The last 72 hours on LinkedIn read like awards season decided to arrive all at once. Indie Agency News members picked up Ad Age A-List honors, Webby trophies, Clio bronze, Epica gold, and Digiday nods in rapid succession — and they didn’t just collect hardware, they watched peers like Rethink take Agency of the Year while Preston Spire walked out of a room full of holding companies with Best Work for Good. In between, Earth Day surfaced some of the most uncynical sustainability takes we’ve seen in years, three brand-new ventures launched quietly, and Ian Millner wrapped 25 years at Iris with a podcast conversation that skips the highlight reel. Here’s what members put on the record.
🏆 Ad Age’s Big Night, Indie-Style
Rethink landed at the top of Ad Age’s A-List as Agency of the Year, continuing an indie streak that keeps redrawing what “agency of record” can look like in 2026.
Highdive made the A-List for the third consecutive year — and brought home Account Manager of the Year for Kaley Lambeth on top of it.
Preston Spire took Best Work for Good (Pro Bono/Nonprofit) for “Project Lockdown”, work built with Teachers Unify to End Gun Violence. Their framing: two-thirds of school shootings involve an unsecured firearm at home. A fiercely independent, employee-owned shop out of Minneapolis won it in a room packed with the biggest agencies in the country.
Chemistry got named a 2026 Standout Agency, with Tim Smith apparently responding to the news with “say less.”
Mischief @ No Fixed Address took a victory lap for their partners at the Creativity Awards — Chili’s Brand of the Year (again), Slate Auto Best Brand Product Launch after hitting 100,000 reservations in two weeks, and JCPenney Best ROI on the back of 3.0% YoY traffic growth in May 2025. Luz Infante Bickert of Chili’s picked up Future Brand Leader in the same sweep.
Innocean USA’s David Mesfin was named Diversity & Inclusion Champion of the Year for “Refacing the Future,” his project building a library of millions of diverse images for AI training data.
🕸️ The Webbys Went Deep on Indie Work
Highdive walked out with five Webby wins across KFC and State Farm, pulling in 4.6 million People’s Voice votes between “The Colonel’s Secret,” “11 Secrets,” and “Batman vs. Bateman.”
Territorial took Best B2B Campaign for Centivo’s “How Dare We”, with a note that there was “no CTA this time — just wanted to thank everyone.”
Saylor’s “This Could Work” podcast was voted Best Creativity & Marketing Podcast.
Terri & Sandy won Best Use of Social for New Women New Yorkers, work advancing careers of immigrant women.
Day One Agency took Gold in Best in Social — Sports for Converse’s SHAI 001 launch with Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.
Gravity Road won for McCain Foods’ “Farms of the Future AR” — a game built around Wormy, what they describe as a world-first in-game AI character trained on regenerative farming.
Alto picked up two for Life360 (Copywriting and Original Music), while Special U.S. noted they were “excited to be in any list that includes Amy Poehler and Heated Rivalry” after Uber Eats’ Super Bowl campaign took a trophy.
🌱 Earth Day, But With Receipts
Campfire wrote what might be the sharpest Earth Day post we’ve read in years — a line-by-line accounting of what their B Corp status, 1% for the Planet membership (of revenue, not profits), Ad Net Zero signatory status, and COTAP offsets actually cost them. Their close: “One day a year is a nice gesture. We’re more interested in the other 364.”
Mythology revisited Back Market’s first physical store — over 30 million refurbished devices sold, 1.6 million tons of carbon emissions avoided, and a market-inspired space built to “make refurbished feel celebrated rather than compromised.”
Bridge Insights & Media shared their work with Take Care of Texas, including a 196% increase in conservation pledges.
George P Johnson’s David Baldig published a piece for LBB called “Proof Over Promise: The End of Greenwashing as We Know It” — pointing to the surge in ESG disclosure requirements that’s moved the conversation from marketing buzzwords to legal liability.
Innocean USA brought Project Wav to the conversation — a campaign about global dimming reducing sunlight our oceans rely on.
🎬 New Work That Dropped This Week
Special Australia launched Set for Life’s “Monthly Cash, No Catch” — three films imagining walking away from the ridiculous things people do for extra money each month (feet pics, bad flatmates, financially generous but emotionally scarring parents).
Fact & Fiction expanded AAA’s promise with “”In Case of Everything”” — protection for “disastrous Zoom calls when you weren’t actually on mute” and accidentally texting your trainer “Can we make out?” after autocorrect sabotaged “Can we make it two?”
TRG dropped “”Symphony,”” the third spot in their “”Dear Mom”” campaign for MemorialCare Miller Children’s & Women’s Hospital.
Quality Meats Creative launched Moen’s new brand platform, “For anyone who relies on water”.
G7 Entertainment Marketing built Mike’s Hard Lemonade Stand at Tortuga Music Festival — retro-meets-modern activation complete with a fridge fans could literally raid for POV photos.
🚀 New Things Launching Out of Indie Lands
Vysical introduced Hera Brands, a venture studio building women-forward consumer brands at the intersection of everyday rituals and functional wellness. The plan: originate, validate, and launch CPG concepts from the ground up.
Optimism BH announced Barrett Hofherr is now Optimism BH, “though Jamie and Matt still go by Jamie and Matt.”
Bakery Agency started Cultish, a Substack covering “the strange alchemy of why people care way too much about certain things.”
Mother Bear Agency launched Threadline, a Substack sharing insights from PR/Comms leaders on data-driven storytelling.
TiNY rolled out their new website with a planted typo and a drink on offer to whoever finds it.
Baldwin& has open desks for rent in their downtown Raleigh space — 24/7/365 access, production studio upstairs, “none of the wework-ness.”
🐔 Case Studies Indies Should Steal
SRH is running a two-part masterclass on brands that go on the attack. The Honest Eggs Co. story is the standout: a brand with less than 1% market share and eggs priced 50% above competitors took on Australia’s “Free Range” loophole (which allows 10,000 chickens per hectare) by building FitChix — the world’s first activity tracker for chickens. They printed average daily steps directly on the eggs. Their hens average 21,000+ steps per day, roughly three times more than the average Australian. The campaign delivered $40 million in earned media, a 25% increase in sales, and a 40% increase in retail grocery orders. Part two on Yorkshire Tea’s attack strategy is teed up here.
Quirk Creative did a deep dive on Jackpocket’s 9x growth to a nearly billion-dollar exit with Alison Monk of Eden Collective — covering DMA mastery around the Philadelphia/New Jersey overlap, predictive analytics on jackpot cycles, and why linear TV still wins for demographics that skew older and male.
Left Off Madison wrote a sharp piece on why product differentiation gets copied fast and emotional differentiation doesn’t, pulling lessons from Ajinomoto Gyoza, Just Bare Chicken, 7UP, Hawaiian Punch, dnL, and Sunkist.
👋 Exits, Evolutions, and Candid Moments
Iris co-founder Ian Millner is stepping down after 25 years and sitting down with Rob Mayhew for a one-off Entrepreneurs in the Wild episode. Their framing: “No highlight reel. No spin. Just the real thing.”
Artists & Outlaws shared Chief Creative Director Jon Krevolin’s manifesto on leaving the holding company world (“tethered to, or more realistically weighed down by, the holding company mothership”) for indie life. His take: “Today marks the dawn of the small independent ad agency.”
Schafer Condon Carter promoted Jack Hennessy to Chief Operating and Media Officer.
No Problem Studio got profiled by LBB four years in, with a quoted ambition “to become the most entertaining company in marketing.”
🤖 What’s Haunting the Industry Brain Right Now
Davis+Gilbert LLP published an alert on agentic AI in advertising and five legal risks marketers can’t ignore — written by Paavana Kumar, pointing out that agentic systems act autonomously, sometimes without human sign-off, which means internal governance built for content review isn’t built for governing the tool’s actions.
Eight Oh Two Marketing wrote a breakdown of what Google and ChatGPT announcements mean for paid search: “If your strategy still starts at the keyword, you are already behind.”
VaynerMedia argued AI shouldn’t replace human touch but should be used to understand it — have it dig into why people stop and watch a video past three seconds, not generate the copy.
XYZ made the case that AI assets “look great on screen” but rarely survive large-scale production, sharing their AI upscaling process for large-format-ready files.
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