There’s a particular energy to the week after Cannes, and Indie Agency News members are living in it right now — half of them still processing what they heard on the Croisette, the other half getting back to the work that pays for the rosé. This edition catches both moods: the reflective (what a Lion of St. Mark speech means when you get home) and the tactical (why consolidating one line item tripled a client’s conversions). There’s a surprising amount of talk about being ignored — by algorithms, by buyers, by your own dashboards — and an equally surprising amount of genuinely fun work. Scroll on.
🏖️ The Cannes Comedown
Everyone came home with a notebook. Here’s what stuck.
Klick couldn’t stop thinking about what it heard rather than what it saw. CCO Rich Levy wrote about five offhand remarks from the stage — from Oprah to Apple’s Eddy Cue to Susan Credle — that outlasted the festival. Separately, SVP/ECD Amy Fortunato reflected on Susan Credle’s Lion of St. Mark acceptance speech and what it means to make work that outlasts the moment.
Rethink‘s Partner and Global CCO Aaron Starkman made the case for outdoor on Campaign Chemistry, recorded live at Cannes: “This is the last remaining space that we don’t share with AI. It’s advertising for humans, made by humans.”
D/CAL Co-Founder adam j. wilson landed a hot take in an LBBonline op-ed: the biggest lesson from Cannes is to start building creator-friendly brands.
Founders Co-Founder & CEO Tanya De Poli moderated “A Generation We Cannot Afford to Lose” at Latino US Day, telling PRODU that “Latino power in Cannes Lions and in the world is real.”
📊 The Numbers That Made Us Look
Data people, this section is for you.
Delve Deeper shared a case study where the problem wasn’t the audience or the creative — it was structure. For Gerber Life Insurance, consolidating segments into a single DV360 line item dropped CPA from $10,755 to $3,381, tripled conversions, and grew response rate by 277% on 6% less spend.
OS Studios put a number on a 13-year partnership: Ultra Music Festival’s YouTube audience grew from 50,000 to 1.75 million — a 3,300% climb — as their team (formerly NOMOBO) helped build UMF TV.
Yes& Agency‘s work with the Kansas State University Foundation, “Good for K-State,” was named a 2026 Gold CASE Circle of Excellence Award recipient, driving 100,000+ interest tags and 21% higher engagement with a tough-to-reach audience.
Ardmore‘s client Visit Philadelphia had a standout FIFA World Cup 26 run, with its Fan Festival drawing as many as 55,000 fans in a single day — the largest single-day attendance of any U.S. Fan Festival.
🍔 Fresh Work Worth Watching
The stuff that ran.
Familiar Creatures brought back their brand-campaign Yeti for BUBBA burger, filming him grilling in the dead of summer for a summer-first social push covered by Muse by Clios.
Saylor joined Hilton and Campaign at Cannes to break down the brand’s social-first travel strategy — putting “The Stay” back at the center of the trip.
VIA built Big Y’s “Free Finds You” around the jolt of discovering forgotten cash in a jacket pocket, and learned a baguette can carry a lot of strategic weight across three :15 spots (rotisserie chicken in a glovebox included).
McKinney partnered with Little Caesars on a Webberoni pizza tie-in for Spider-Man: Brand New Day, in theaters July 31.
David&Goliath‘s new spot for the Kia Seltos, “A Real SUV,” got a nod from Ad Age for a playful take on how much a compact SUV can deliver.
🤖 The AI Reckoning
Adoption is up. So is the anxiety.
Creativ Company flagged the stat of the week: according to this year’s Cannes jury chair, 40% of 2026 festival entries used AI in some form — double the 2025 share — alongside tighter disclosure rules and a new ethics review process.
Gravity Road launched Ode Poetry, an AI voice companion built with Microsoft AI that prescribes a poem based on how you’re feeling, narrated by Stephen Fry.
Response Media made the counterintuitive argument that data accuracy, not data volume, is the real competitive advantage — because AI amplifies whatever it’s given, good data or bad.
🏆 The Trophy Case
Recognition, named specifically.
Quirk Creative was named an Indie Agency News Strategy Award finalist for its “Power to the Littles” campaign for Serenity Kids.
Highdive had a two-fer: Co-Founder and Co-CCO Mark Gross was named a Campaign US 40 Over 40 honoree, and director Bryan Buckley picked the agency’s Sydney Cohen as his “Innovator” for shots’ 2026 Cannes special for the State Farm “Batman vs. Bateman” campaign.
Allen & Gerritsen‘s Worcester Regional Airport campaign for Massport, “A Welcome Departure from Normal,” earned a place in the latest Lürzer’s Archive.
Vladimir Jones celebrated client Santa Fe being voted #1 City in the U.S. in Travel + Leisure’s World’s Best Awards — and 19th in the world, the only U.S. city in the global top 25.
🤝 New Names on the Door
New business, new logos, new chapters.
Praytell is officially Arc’teryx Equipment’s PR and media relations AOR.
Brandon is now Avelo Airlines’ creative and media partner for an integrated summer-travel campaign.
Schafer Condon Carter was named Creative & Media Agency Partner for Navy Pier, the Midwest’s most-visited attraction.
PJX Media joined forces with Talon, a move the team says forms the largest independent OOH agency in the US.
Karsh Hagan and Madden Media united to launch KHM.
🧠 Big Brains, Strong Opinions
The thought leadership that earned the label.
SRH ran a mini psychology lesson on the Von Restorff effect — Hedwig von Restorff’s 1933 memory study — to argue that being distinct beats being better, because the brain lumps like things together and ignores them.
Vuja Dé Digital made the case that the most dangerous metric in marketing is a good one pointed at the wrong question: chase ROAS hard enough and you cut the exact budgets planting seeds for new customers.
based.marketing argued that recognition gets a challenger dealt into the hand, but what wins is a stance the leader is too big to take — because features get copied by Tuesday.
Left Off Madison revisited a launch that ran out of inventory before its official date and reframed “out of stock” as one of the biggest growth failures a brand can make: the campaign didn’t fail, the inventory plan did.
🎭 The Lighter Side
Because it’s still summer.
Öpinionated wrote an escalating open letter to LinkedIn asking why posts are capped at 3,000 characters, running through everyone from Hemingway to Lin-Manuel Miranda before hitting the limit mid-sentence.
Terri & Sandy debuted its first work as creative partner to the National Geographic Society, turning Washington, D.C. into a canvas of curiosity with 100+ OOH placements built around that unmistakable yellow border for the National Geographic Museum of Exploration.
Lupine Creative threw back to its “You + 2” screening for Feeld — a swingers-themed event with double-entendre signage and “looooots of cornhole” — while congratulating DTF St. Louis and HBO on 13 Emmy nominations.
Gus is thinking about bringing back flashmobs. We’re listening.
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