social strategist Callum Ritchie rounded up the strange new ad spaces creators are inventing, including a projection mapped onto someone’s toilet.
Barbarian says reach is only one of five “currencies” creators deliver, alongside cultural cachet, community access, relatability and content value. Most brands, it argues, are only paying for one.
🍺 Agencies Making Their Own Things
When the client is you.
Curiosity gave its people $25K and a Shark Tank-style pitch competition called CurLab, with six teams and a judging panel that included former Bengal Dhani Jones. The winner is Spill! Session Ale, a low-ABV session IPA made with Sonder Brewing and Rivertown Wellness to help guys open up. Scan the QR code on the can and you unlock a free first appointment with Rivertown Wellness, for a limited time.
DCA profiled Sounds Fun, the New York consumer experience agency exploring a record label and a fashion brand as learning exercises rather than revenue plays. Co-founder Iain S. Thomas frames them as a way to learn about fandom and about selling a product of their own.
Hatch Agency Producer Maddie Harrington and Sweeter The Juice Films co-founder Victoria Griggs, the pair behind the interview-slash-cooking show Eat In or Dine Out, walked through how it gets made, from set decor and food styling to muppet-making.
🧭 The Business of Being an Agency
Who picks you, who keeps you and who owns the mess.
GERTRUDE, INC. hired Ellen Slauson as Chief Marketing & Growth Officer, and her mandate includes building relationships with the search consultants who increasingly decide which agencies get considered for major assignments.
RP3 Agency Chief Strategy Officer Laura Thomas told Ad Age how agency partnerships survive CMO churn. Her short version: “Loyalty isn’t a business strategy. Relevance is.”
Pile and Company President Meghan McDonnell weighed in with Ad Age on what mid-size brand marketers look for in agencies.
White Rabbit Group notes that most agency founders name three owners of their last web build, not one. After more than 800 projects, it now builds every project around a single Outcome Owner who answers for scope, timeline and the client relationship.
Left Off Madison‘s Rob Douglas makes a similar argument at brand scale: consumers experience one brand, not an agency roster, so one funnel needs a captain, a lead agency connecting creative, media, measurement and optimization.
Worldwide Partners, Inc. pulled seven takeaways from IGNITE Copenhagen, including “AI is becoming less of a topic and more of a tool” and “independence definitely doesn’t mean going it alone.”
Fuse Create did the headcount from the same summit: 98 attendees, 45 agencies, 26 markets, plus a highlight session on the story behind Ricola’s “Ricolé” campaign.
🏆 Hardware and Honors
Specific trophies, specifically named.
Laughlin Constable‘s QuikTrip Home Bun Race made Ad Age’s list of the top five creative campaigns to know right now, with Tim Nudd calling it an “absurdly simple idea.” The agency’s response: “Another great day to be an inflatable hot dog.”
The Many is on MediaPost’s OMMA finalist list six times: four for Panda Express, one for NOS Energy and one for Wounded Warrior Project. Winners are announced Oct. 7 at The Cutting Room in New York.
Zambezi joins it there, with Scale by Zambezi’s media work on Health-Ade’s Lindsay Lohan kombucha campaign named an OMMA finalist.
Not content with the BrandAPI series, Drake Cooper was named Best of the West by AAF District 15 as both Advertising Agency of the Year and Media Agency of the Year in the $10–50 million billing category, and Liesl Doggett took Media Professional of the Year.
Alto landed Top 5 U.S. and Top 20 Global in The Drum’s 2026 Indie Agency 100.
Attention Arc Co-President Asieya Pine was named an Agency Trailblazer in AdExchanger’s 2026 Top Women in Media & Ad Tech.
AXM (Ars X Machina) SVP of Analytics & Data Science Sara Owens, the force behind its Agile Mix Modeling platform, made the same AdExchanger list as one of 17 Data Demystifiers.
David&Goliath was named one of Fast Company’s Best Workplaces for Innovators 2026, with recognition in both the Advertising, Marketing and PR and the Midsize Companies categories.
Rise and Shine and Partners hand-painted Louisiana Hot Sauce’s social assets onto real wood clapboard signs and took home a Communication Arts Advertising Annual Award for Creative Excellence for the “Bayou Some” work.
🌍 Big Brand Builds
Forty markets, four travel classes and one opera.
Mother‘s Berlin team was appointed by FlixBus to build a clear, consistent brand for its next phase of growth across more than 40 markets.
Serviceplan Group‘s Serviceplan Culture teamed with Monarch Collective, an investment platform dedicated to women’s sports, on “Whose Game Is It Going To Be?”, a zine of eleven theses on the culture, economics and future of women’s football. The group also launched an international Lufthansa campaign built on the airline’s Future Onboard Experience, spotlighting the details across all four travel classes.
Motive: A Project WorldWide Agency‘s first campaign for Clos du Bois and GALLO turns the US Open sponsor into “Club du Bois”, with 100-plus placements including Times Square and Penn Station and hero content starring Eugenie Bouchard.
Colossus gave Boston Lyric Opera a new identity that draws parallels between opera and contemporary cinema, profiled by GDUSA ahead of the company’s 50th anniversary.
Wondersauce turned the 2026 Gen Z Sex Study from Playboy, Julie Products and the Kinsey Institute into an interactive editorial experience built to make the data something people want to explore.
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