Adweek dropped its 2026 Fastest Growing Agencies list this week and the Indie Agency News member roster showed up fourteen times deep — top spots, regional wins, women-led categories, the works. But the more interesting thread running underneath all that growth is a quieter one: a lot of members are spending this week explaining what happens after the machines start doing the discovering. AI search readiness, agentic commerce, ad formats that answer follow-up questions instead of serving links. Growth is the headline. Figuring out who’s actually on the other end of the message is the story.
📈 The Adweek Pile-Up
Fourteen members, one list, zero chill.
The Mayor landed at #1 out of 72 agencies globally after three years in business, which is the kind of stat that either terrifies you or motivates you depending on where you sit.
Siberia took the #3 spot and used the announcement to explain its structure: senior custom teams, no account service, no managers. Their words: “It’s not top-heavy, it’s TOP-ONLY.”
Party Land pulled a three-category sweep — #1 Women-Led Creative Agency globally, #1 Creative Agency in the West, and #5 Creative Agency globally.
Dotted Line Agency came in at #15 and #1 Women-Led Agency, then documented the champagne getting popped at 4:30pm.
Saylor hit #10 for the third consecutive year in the top ten, and hunterblu media landed at #67 — their fourth time on the list, announced with a “SIX SEVENNNN” that we respect.
Laughlin Constable was named No. 4 fastest growing agency of its size nationally, fifty years in. Familiar Creatures made it a third straight year, fourth fastest in the Southeast and fourth fastest among 1–10 employee shops. Loop.co took #23.
Also on the board: Fuse Create at 20+ years in, TUX back-to-back from 2025, Charts + Darts, and X&O calling it an official growth spurt.
Best announcement of the bunch goes to SuperBloom House, who opened with a note about not having posted in a while because nobody at the office “had a new baby, a midlife crisis, joined a cult or had their aura read,” then landed on being in the 96th percentile as one of the top three fastest growing agencies on the west coast — comparing it to a newborn getting weighed for the first time.
🔍 Everyone Is Optimizing for the Machines Now
The discovery layer moved and members are showing their work.
Stella Rising‘s John Morabito told BeautyMatter that traditional Google search and the LLMs agree on your brand about 33% of the time — his argument being that if GEO were just SEO with a new name, those numbers would match.
Klick Health has the healthcare version of that number: as of December 2025, 89% of healthcare keyword searches returned AI-generated results and nearly 80% of consumers get answers without clicking anywhere. They’ve turned it into an AI Search-Readiness Assessment covering brand visibility, content infrastructure and ecosystem strategy.
Delve Deeper makes the case that Google’s AI Mode isn’t an upgrade to search advertising but a different format entirely — the ad reads the query, handles follow-ups, and can complete the purchase without the user going anywhere. Their stat: 75% of AI Mode users make faster decisions.
Graybox actually ran the experiment. Brock Anderson wrote up what 30 days of live ChatGPT ads looked like on cost and optimization compared to Google and Meta.
Wondersauce CEO John Sampogna frames it as a shift in who brands are communicating with — algorithms already decide much of what gets distributed, so being understood by people is only part of the equation now.
Left Hand Agency CEO Lauren Ridgley offers the useful counterweight on agentic commerce: the infrastructure is moving fast and CPG brands need to understand it, but preparing for the shift and chasing the hype are different activities.
And Bits&Letters wrote the most practical thing in this whole category — advice for marketers who are already Claude Coding their own websites, opening with the admission that they’d rather those marketers were hiring them instead. Rule one: keep a real CMS.
🍕 New Work Worth Watching
Pizza for one, a lottery ticket without fine print, and Randall Park playing four people.
WorkInProgress launched the Domino for Domino’s — a handheld, portable, Detroit Style Parmesan crust pizza made for one person. They took it up the side of a mountain to prove the point.
Cactus made scratch-offs honest. For the North Carolina Education Lottery’s Taxes Paid Scratch-Offs, the top prize printed on the ticket is the exact amount that lands in the winner’s pocket — shot entirely in camera, no VFX.
Zambezi built Nex’s first national brand campaign, “Bring Back Family Time,” around a hero film told entirely from the perspective of the family television.
Rethink put Randall Park in four roles for bibigo, on the premise that Korea is everywhere except the kitchen.
Mother brought Gillian Anderson back as Marks and Spencer’s Chief Compliments Officer for Autumn, and separately put Baker Mayfield and Bijan Robinson in “My Greatest 7” for SONIC.
McKinney made an analogue summer for Ross Dress For Less. Co-CCO Omid Amidi on the thinking: “Not by romanticising the past, but by reminding people that the best stories still happen when you leave the house.”
Yes& Agency connected wireless charging to the moment cities stopped tolerating horse manure in the streets for Qi2’s “We’re Doing This Now.” Their phrasing: humor, history, and a little bit of crap.
Curiosity‘s work for new client Underdog — Paul Walter Hauser in a yellow tracksuit, directed by Jody Hill — got picked up by Ad Age with more spots dropping through the NFL season.
Doe-Anderson paired UK Football coach Will Stein with bank reps for Central Bank & Trust Co., featured in Ad Age.
Tilt Creative Studio marked the 25th anniversary of 9/11 with “The Heart of the Warrior” for the Wounded Warrior Project, and Special Australia led KFC into its Picklecore era. BarkleyOKRP built “Test Drive Your Family” for the Lucid Gravity. Quality Meats Creative created an organization dedicated to raising awareness for people who want to keep doing nothing about child poverty, in service of Comic Relief, which is a swing.
📊 Numbers That Made Us Stop
Case studies with the receipts attached.
Delve Deeper published the Blood Cancer United case study — rebranding The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society after 75 years without losing fundraising momentum. First-year results from select paid campaigns: $1.2M+ additional YoY revenue, 27% lower cost per acquisition, 29% higher return on ad spend.
Fohr responded to Digiday’s finding that half of marketers misprice creator fees and 40% think they overpaid by building Rate Check — plug in a handle, an offer and the deliverables, find out whether it’s fair before you negotiate.
Iris London‘s Jesper Norgaard makes the case that the B in B2B does not stand for boring: emotional campaigns outperform entirely rational ones, and creative work drives measurably higher consideration. B2B buyers never stopped being human, they just got treated like spreadsheets.
Doe-Anderson Executive Strategy Director Amy McNatt published a piece in WARC on using behavioral science to map and measure emotional transformation instead of writing functional briefs and hoping magic happens in post.
SRH has been running a campaign all week around Brandnesia™ — their term for the natural tendency of people to forget brands. Drop your brand in the comments and they’ll send back a Brand Memorability Score™ in 48 hours.
Goodway Group‘s Briana Finelli argues that retail media networks don’t need to become identical to prove they’re mature — advertisers don’t need every commerce network to sell them everything, they need to understand why they should buy something specific from you.
👋 New Chairs, New Rooms
People moves and the honors that follow them.
Fact & Fiction hired Jake Rosenblatt as Senior Director of Cultural Strategy, from The Martin Agency where he ran The Cultural Impact Lab. He’ll oversee social, influencer, earned media and innovation.
WH inc. named Adrienne Lopez Executive Vice President.
Highdive picked up two ADWEEK Team Visionary Awards finalist nods — one for the two-person team of Ben Doessel and Randy McEntee in Technology/Innovation, behind Jeep’s “Tire Story” and State Farm’s “Stan the Stanchion,” and one for their leadership team in Legacy Leadership, citing 140+ people, a new NY office and +20% YOY growth.
Giant Spoon‘s new Executive Creative Director Haywood Watkins III joined this year’s Cresta Awards jury, and TRG chief strategy officer Christopher Ferrel will co-emcee 4A’s StratFest 2026 in NYC on October 6 alongside MARTIN*’s Elizabeth Paul.
David&Goliath Founder and Creative Chairman David Angelo joined the Fast Company Impact Council, and Super Nice introduced its new CSO Raqib Sheikh and fellow new leaders via LBB.
Powell Communications promoted Kelly Morris to its first-ever Client Services & Events Manager — a role that involves tracking over 320 events a year.
🏆 The Other Awards Circuit
Not everything runs through Adweek.
Unruled Outdoor Agency made the 4A’s Jay Chiat Awards shortlist for Brand Transformation Strategy for Raymarine’s “Earn Your Strikes.”
Special New Zealand had a run: six Best Design Awards finalists across brand identity, digital campaigns and social good, plus seven client wins at the NZ Marketing Awards — including three golds for Greyhounds as Pets NZ and Brand of the Year for Trade Me. Across the Tasman, Special Australia saw Tash Johnson and Celia Garforth win their categories at B&T Women in Media, with Lindsey Evans named to the 2026 Power List.
SweetScience Marketing earned two nominations in The Drum Awards for B2B, and Eight Oh Two Marketing is a finalist across three submissions in the 2026 US Search Awards.
Epica Awards renewed its partnership with the All-Ukrainian Advertising Coalition and interviewed VRK CEO Maksym Lazebnyk about resilience and visibility. In 2026 alone, the Ukrainian Creative Awards received 1,424 entries from 183 participants.
KDSP got a nod from Tim Nudd for its Grow Therapy work, Good Conduct landed its first Greenlight campaign in Ad Age’s roundup alongside pickles, pizza and Wet Leg, and Binary & Co became a Google Premier Partner — while noting, admirably, that the metric largely reflects total ad spend managed rather than agency skill.
🎙️ Worth Your Ears and Your Calendar
What members are saying, and where they’re saying it.
Young & Laramore President & CEO Tom Denari wrote an Ad Age opinion piece on what marketers can learn from the book of Dolly — “9 to 5” for being yourself full-time, “Dumb Blonde” for keeping a sense of humor, “Jolene” for picking your battles.
Powers of Reasoning CEO Kate O’Brien talked to Ad Age’s Lindsay Rittenhouse about how independent structures evolve as clients get bigger, and when another layer is helping versus just getting in the way.
Murder Hornet‘s Noel Cottrell, and Corner Table Creative‘s Madeline Meade and Rachel Brandt, spoke with Campaign U.S.’s Emma Thumann about what it takes to get an indie agency off the ground.
VIA CEO Leeann Leahy and CCO Matt O’Rourke sat down with Kyle O’Brien for a long conversation about refusing to pick a side between art and science — the “Hogwarts of Advertising” piece, if you missed it.
Venables Bell and Partners CCO Will McGinness joined Saville Productions’ Purpose Podcast on career lessons and why the best ideas still start with curiosity.
Worldwide Partners heads to Copenhagen in under two weeks for the IGNITE 26 Global Summit, with Margaret Heffernan on collaboration and uncertainty. Pre-summit viewing, per WPI.
Also worth booking: Superheroes hosts what it’s calling the world’s first live AI creative championship in Amsterdam on September 24 — eight creators, 10-minute knockout duels, winner advances to the World Finals in NYC. Mower Agency has B2B trust leaders on stage September 15. Legal+Creative | Toerek Law‘s Sharon Toerek is running a free 60-minute session September 16 on the five steps that close the two AI legal risk gaps every agency question traces back to — intellectual property and confidentiality. And The One Club for Creativity has Brand-Side 2026 in Nashville September 30–October 1 plus WAATBP in NYC October 2–3, with a $5,000 brief competition.
😎 Filed Under: Human
The stuff that reminds you these are people.
Baldwin& wins the week twice. First for the post about how their head of social reads the internet, writes a newsletter about it on her own profile, then shares it on the agency account she also runs — “(it’s me. i’m writing this.)” Second for the shortest and most accurate post in the entire dataset: “raise your hand if you’ve ever said ‘we need to treat ourselves like a client’ and then you don’t.”
Terri & Sandy handed Grace Barratt $10,000 to cross something off her bucket list, then posted the reaction. Sound on.
Another Thing said goodbye to Butterjack: “Thank you for keeping Butterheads in your fridge and hearts for this long.”
Goodway Group partnered with HandsOn Greater Phoenix to pack 250 kitchen kits for veterans moving into transitional housing — cookware, potholders, recipe cards — plus $20,000 toward the project. H/L Agency‘s McDonald’s Golden Grants program, led by EVP Crystal Burreson Sawyer, surpassed $1 million in community support for K-12 education, youth sports and local non-profits.
TogetherWith invited everyone to sign the entryway of its Louisville office. Red Door Interactive ran its annual Summer Games for a team that doesn’t share an office or a city. Gus assembled what it is calling the greatest small ad agency bowling team. And The Escape Pod offered the season’s most efficient observation: “Summers go by fast. Summer parties go by spr fst.”
Antidote closed the loop on all of it with two recommendations for anyone looking for respite from war, politics, gas prices, killer robots and heat domes: “The Dink,” a pickleball comedy, and “Tony,” a coming-of-age origin story about Anthony Bourdain. Neither has anything to do with the Strait of Hormuz.
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