7 sessions. One room. One day.
Every Blueprint from Indies Rising — Chicago 2026: the moments, the candid quotes, the frameworks, and the moves you can run Monday morning. Read them in any order. Share them with your team. Come back when you need them.
You were there when Meranne told the story she's been replaying for a long time.
Her team had walked into a pitch with a bold strategic idea that threaded all the way through to the creative. First round went great. The client, in her words, said "keep pursuing that."
Then the final round.
"They said the solution was wrong and hired someone else."
The room went quiet for a beat. Everyone on stage had a version of that story.
And then she told the contrast — a pitch she's in right now, where the CMO said, point-blank: "I don't actually agree with you, but I love that you went in so hard and so passionately against this. And that's the kind of partner that I want in an agency."
Clients don't just buy the answer. They buy the relationship they'll need to keep getting to better answers.
Block 1 dragged every indie talking point out of the brochure and asked two questions: when an indie loses the pitch room, what actually happened? And how do you run an agency whose culture, positioning, and systems are honest enough that the right work keeps coming back?
Three back-to-back sessions: Ghost of Pitches Past and Poking Procurement ran as one extended conversation. Tap In, Tap Out put two open chairs onstage and dared the audience to fill them.
Energy in the room: quick, honest, a little bruised in Part One. Part Two loosened it up — open chairs, a live dare to come speak, a room-inside-the-room conversation about what indie culture actually is. The audience leaned forward the whole way.
Isabel and Haley traded moderator duties. Meranne, Daniel, and Anthony sat between them. The conversation was about pitch losses — the real kind, the kind nobody brags about — and what running an honest agency actually looks like from the inside.
Meranne's opening loss story. (See cold open.) The point that stuck:
Isabel asked Haley how she holds the line on walking away from a pitch when there's payroll to make. Haley, deadpan: "Where are all my medals? I didn't get a medal. Celebrate your wins — important."
Then she went serious. Party Land's first question to any inbound is "Why Party Land?" If they can't answer it, she walks. She walked from a $1.5M project recently — "they had very little idea who they were talking to… we declined to participate."
Isabel named a new pattern she keeps getting called into: pitches where only indies are invited, and clients are openly, emphatically anti-holdco.
"We always say, 'Like, who hurt you?' These clients who are now saying, 'We don't want a holding company. We don't want to be part of what's happening right now. We only want indies in this mix.'"
— Isabel LongHis CEO coached him: "Every time you meet with the client, bring them a gift." He thought she meant chocolate. She didn't.
She meant: every touchpoint, plant a small nudge of adjacent value. If you're a design shop, talk photography. Talk art direction. Talk media. Let the client start understanding that's part of your world — and watch them bring up the next scope themselves.
Haley named the unavoidable first job of every indie pitch: promising the senior team in the room will be the team on the work.
"I find myself having to, like, promise the absence of a negative. 'Believe me, they're going to be here. I know you've had bait-and-switch. We aren't going away.'"
— Haley HunterHaley has scripted language for exactly this — delivered in the first 20 seconds of every pitch call: "Here's your leadership group. They are on this call. They will work on your brand. Matt is our CCO — he still writes."
"Clients take notes on those calls. They write down the things you wouldn't expect them to. It takes about 20 seconds." — Haley Hunter
Meranne named the trap every indie is caught in: the very thing clients say they want from indies — small, senior, agile — is what makes them flinch when the brief gets bigger.
"They love the direct connect to the strategic lead, to the creative lead… the thing we struggle with is that automatically almost assumes you're of a certain size. The question with larger clients is, can you scale?"
— Meranne BehrendsThe session's most consistent drumbeat. Said from every chair on stage.
Daniel: "You should be saying no, especially to stuff you're not good at."
Anthony: "What if they said no? We can do that — but we're not good at that. We're phenomenal here, but not there. To me, the no builds trust."
Isabel: "There are so many client-side procurement people I've built relationships with because they know they can call and I'll say, 'Yeah, no. You don't want us.' Or 'We would crush this' — and they know I'm being honest."
"There's no 'no' that I've ever regretted."
— Meranne BehrendsAnthony's cleanest framing of what makes indies structurally different:
"From a holdco, the selling is incredible. But within indie, they came in and solved the problem… And the revenue was always there."
— Anthony ReevesThe closing round — start-stops from every panelist — got loud. The loudest moment of Part One:
"Stop apologizing for my skills, for my agency's size. Just stop apologizing. We have the right to be in the room."
— Meranne Behrends"I'm sorry — I'm so Australian — but fuck the big guys. Let's just really own something and drive it forward."
— Anthony ReevesTwo open chairs onstage. A room full of introverts told to come speak their mind. Kai and Roberto held the anchor seats and turned the conversation into something bigger than a panel.
Haley opened with a bait: everybody calls themselves a culture-first agency. What does Valerie actually mean by it?
"There's a difference between saying 'I love Southern food because I go to Popeye's every day,' and 'I understand Southern culture because I understand why the use of fried chicken is important, or the seasonings — are we talking a tablespoon, or did Grandma tell us a pinch of something?' It is that input of understanding how to get to the output."
— Kai Deveraux LawsonHaley asked the indie version of "can you scale?" — how do you convince clients to buy into a newer, smaller agency?
"Here's the thing about Valerie — we're basically a rebellious toddler. A total startup screaming, kicking, punching above our weight a lot of times. You absolutely have to work with Valerie if you believe in culture-first. 'You like us? We like you. Okay, we go together now.'"
— Kai Deveraux LawsonRoberto told the Young Hero founding story — early days, pitching a creator-led model nobody had language for yet. Pyramids and explainer slides didn't work. So they changed tactics.
"We don't need to oversell or over-explain the creator model. We just need to find the right moment to embed it into the presentations."
— Roberto Max SalasThe example: a campaign for Lonely Whale — "Question how you hydrate" — announcing we've all been hydrating wrong through single-use plastic. They built an experience called the Museum of Plastic, piggy-backing on the Museum of Ice Cream moment. The creator-led approach wasn't pitched. It lived quietly inside the idea: 27 artists, 27 alternative ways to hydrate.
Katie Walley-Wiegert tapped in from the audience. She's spent her career doing a-list holdco award submissions. Now she works with indies:
"I was overjoyed that I don't have a culture team. I've worked with Valerie. Valerie doesn't have a culture team. But it's the agency I always dreamed of working for, because the culture just is in the way that everyone treats each other."
— Katie Walley-WiegertAnd the real question for the room: "What is indie culture? What should it be? What are we striving for to really differentiate that indie provocation and promise to talent versus where the holdcos are at?"
Kai's follow-up was the cleanest articulation of what to keep from holdco and what to burn.
What she kept: "Making sure we support our growth, our finances are clean, we understand billability, we understand how everyone's working. There are things that are good coming from the holding company."
What she rejected: "There's a lot systematically and also systemically that were set up for folks to hide behind — particularly as to how you treat your people."
"I need you to go outside and go live life. Real life. Go eat food, go touch grass — and then come back and bring that insight to the table. That structure [holdco] requires you to be in the building under the fluorescent lights. For us, we know a lot about a lot, because everyone has experienced it."
— Kai Deveraux LawsonEric Brown from Blood Sweat and Tears tapped in. He and his partner Nora have looked at enough pitch decks to read the answer before the reveal.
"We oftentimes see agencies over-diversifying, going after things that aren't part of their core capability set. When you try to be something you're not — to leverage a capability you just put on the homepage — and you don't have the teams, the expertise, the experience, the portfolio to show it, that shows up in the work."
— Eric BrownMasha Spaic from Transport (NYC) tapped in. Transport had just won a pitch that week — with a client they'd lost to the year before.
"We kept in touch, we kept getting to know each other, and that led them to come back to us. It's the getting to know each other. We want to be doing it with people. Our creative work is laborious, time intensive — and clients want to feel that."
— Masha SpaicRoberto picked it up and named the bigger pattern: "Our new business lane that performs the best for us is usually our friends from other agencies, who are now in-house or have started startups, and now we are their clients. It took 10, 15 years to build that relationship."
Real disagreement came near the end of Part One, between Meranne and Daniel — on whether to dissect pitch losses at all.
Meranne had just said her team doesn't talk enough about wins and losses after the fact. Daniel pushed back:
"I generally advise, it's good to dissect to a degree — but it's a little damned if you do, damned if you don't. Until something becomes a trend, if you were in the room and you feel good about your performance, I wouldn't change much. So much weird stuff happens in those rooms. It's rarely some grand epiphany of why an agency won or lost."
— Daniel WeinerThat's uncomfortable because most agency principals overcorrect after every loss.
The open question it leaves: where's the line between useful pattern-finding and reactive over-dissection?
Now shared shorthand — use them.
| Term | Who Named It | What It Means |
|---|---|---|
| The No Builds Trust | Anthony | Honest declinations compound credibility. |
| Solving vs. Selling | Anthony | Holdcos sell scope. Indies solve problems. Revenue follows the solving. |
| Who Hurt You? | Isabel | All-indie pitches driven by client trauma from holdco relationships. |
| Promise The Absence Of A Negative | Haley | The indie's first job: proving the senior team won't disappear. |
| Bring Them A Gift | Anthony | Every touchpoint plants a small, free nudge of adjacent value. |
| The Scalability Paradox | Meranne | "Small, senior, agile" is what clients ask for — and what makes them flinch. |
| Feed Therapy | Meranne | Taking whatever comes in because you need revenue, before you've learned to filter. |
| Can We Win? / Do We Want To Win? | Isabel | Highdive's two-question filter on every opportunity. |
| Popeye's vs. Grandma's Kitchen | Kai | Cosmetic culture borrowing vs. real cultural work at the input layer. |
| The Rebellious Toddler | Kai | Positioning so specific it filters out non-believers without a sales pitch. |
| The One-Slide Strategy | Roberto | When the vocabulary doesn't exist yet, embed the model in a bigger idea. |
| Systems Create Culture | Kai | Keep the holdco's operational discipline. Burn its architecture for hiding. |
| Go Touch Grass | Kai | Creativity requires humans living real lives, not under fluorescent lights. |
| Agency Interventionists | Eric / BS+T | Indies telling each other the truth about positioning and what shows up in the work. |
| Friends Become Clients | Roberto / Masha | The real indie biz dev engine is the 10-year friendship, not the 6-week RFP. |
Words picked on stage for a reason.
For your team channel. For your standup. For your own notebook.
"There's no 'no' that I've ever regretted."
— Meranne Behrends"The no builds trust."
— Anthony Reeves"Stop apologizing for my skills, for my agency's size. We have the right to be in the room."
— Meranne Behrends"Fuck the big guys. Let's just really own something and drive it forward."
— Anthony Reeves"From a holdco, the selling is incredible. Within indie, they came in and solved the problem. And the revenue was always there."
— Anthony Reeves"We always say — like, who hurt you?"
— Isabel Long"Every time you meet with the client, bring them a gift."
— via Anthony Reeves"The authenticity isn't the output. The authenticity comes from the input."
— Kai Deveraux Lawson"We're basically a rebellious toddler. Screaming, kicking, punching above our weight."
— Kai Deveraux Lawson"Valerie doesn't have a culture team — but it's the agency I always dreamed of working for."
— Katie Walley-Wiegert"Go outside. Go live life. Go eat food, go touch grass — and bring that insight to the table."
— Kai Deveraux Lawson"When agencies over-diversify and put a capability on the homepage they don't have — it shows up in the work."
— Eric Brown"Our new business lane that performs best is usually our friends from other agencies who are now our clients. It took 10, 15 years to build that."
— Roberto Max SalasPut it in motion this week.
Haley's exact language is in the Scripts section. Customize once, then say it early, every time. Watch clients write it down.
If you can't answer yes to both, have a different conversation — with the brand or with yourself.
Not chocolate. One nudge each — an adjacent capability, a piece of category work, a thought from this session. Expand how they see you without selling.
Isabel's rule. Start the indie handoff list if you don't already have one.
Daniel's rule. One loss is weather. Three losses in the same direction is signal.
For every service listed: do you have the team, the expertise, the experience, and the portfolio to stand behind it? If not, cut it. Cred stack bloat shows up in the work.
Not a pitch. Not "just catching up." Genuine presence. The Roberto/Masha rule: friends become clients, but only if you've kept being a friend.
Jot your real answers — then put one on the agenda at your next team meeting.
This recap is part of the Indie Agency News Blueprint series — the premium content product built from our live events. You were told not to take notes. We meant it.
…Jen Martindale stopped being polite.
Anthony Romano had just asked the panel for a story where an agency pushed a creative idea too far — past the point where conviction became self-interest. Jen didn't blink. Thirteen years at Leo Burnett. Her bullshit meter, in her words, is "very dialed in."
"It makes no strategic sense for them to be pushing in this direction. They're pushing anyway. They want to win an award for this. And I'm fucking done with that."
Then the punchline: "It's just easier to say you're done. We're not going to be working together anymore."
Four CMOs on stage — all with holdco scars, all working with indies right now — and every one had a version of that story.
The myth that CMOs love agency fire above everything else is true. The footnote is that the wrong kind of fire ends the relationship.
Indies spent Session 1 saying what makes them different. Session 2 put those talking points on trial. Anthony Romano moderated four brand leaders through three movements: Indie Tinder, What Indies Do Better / What Holdcos Do Better, and a live Fictional CMO Sim.
Energy in the room: the greens were loud, the reds were louder. Russell cursed. Jen cursed more. Nobody was polite. Nobody was asked to be.
The panel was handed six anonymized agency value propositions pulled from real indie websites. Green card = tell me more. Red card = next.
The first prop leaned whimsical. The room split. Jen went green — "it made me think they were really versatile… and I liked that it didn't use jargon." Ashley and Kim went red.
"Storytelling is definitely part of it. But if you can't get that through-line to what it delivers for me in the first — attention, six to eight seconds — you've lost the opportunity."
— Kim DeNapoliThree reds, one green. Russell's red was loudest: "It sounds like you're selling pricing, not solutions. If I'm selling cheap to my CFO, I'm doing a disservice to the organization." Ashley's green defended the pro-CFO frame: "The agencies I've worked best with understand how to get things done within the organization."
The prop: "We are the insights-to-action agency, experts at mid-to-bottom funnel marketing… hungry for unruly paths with POVs that are hard-won."
"Insights are huge. Why the bigger holding companies are attractive is the data and the large volume of information they have. But starting with 'every good idea is powered by the right insights' has me interested."
— Kim DeNapoli"If I see 'advertising sucks' one more time — stop bashing yourselves. It's what you do. A lot of advertising's shitty, but don't go make shitty ads and own that. That's on you."
— Russell Barnett"'Narrative worlds' gave me an eye roll. What the fuck is that? I could guess — but don't make me guess." — Jen Martindale
Dense, jargony copy. Four reds. Kim: "this could be any agency." Ashley: "it felt like it could have been an AI-written phrase."
"You're lost in it. As an indie, you have such ability where holdcos can't — they have to be generic. You as independents have the authority to go out and be different."
— Russell Barnett"You have to know who you are. What is your DNA? I picked our last agency because they knew who they were." — Ashley Findlay
Long, bold prop — "in a world drowning in algorithmic slop, the only thing that breaks through is a brand that makes people give a damn… one of the rare women-owned creative agencies, less than 1% in the field."
"It's so clear what the point of view of this agency is. Even if I don't understand the how, I'm really intrigued that they have a clear POV on how to solve business problems."
— Jen MartindaleHybrid creative-plus-production shop, "no handoffs," "advertising your customers actually enjoy." Four greens — with a critique.
"I don't know if I need to enjoy the advertising. Is the job enjoyment? Some of the best advertising is completely controversial. I'm not there to be entertained."
— Russell BarnettJen caught the double meaning that saved it: "I took 'invite you in' as a double entendre — they invite their clients into the process. In-house teams are going to be a competitor for everyone in this room."
A stop-start audit of behaviors, not infrastructure. Before granting indies a single win, Anthony asked: what's the most frustrating thing agencies keep doing?
"I'm constantly getting inbound from agencies who think they have something to offer the Cubs. If you spent 15 minutes on ChatGPT understanding how we make money, you'd never say some of the things you're saying. I hit delete on every single one."
— Jen MartindaleKim: "Speed and the lean-in and the hustle. You get real razzle-dazzled with a holdco. And then it comes to actually getting speed to market, and it's challenging."
"When it's working with an independent — the team feels truly integrated, and you have the best of the best working on your business. Collectively we wouldn't have gotten there independently."
— Ashley FindlayThe contrast — the "finance tax" on holdco relationships: "Every time we do something slightly out of scope, I'm having a conversation about finances. That kills the momentum."
Russell's sharpest indie critique. He prefers CD-to-CMO, direct line. When it breaks:
"The challenge with independents is continuity on the people. You're bringing people in and out, training people over and over. Training is a cost center to me."
— Russell BarnettKim's fair credit: "In a pitch with a big holding company, they're a damn machine. They have dossiers on everyone in the room, and it's very formulaic." Then the counter: "The good part about the machine can be an opportunity for you to outsmart what that machine would deliver. How can you make it feel personal?"
Ashley gave the single cleanest indie differentiator of the session. This is the one to steal:
"My biggest frustration is when you get pitched this fantastic plan and the team that delivers under-delivers. So I only want the working team in the pitch. I don't want a pitch team. That's another way you can differentiate: we don't have a pitch team."
— Ashley FindlayAnthony gave the panel a choice: fire or heart. All four chose fire. Unanimously. But every answer came with a qualifier.
Ashley: "You're hiring an external partner to challenge you."
Russell: "It's my job internally to clear the way… if you bring me fire that creates value, we're all in."
Kim: "If you bring the strategy with the fire, now you're getting what you need."
Jen: "It's fire. But fire that comes with mutual trust, and a deep understanding of the business."
"They want to win an award for this. I'd love to win an award too. But when you're getting pressure from the CCO of the worldwide holding company, and it's clouding your judgment on the right thing for my business — I'm going to sniff it immediately."
— Jen MartindaleAshley stacked on it: "'We're not getting what we want from the brand team — let's go above their heads.' That's when it really kills the relationship."
"Stop talking about speed. Everybody can do things fast now. There's no value in speed anymore. If you can create speed with continuity, with connectivity in a way others can't — that gets interesting. But speed alone, everybody can do it."
— Russell BarnettKim's close, a restatement of "Know Who You Are": "Stop trying to do everything. If you know who you are and find that intersection with what the client needs, you're set up for success."
Jen played a nervous CMO who'd slept on a bold creative direction and wanted to pull back. Alex Goulart played the agency leader. He was warm. He listened. He offered to pivot. The panel's verdict was polite. Also pointed.
"A great boss once said great ideas should scare you. I wanted you to challenge her more — what do we need to bolster to get to that scared-excited space? She was coming from a place of safety. That's the role of the partner — to push out of that."
— Jen MartindaleThe uncomfortable truth: when a CMO gets cold feet, the agency's instinct is to protect the relationship by softening the ask. That instinct is wrong. The same four who chose fire over heart said the agency should have pushed harder, not softer.
The open question it leaves: where's the line between "reading the room" and "letting the CMO's anxiety kill the work"?
| Term | Who Named It | What It Means |
|---|---|---|
| Indie Tinder | Anthony Romano | Live audit of value props with no names attached. If yours can't get a green card from a CMO who's never heard of you, it's not doing its job. |
| The Bullshit Meter | Jen Martindale | Every CMO who came up agency-side has one. Calibrated to award-chasing, template pitches, and jargon. |
| The Fire Meter | Anthony | CMOs want fire over heart — but fire in service of business strategy, with mutual trust. Anything else reads as recklessness. |
| The Pitch Team Problem | Ashley Findlay | The team that pitches is not the team that runs it. "We don't have a pitch team" is a positioning statement. |
| The Financial Tax | Ashley | The implicit cost of a holdco relationship — every out-of-scope moment triggers a finance conversation. Indies win by absorbing it. |
| The Razzle Dazzle | Kim DeNapoli | Holdco pitch polish that doesn't translate into post-signing speed. |
| The Continuity Gap | Russell Barnett | The indie flex ("scale up, scale down") that reads from the client seat as constant retraining. |
| Speed Has Been Commoditized | Russell | "We move fast" is now the 2026 version of "full-service agency." Speed-plus-something is next. |
| The Award-Chasing Tell | Jen | The moment a CCO overrides brand strategy to push toward a case study. Ex-agency CMOs spot it immediately. |
| The 15-Minute Rule | Jen | The floor of cold outbound quality: 15 minutes on the brand's business model. Below it, you get deleted. |
"They want to fucking win an award for this campaign. I'm done with that."
— Jen Martindale"Stop talking about speed. There's no value in speed anymore."
— Russell Barnett"I don't want a pitch team. The people in this room are the people who will run your account."
— Ashley Findlay"Great ideas should scare you."
— Jen Martindale, quoting a former boss"If I see 'advertising sucks' one more time — stop bashing yourselves. It's what you do."
— Russell Barnett"'Narrative worlds' gave me an eye roll. What the fuck is that?"
— Jen Martindale"I hit delete on every single one of them."
— Jen Martindale, on cold outbound"The razzle-dazzle is great. Then it comes to actually getting speed to market, and it's challenging."
— Kim DeNapoliRead it out loud. Six seconds. If a CMO who's never heard of you can't name what you solve and for whom, rewrite it.
Everyone moves fast. Replace with speed-plus-something: continuity, insight, taste. Pick one.
Did you spend 15 minutes understanding the brand's revenue model before you sent? If not, rewrite them.
Say it out loud: "The people in this room are the people who will run your account." Then design your staffing so it's true.
"Narrative worlds." "Brand ecosystems." Pick the one you lean on hardest. Replace it with a concrete verb.
If the lead idea on your site is that your industry is broken, you're telling CMOs you're part of the problem.
Ashley's formula: "We are [DNA]. We do [capabilities] in service of it."
Am I pushing this because it's right for the brand, or right for a case study?
The indies Ashley loves earned it by being present without a scope in their hand.
If nothing in your deck makes anyone nervous, you're not pushing hard enough.
Don't pivot to softer until you've confirmed the problem is the work — not the nerves.
How many different people has the client met in 12 months? If it's climbing, you're eating the training cost.
Naming what you won't do is the same move as defining what you will.
This recap is part of the Indie Agency News Blueprint series — the premium content product built from our live events. You were told not to take notes. We meant it.
…Myra admitted out loud that she hadn't fired an agency she probably should have.
Mid-panel, Jonathan was asking about the "D word" — divorce. When does an agency-client relationship break? Myra — brand side at Fortune Brands now, 15+ years a creative before that — took a breath and said it.
"The team that initially won the business left the company. As hard as we tried, I don't think we ever filled their shoes. And that was uncomfortable. I probably should have just been like — it's time to fire us."
She laughed. Jonathan laughed. The room didn't — it leaned in. Every founder had lived the other side: holding on too long, watching a great client drift because the people who'd won the business were gone and nobody had the uncomfortable conversation.
Clients don't leave because the work went bad. They leave because nobody had the hard talk when the team changed.
Jonathan King framed the conversation as a love story — first date, DTR, scope as prenup, the six-month check-in, fighting, keeping the spice, divorce, dating again. The frame let everyone drop the professional armor.
The question underneath: what do brand-side marketers actually want from their agency partners — at every stage — that agencies keep getting wrong?
Energy: disarming. Jonathan set the ground rule in 90 seconds — "no sugar coating, be real" — and both took him up on it. Myra used therapy language on stage. Anup kept pulling it back to business outcomes. The session where marketers stopped performing "client" and started being people.
Green flags, red flags, what pulls brand-side to indies, and the foundational fight over whether a scope of work is a prenup or a trap.
Anup's green flag: curiosity about the business, not the brief. Myra's came from a different angle — LinkedIn as dating app.
"I like to see a green flag that an agency has thought leadership — they're posting on LinkedIn. I can see the way their brain works before we even get in a room. You're not suddenly surprised they don't look like their picture."
— Myra NussbaumAnup's three red flags: misrepresenting who you are, over-indexing on beautiful creative vs. business outcomes, and chronic people-pleasing.
"If you come in and are seen as a people pleaser, that's a red flag for me."
— Anup ShahMyra: "You have someone whose blood, sweat and tears are literally in it, as opposed to someone doing it as a job. I want to work with the people that have a lot invested."
"I love working with indies, because I know the person doing the pitch is also in the work — all throughout, shaping it, in the meetings."
— Anup ShahAnup, the operator: "Clarity on the problem. Clarity on the deliverables — what's in, what's out. Clarity on staffing. Those are the three things."
"I hate scopes of work. Agencies feel the pressure to hit a number by putting head counts against it. No prenup. I'm going in full trust. We're sharing a bank account, the whole deal."
— Myra NussbaumJonathan pulled an audience question: what if an agency tied 50% of its scope to business results? Both panelists killed it on the spot.
Myra: "I think it's crazy, do not do that. 50% is way too high. Even the best work may not work. But I like a strong KPI discussion."
Anup: "I love the intent. I'd worry whether the measures are directly linked to the work, and does it incentivize short-termism?"
From the six-month check-in through fighting, keeping the spice, divorce, and dating again — the moves senior marketers wish agencies would just make.
Both said text message before Jonathan finished the question.
"Informal, frequent. If you have good trust relationships, you're texting back and forth. The more often you connect, the better end product you'll get."
— Anup ShahMyra added: give creatives the ability to connect with clients directly — and check in when they go quiet.
"When they tell you, 'This is the best meeting of our week,' they're not fucking with you. It IS the best meeting. The pressures are intense."
— Myra NussbaumMyra's first-weeks anecdote at Fortune Brands — a senior leader said "I don't really get what you do" to her face.
"I've been prepping and hyping this campaign with sales teams, engineers, FP&A — groups I didn't know existed. Even asking your client, 'How can I help you sell this in — a sizzle video?' would be great."
— Myra NussbaumAnup echoed it: "Every other function — they're closet marketers. The more you help your brand teams with data on why this works, the more effective they'll be selling it in."
"When work gets killed, it's usually not because the work wasn't good. It was because of misalignment on the problem, or on what we're trying to achieve."
— Anup ShahMyra's tactic: work the strategic idea, then encourage your client to pre-sell the strategy up the chain before you get to the campaign. "Pre-selling on both sides is really effective."
Myra's agency-side story — a new CCO forced her to bring award-chasing work to a longtime client she knew would hate it. After the meeting, the client called:
"'So what was that? I feel like you were a Stepford wife in there. I didn't recognize you.' You don't make your spats at the dinner party. You call them and have it out."
— Myra NussbaumAnup: "Be honest, be direct, but don't let issues fester. It's a small problem that gets to be a big problem later."
"There's a fine line between trust and complacency. You want trust, but you don't want to get so comfortable you become complacent."
— Anup ShahMyra: "Try something new. Focus on earned media, big brand ideas, PR. Then pitch provocatively. Even without budget, pitch it."
"There's a newer PR agency called Honeymoon. They're built on the premise of always keeping it in the honeymoon phase. It should feel natural to want to keep it fresh."
— Myra NussbaumAnup: "It's on the brand team to also push the agency to keep it fresh. It's a two-way street."
"Where agencies weren't working out is because you had so much turnover at the senior and junior level. The agency wasn't forthright about the issues, and that led to a breakup. A lot of that can be overcome with good communication."
— Anup Shah"My inbox — I have custom GPTs to kick out all the AI sales pitches. Honeymoon came from a referral — a good pitch line, the deck told the story clearly. Make it hooky. Make your packaging as provocative as the work you do."
— Myra NussbaumAnup: "Speak the language of business. Tie the work to measurable business outcomes."
The real disagreement came early — between Anup and Myra — on the scope of work itself.
Anup wanted the prenup detailed. Myra wanted none of it:
"I hate scopes of work. I'm going in full trust. We're sharing a bank account, the whole deal."
— Myra NussbaumThat's uncomfortable because agencies build their entire commercial practice around what Anup said — and half their clients run Myra's model in parallel. Default to Anup's framework with a Myra and you feel bureaucratic. Default to Myra's with an Anup and you're in the six-month fight Anup was trying to prevent.
The open question it leaves: what's the first-meeting question that surfaces whether a client is a Myra or an Anup?
| Term | Who Named It | What It Means |
|---|---|---|
| The Love Cycle Frame | Jonathan | First date → DTR → prenup → six-month check-in → fighting → keeping spice → divorce → dating again. Name the stage you're in. |
| LinkedIn Is The Dating App | Myra | Your thought-leadership presence is the pre-date swipe. Online and in-person selves have to match. |
| Closet Marketers | Anup | Every non-marketing function has a marketing opinion. Your client sells to all of them. Arm her accordingly. |
| Stepford Wife Presentation | Myra | The pitch you deliver because your agency made you, not because you believe it. Kills trust. |
| Pre-Selling On Both Sides | Myra | Agency pre-sells strategy up the client's ladder; agency pre-sells client internally. Nobody's surprised. |
| Trust vs. Complacency | Anup | Year-two killer. Trust built in year one becomes complacency if nobody keeps the work provocative. |
| The Honeymoon Problem | Myra | Keeping a mature relationship in the honeymoon phase is both sides' job — usually only the agency worries. |
| Fire Us | Myra | The admission a client almost never makes. The agency that earns the right to say it first wins the next pitch. |
| The Sell-Through Kit | Myra | Sizzle, one-pager, internal deck. The unbuilt indie deliverable. Make it without being asked. |
| The 48-Hour Departure Alert | Anup | When senior people roll off, the client hears from you first — names, backgrounds, handoff plan. |
"I'm going in full trust. We're sharing a bank account, the whole deal."
— Myra Nussbaum"When they tell you, 'This is the best meeting of our week,' they're not fucking with you."
— Myra Nussbaum"You don't make your spats at the dinner party. You call them and have it out."
— Myra Nussbaum"I probably should have just been like — it's time to fire us."
— Myra Nussbaum"If you come in and are seen as a people pleaser, that's a red flag for me."
— Anup Shah"When work gets killed, it's usually not because the work wasn't good. It was misalignment on the problem."
— Anup Shah"There's a fine line between trust and complacency."
— Anup Shah"I love working with indies, because I know the person doing the pitch is also in the work."
— Anup ShahIf your in-person self doesn't match the person on the feed, fix the feed before the next pitch.
Full-trust, hate-the-scope — or clarity-on-problem-deliverable-staffing? Ask in meeting one. Customize the contract accordingly.
Senior marketers read it as naïve or manipulative. Replace it with a strong KPI conversation.
Before creative credentials: distribution, sales pressure, CEO headache.
The creative-to-client text is where the best briefs get written.
Four business days of silence → someone sends the "how can we help" text. A wellness check, not a status ask.
Sizzle, one-pager, internal deck. Treat every client as someone selling the work to thirty people she doesn't love.
If your client's comfortable bringing you to the President/CEO at strategy stage, offer it.
If the brief is internal politics dressed as a brief, decline or rewrite.
Not a scope extension. A provocation. Trust-vs-complacency defense.
When a senior person rolls off, the client hears from you first — names, backgrounds, handoff plan.
Most breakups are unspoken months before they're formal. Name the problem while you can still fix it.
If your tagline, deck, and LinkedIn are weaker than the work you pitch, fix yours first.
This recap is part of the Indie Agency News Blueprint series — the premium content product built from our live events. You were told not to take notes. We meant it.
…Alan said the quiet part out loud about how indie mergers actually start.
DNA had long-term retainers, a strong account shop, and a hole where creative ownership should be. Building that muscle from scratch meant new hires, new risk, no guarantee. And there was another agency in town that kept beating them on the work. So the two founders had a conversation.
"I think what we said was, 'We're gonna kill 'em or buy 'em.' So we said, 'Let's go have a drink.'"
He expected a polite exit. Instead it kicked off a year-long conversation that became DNA's merger with Hands of Stone — the biggest bet in 26 years of running an agency, and "the biggest payoff for our company that we ever made."
The boldest growth bets don't start in a deck. They start in a bar, between two founders who already know what they're missing.
Session 4a opened Block 4 with a question nobody wanted to answer generically: what is the single biggest bet you've made on your business — build, buy, merge, or stay — and what did you actually learn once you placed it?
Moderated by Lori Murphee of Evalla Advisors, who sits between agencies and the strategic, PE, and independent paths they might take.
Energy: more operator than pundit. Fewer laughs than Block 1, more notebooks open. The block where founders who run P&Ls talked about the decisions they'd already made and the ones they couldn't take back.
Lori asked each operator for the single biggest bet they'd made. What came back wasn't a deck — it was founder-level honesty about mergers, survival pivots, and the middle lane.
"These are a couple of guys in town with a small independent agency, and they had the exact opposite problem we did. Their problem was scale, and ours was we felt creative. So it started a year-long conversation about how we could put our companies together."
— Alan Brown"Making the decision about our big bet, it was more about survival. Anybody who looks at media consumption knows linear TV is declining. That was a survival imperative, to keep up with the industry."
— Jane Crisan"There's thousands of independent agencies — many really great creative boutiques — but we see them cautious about getting into media or data. We're not. Above that, we see the holding companies deeply in those positions — but with trust, attention, transparency issues. Right there in the middle is what we call Indie Amplified."
— Britton Upham"We thought we had it all figured out — mission, vision, values, culture. But what people experienced was: mom got married overnight and stepdad's moving in, and it's like, 'Who the hell is that guy?'"
— Alan BrownThe fallout: culture became a year-long work-in-progress. And the business-model mismatch — DNA retainer-heavy and full-time; Hands of Stone primarily freelance — was a whole second integration problem.
"Going from two owners in each company to four owners now — how do decisions get made, who makes the call? Having clear swim lanes and clear ways decisions get made is super important."
— Alan Brown"The easiest is the back office. It's the less dramatic, but it takes a lot longer than you think to integrate a shop into your infrastructure. We still have some things that aren't fully integrated."
— Jane CrisanSelf-funding vs. PE, change-management timelines, AI adoption, and the quiet signal that it's time to go shopping.
"We're self-funded, and that presents a challenge — you have to fund at the speed of acquisitions and other M&A or PE. That's a concern right out of the gates."
— Britton Upham"Nobody's gonna like to hear this. Everything takes three to five years to really infiltrate back into the culture. To get a big ship moving, it takes a while. Change management has become a big word in our shop."
— Jane Crisan"We thought, 'we're gonna bring everybody in five times per year.' Every time we'd set up something around it — it could be $75,000 a pop. These investments are not sustainable at that level."
— Britton UphamMcGarrah Jessee runs flexible now — ~60 in Austin, ~40 across 22 cities. "We refer to it as turning our creativity onto ourselves."
"We hired two AI engineers and a program manager, stood them up as an innovation team. Their whole purpose was to go desk to desk across the agency and interview people about what in your day you'd classify as busy work."
— Britton UphamThe finance example: closing the books takes a week. "What if that were two days? Trade back time for gray matter — for strategic and creative work."
"I'd like to not call it failures but learnings. There are areas we tried to build and are not building at the rate we'd like. Those are the areas we're looking at a strategic partnership or acquisition, because we want scale faster."
— Jane Crisan"What are your ingredients? If you rearrange them or change the portion size, what could you create? We have data science, media, creative, strategy. You could focus those on other industries or adjacent industries."
— Britton UphamHe invoked Amazon's vertical-integration logic — rent out the systems you built, open the aperture on where the minds in your building can go.
"Everybody advised us not to do it, because it's never gonna work out. If hindsight's 20/20 — with partners like I have with this acquisition, absolutely. This is the third time we made a run at one; the other two weren't the right one. It's all a matter of who it is, what it is."
— Alan Brown"For agencies looking to build through acquisition — I love that. But it's really hard and it's important to have somebody who can focus on it. Time kills all deals. Really know that's what you want to do, and get help to do it."
— Lori MurpheeThe real disagreement wasn't loud. It was structural — and it sat between Britton and Jane.
Britton went all-in on self-funded independence, framing PE and external capital as risks to culture, transparency, and the staff's paycheck through Fair Share. Jane, without pushing back directly, made a quietly confident case that PE had been a 17-plus-year partner — "they're great partners, and they mostly let us run our business" — and that it enabled the acquisitions, the converged-TV pivot, and the ability to go shopping again.
Two agencies can be "indie" in the IAN sense — founder-owned, creatively self-directed, culturally integrated — with completely different funding structures underneath. Both models are producing the work.
The open question it leaves: where does "indie" end and "PE-backed indie" begin — for the IAN definition, for clients, for talent?
| Term | Who Named It | What It Means |
|---|---|---|
| Kill 'Em Or Buy 'Em | Alan | The honest opening of an indie-to-indie merger conversation. If you're losing to them, the question's on the table whether you know it or not. |
| Indie Amplified | Britton / McGarrah Jessee | The deliberate middle lane between creative boutique and holdco: indies that actually build their own media and data. |
| Converged TV | Jane / Rain | CTV + linear + digital video + analytics. A survival pivot, not a trend deck. |
| The Mom Got Married Overnight | Alan | How staff experiences a merger no matter how well-planned the all-hands is. Plan for the feeling. |
| Clear Swim Lanes | Alan | In a four-owner structure, the decision architecture is the culture. Write it, publish it, enforce it. |
| Learnings, Not Failures — Then Go Shopping | Jane | When the internal build is too slow, that's the signal to look at a partnership or acquisition. |
| Lead With The Benefit | Britton (on AI) | AI adoption as a desk-to-desk gift-giving program. Find busy work, return gray-matter time, let adoption follow. |
| Ingredients, Rearranged | Britton | Data + creative + strategy pointed at an adjacent industry. Same capability, new menu. |
| Time Kills All Deals | Lori | Every week a deal slows, it gets riskier. M&A needs a named internal owner, not a side-of-desk assignment. |
"I think what we said was, 'We're gonna kill 'em or buy 'em. So let's go have a drink.'"
— Alan Brown"For us, it was more about survival. That was just a survival imperative."
— Jane Crisan"Right there in the middle is what we call Indie Amplified."
— Britton Upham"Mom got married overnight and stepdad's moving in, and it's like, 'Who the hell is that guy?'"
— Alan Brown"Everything takes three to five years to really infiltrate back into the culture."
— Jane Crisan"These investments are not sustainable at that level to bring everyone in physically."
— Britton Upham"Trade back time for gray matter, for strategic and creative work."
— Britton Upham"Time kills all deals."
— Lori MurpheeIf your team can't answer "what if the plan breaks?" you don't have a plan. You have a budget.
If yours takes three paragraphs, you haven't decided yet.
What gap can you not close? What gap can they not close? If the Venn is clean, have the drink.
If it's in secular decline, your three-year plan is a repositioning plan. Start now.
Don't let the trade-off be invisible. Make it a company decision.
Who decides what, which meeting, on what cadence. Re-publish quarterly.
Your change-management plan and your long-range plan are the same document.
Engineers + a PM. First 90 days is desk-to-desk interviews, not a tool rollout.
Tracked build rate × capability importance = your shopping list.
"The founders" is not an answer — one name is.
Fewer, more intentional convenings beat more, diluted ones. Build the rituals that survive.
Which three core capabilities, aimed at which adjacent industry, could become a new revenue line without a new hire?
All three are viable. Only one is what you tell your people.
This recap is part of the Indie Agency News Blueprint series — the premium content product built from our live events. You were told not to take notes. We meant it.
…the moderator asked whether clients were finally pushing back on margins.
Every head tilted the same way. Lauren first — "Not yet. The questions are being asked. Nobody's putting enough pressure to actually act on it." Jaime next — "Yeah, same, not yet." Then Rachel flipped the frame:
"It's not downward pressure. It's almost an upward lens — actually, I want to see the work get better. I want to see you respond faster because of these tools."
That's the whole block in three answers. The margin squeeze is not here yet. The expectation upgrade already is.
Session 4a covered the M&A and holdco-side bets. Session 4b went inside the indie shop and asked the two questions every principal is losing sleep over.
What does a modern media operation actually look like inside an indie — in-house, outsourced, hybrid, freelance? And what is AI really doing to the work, the team, the client, and the margin?
Forty-five minutes. Four panelists. One moderator from a preferred partner (Pathlabs). No slides.
Energy: quieter than the pitch-room sessions. Operators comparing notes — a freelancer who didn't show, a CFO who built a cash-flow dashboard in a week and a half, a meta auto-optimizer trying to ruin a campaign. Heads nodding, pens moving.
Four operators on in-house vs. outsource. No two answers the same. A posture shift, five years underway, finally spoken out loud.
Lauren opened with the line every media principal had been waiting for someone else to say. Left Hand has invested hard in training protocols and systems — repeatable without being formulaic.
Four years ago Stolz brought media fully in-house. Over 18 months, media revenue declined through client changes. Now, another decision point.
"The overhead we would need to continue to buy media in the way our clients deserve — it's a challenge."
— Jaime Ekman, StolzCorner Table needed the revenue and didn't know what else to do. So they went freelance-only.
"They didn't show up. We'd committed things, we had important relationships relying on this. Yes, we figured it out. But being in that spot early gave us a sense of — we rely on freelancers, we have a great bench — we also need full-time resources who can back that up."
— Rachel Brandt, Corner Table Creative"It used to be we were very particular about doing everything ourselves. We would not partner. Everybody was a competitor. We have massively shifted on that point of view over the last five years."
— Kyle EckhartWhat replaced it: a dedicated task force reviewing potential partners — part for evolving their business, part because clients keep asking, "Who does the best work in this space?"
Ten moments later, the sharpest indie positioning on AI this year was sitting on the panel — and nobody had pitched it as positioning.
They don't use AI for planning. They use it for validation — running the finished proposal through CMO-brain prompts: what are the white spaces? What will the client ask?
"It's not replaced any people at our agency yet. And I don't plan on it."
— Lauren Ridgley"Our creative team likes to talk about how you can get a whole lot more bad ideas out of the gate, and just get rid of those so you can get to the good ideas faster."
— Jaime Ekman, quoting her creative teamOn tool churn: "So many AI tools we've tried are now out of business. It's moving so fast. The key is trying as much as you can, seeing what sticks."
Rachel's own Financial Dashboard, built in a week and a half by her fractional CFO. Cash flow, plan vs. actuals, per-client forecast, profit margin, invoice status. Then they added agents.
"I can ask, 'Did they pay their invoice? How are we doing this month?' And it answers in real time. It's integrated into our Slack."
— Rachel Brandt, Corner Table CreativeNot a cost saving — a creativity unlock. "It's reshaping how I think about tools for our clients. What's the dashboard my client needs to see right now?"
First they put a policy in place. Then they realized nobody was experimenting. So they added process and tools to give people the latitude to experiment.
"We want it to happen organically through team-based tasks — not pushed down from the top to say 'you're going to use AI for this thing.'"
— Kyle EckhartThe ROI story: "Our CTO saw a demonstration of a tool we were paying for and said, 'I think I could build it.' He built it over the weekend. Now we're productizing it."
"Before, you could send a report and own the narrative of whether it's good or bad. Now our clients are downloading all the media data, and the level of questions has leveled up significantly. If our people didn't use AI to analyze the data too, it'd be bad for us."
— Mario Schulzke, PathlabsCreative side: nervousness, not much client expectation. Media side: "How are you using AI to drive efficiencies in my business?" — on a regular basis.
"It's allowing us to do more, not less. It's allowing our people to do more with their jobs in the space of creativity and curiosity."
— Kyle Eckhart"We work in partnership with brands and creative agencies who do tremendous work — and then meta can come in and totally fuck it up with their AI automation. We're very protective of how we set up campaigns, because there are brand identities at stake. We talk a lot about when we do not want AI to take control, because it makes things worse."
— Rachel BrandtLauren: "Not yet. Nobody's putting enough pressure to act on it."
Jaime: "Yeah, same, not yet."
Rachel: "It's not downward pressure. It's an upward lens — I want to see the work get better, respond faster."
Lauren: "They know how to use AI better than us. Teaching them to prompt is easy; the strategic thinking behind what they're asking is where they need to work."
Kyle: "Use-case demonstration. A little road show to inspire teams to share use cases with each other."
Jaime: "Now AI does note-taking and reporting, we can get younger team members into the work faster. We're aligning our internship program with our pro bono program so they're actually working."
Rachel: "They're thinking, 'here's an idea I can bring to the client,' instead of 'where can I find that answer?' I'm inspired by them every day."
On a stage last year, a very large agency said their ambition was to take their operation from 2,000 people to two people.
"We're now going to just start focusing on people as our positioning, and underpin with technology that helps them. It's a people business, and we want to stay that way."
— Kyle EckhartNo shouting match — a quieter, bigger structural disagreement about what in-house means.
Jaime: full in-house media, built four years ago, is now a cost structure she's questioning. Kyle (larger integrated shop): the five-year shift has been away from "do everything ourselves" toward a dedicated partnership function — more partners, not fewer. Rachel: the hybrid compromise, because one-track models are fragile.
There is no right answer to in-house vs. outsource. There is only the right answer for this quarter, this client mix, this complexity level. The agencies treating it as a once-and-done decision are going to get caught.
The open question it leaves: how often should a principal formally re-evaluate their media operating model, and what are the trigger conditions?
| Term | Who Named It | What It Means |
|---|---|---|
| "Yes, No" | Rachel | The sound of an indie saying yes to revenue they shouldn't, before they've built the system. |
| Validation, Not Planning | Lauren | The mature use of AI in media: stress-testing the finished plan against the CMO brain before the client does. |
| Bad-Idea Disposal | Jaime / her creative team | AI's real creative-side job: burning through obvious options fast so the team gets to interesting ones. |
| Organic AI Adoption | Kyle | AI rollouts that come up from the team identifying friction, not down from leadership mandating usage. |
| Turn AI Off On Purpose | Rachel | A deliverable. Opting out of platform auto-optimizations to protect the brand work clients pay for. |
| "People, Underpinned By Technology" | Kyle | The cleanest indie positioning against holdcos chasing the "2,000-to-2" headcount story. |
| The Smarter Client Problem | Pathlabs moderator | Clients read their own data with AI before the call. Arrive with only the agency narrative and you lose. |
| The In-House Re-Decision | Jaime | In-house media is not a destination. It's a posture, re-evaluated every 12–18 months. |
| The Weekend Build | Kyle | Your CTO watching a SaaS demo and saying "I could build that" — now a real business-model event. |
| The Expectation Is Uneven | Kyle | Creative clients are nervous about AI. Media clients want evidence. Two conversations, two scripts. |
"It's never been more complicated to buy media."
— Lauren Ridgley"We said 'yes, no.'"
— Rachel Brandt"In the way that our clients deserve — it's a challenge."
— Jaime Ekman"Everybody was a competitor. Everybody was trying to use our data. We have massively shifted on that."
— Kyle Eckhart"It's not replaced any people at our agency yet. And I don't plan on it."
— Lauren Ridgley"A whole lot more bad ideas out of the gate, so you can get to the good ideas faster."
— Jaime Ekman"Meta can just come in and totally fuck it up with their AI automation."
— Rachel Brandt"Our clients are a lot smarter now."
— Mario Schulzke"It's a people business, and we want to stay that way."
— Kyle EckhartEvery 12–18 months. Put it on the books. Make the posture yours.
"You are the CMO. What questions would you ask? What's missing? What will you push back on first?" — before the client does.
At indie scale: one person, one spreadsheet. Clients are asking who else you know.
Make "here's where we turned AI off, and why" a line item in your next client QBR.
Pick the spreadsheet you hate most. Start there.
Don't teach AI. Collect use cases. Let the best ones spread laterally.
The report-prep and note-taking job is gone. Align the internship to a pro bono client from day one.
A senior and a junior, 30 minutes a week. Junior teaches prompt-craft. Senior teaches strategic framing.
Everyone said "not yet." The pressure's coming. Model it now so you're not negotiating blind.
Creative clients want reassurance. Media clients want evidence. The wrong script is a tell.
If it worked for your CFO view, it works for a brand-performance view.
Arrive with your narrative AND the data's narrative, or the meeting's not yours anymore.
Or your version. Kyle's answer to "2,000 to 2" is the sector's cleanest AI counter-positioning. Claim it.
This recap is part of the Indie Agency News Blueprint series — the premium content product built from our live events. You were told not to take notes. We meant it.
…Sharon said the quiet part out loud: this was the only session standing between you and the open bar.
And then she pulled the room closer anyway. Because the thing she, Lori, and Paul were about to walk through — the invisible invoice, the talent trap, the IP treasure hunt — is the part of the work that quietly eats your margin, poisons your client relationships, and occasionally torches a multi-million-dollar campaign before it goes live.
The opener was a fake brief: Golden Organic Popcorn, a World Cup tie-in, a retired soccer player, a celebrity chef, a licensed song. $225K budget. Then Paul started adding up what wasn't on the page.
"That $225,000 budget can go up to $300 really quick."
The budget you showed your client isn't the budget. The contract you signed isn't the deal. The talent you booked isn't the person who walks on set.
Protecting the work means pricing, papering, and planning for all of it — before the client sees the number.
Session 5 ran as three walk-throughs with heavy audience participation, candy bribes included:
The Invisible Invoice — every cost in a celebrity/influencer deal not in your budget. The Talent Trap — bad behavior, morals clauses, brands behaving worse than talent. The IP Treasure Hunt — a hypothetical campaign dissected for every piece of IP it generates, AI included.
Energy: loose, a little tired (last session of the day), but candid. The candy bribes worked. Once one person raised a hand with a horror story, three more followed. More working group than panel.
Sharon set the fake brief. Lori and Paul walked the numbers, the contracts, and the people. It turned into a string of unprintable on-set stories.
"Megan Rapinoe is 150, Guy eats up the rest. Then SAG fees — pension and health, payroll, taxes. Right there, you're above budget. Add glam, makeup, groomer, travel. And often the talent will ask you to pay their publicist to vet the media. That $225,000 budget can go up to $300 really quick."
— Paul WilliamsLori's add: a past Super Bowl campaign had SAG side costs — ~18.5% of talent fee, over a million dollars — accidentally deleted from the budget by a brand director.
"Get the brand on board that this creator is creating the content as a work for hire, which you're licensing throughout that term. When the term is over, the creator retains the right to it — but can't use it without your approval."
— Paul WilliamsSharon: "Just because you can own the IP doesn't mean you need to, or that it has commercial value. Factor that into what you're willing to pay for it."
"They want the contract signed now and the talent exclusive throughout the term. But the talent's pushing back — if they sign today, it's almost a 10-month term. So we're massaging through that now."
— Paul WilliamsLori's set piece. A-list celebrity, shooting in Spanish, Long Island mansion. Red flags: a $35K/day untested glam team as a "trial run"; weeks fighting about travel; and on set, the talent called the product "shit" in Spanish — the brand's business lead understood.
"It was a joke, according to the rep, and they took it very seriously. A huge effort managing both sides. I got the talent manager to apologize and cuddle the client a bit. They extended by another year — so clearly it wasn't bad enough."
— Lori GoldenPaul's add: all talent deals with personality are a hurricane. Their job is to sit in the middle and be the calm.
"The deal was four hours on set. Then two hours. Then 30 minutes. Two days before, 30 minutes became nine minutes. The day before, nine minutes became zero. We had all the production equipment leased. Massive fight about who pays."
— Anonymous agency attendeeSharon's story: a campaign launched, old racially inflammatory content resurfaced, termination same day. Paul's story is the one to memorize:
"The client was dead set on not including the morals clause. 'This guy will never do anything.' Boom — six months later, huge thing. They'd put it in before he signed. Without it, they'd have been on the hook for multi-million dollars. If there's one thing you leave with, include that morals clause."
— Paul WilliamsSharon: "It's not always about illegal or immoral. Sometimes it's them taking a stand where the brand wants to be neutral. These clauses are written to provide a lot of discretion to the brand." Lori raised the reverse — sophisticated reps now ask for mutual morals clauses.
Creative approved, contracts signed. Then the brand and agency quietly changed the creative, asked talent to wear something she hadn't agreed to, added an unapproved prop, kept her nine hours on a two-day shoot, had her read a line 200 times. They wanted 50 more.
"The account director and brand said, 'We're paying X, she's going to do what we say and leave.' I had to jump between the agent and the account director. We still had another day to shoot. We figured it out."
— Paul WilliamsA hypothetical insurance campaign — social, influencer, direct response, a microsite with a proprietary quote calculator, original names and taglines, celebrity testimonials, people-on-the-street. The prompt: find all the IP. Candy for every landmine spotted.
Zanger called the first one. Sharon: "Trademarkable, ideally — but need to be cleared first. You don't want a name or tagline that causes confusion with another product in a similar category." The layer agencies forget: logos, jingles, sonic trademarks carry both copyright and trademark implications.
"This may be software proprietary to the agency — they built the back end, own it, used it for multiple clients — but they're licensing it to the brand. That's an IP transaction. The look and feel of the microsite is subject to copyright protection too."
— Sharon Toerek"A creator and an influencer are not always the same thing. You can be an influencer without creating much, because you have a platform. And a creator without much influence. You need to work both of those out in an agreement — they have different IP implications."
— Sharon ToerekAny interview or ambient capture — a game, a concert, a street corner — requires name-image-likeness releases. Not just the big talent — the background.
"The tech created to accomplish that is probably protectable IP. But there are also data-privacy issues in the use of that data — not IP issues, but legal issues the campaign will have to deal with."
— Sharon Toerek"First, whether you might be infringing someone else's IP, which is almost impossible to know in advance. Who's responsible if it happens mistakenly? And second, who, if anybody, can own the rights to whatever comes out of generative AI?"
— Sharon ToerekOn ownability: "How much human creation on top of AI output makes it ownable? There is no amount. You can own the human-created elements if you identify them clearly. Documentation is key. But there's no magic percentage."
"Brands are starting to flex on synthetic performers and duplications of likenesses. No talent worth their salt will agree to have their image replicated for multiple reasons in an indefinite period without more compensation. Don't be surprised if these are conversations you start having."
— Sharon ToerekThe audience kept expecting a cleaner answer to "how do you protect against this?" Paul and Lori kept refusing to give one. A lot of this cannot be planned for. It has to be absorbed.
"There's so much going on. The IAT wants everything, CMOs want everything, talent wants everything. The director has his own agenda. The agents have their own agenda. What Lori and I do is sit in the middle and try to be the calm."
— Paul Williams"The best partnerships are when both sides look at each other as a partner. If it feels like we're paying you like buying a product versus paying a person, that's when relationship things go wrong."
— Lori GoldenThe legal paper is necessary but insufficient. The real protection is the person who has the relationships to de-escalate at 2 AM. If the answer to "who plays that role on your team?" is "nobody, I guess me," that's a business-model problem, not a staffing one.
| Term | Who Named It | What It Means |
|---|---|---|
| The Invisible Invoice | Sharon | Every cost in a celebrity/influencer deal not on the budget line — SAG, payroll, glam, travel, publicist vetting. Assume 30%+ above your quoted talent fee. |
| The Talent Trap | Sharon / Paul / Lori | The gap between what a contract says talent will deliver and what happens on set. Managed with backups, diligence on reps, and relationship muscle. |
| The Hurricane | Paul | Any celebrity deal in active production — IAT, CMO, talent, director, agent, publicist, each with an agenda. Your job is to be the calm. |
| Mutual Morals Clause | Lori / Sharon | Morals clauses should now run both ways. Refusing signals only one side has a reputation to protect. |
| Quantitative + Qualitative Data | Paul | Audience-fit data tells you who the right talent is. Qualitative data — how they treat crews, whether they're late — tells you whether you can use them. |
| Work For Hire With Reversion | Paul | Middle path on influencer content: creator makes it work-for-hire, brand licenses for the term, talent retains the asset after but can't redeploy without approval. |
| The Documented Human Layer | Sharon | The only path to ownable IP in a world of generative AI. You can't own the AI output. You might own what you provably added. |
| Synthetic Likeness Rights | Sharon | The next frontier. Rights to digitally replicate a performer beyond the original capture. A separate line item — or the lawsuit. |
"That $225,000 budget can go up to $300 really quick, and if you're not managing expectations up front, you'll get caught with egg on your face."
— Paul Williams"It's better for the brand and the agency if the talent has sophisticated representation — you can cut to the chase a lot quicker."
— Sharon Toerek"I equate all talent influencer deals with a lot of personality as sort of like a hurricane."
— Paul Williams"If there's one thing you could leave here with — include that morals clause. Every single agreement."
— Paul Williams"It's not always about the talent doing something illegal or immoral. Sometimes it's a stand where the brand wants to be neutral."
— Sharon Toerek"If it feels like we're paying you like buying a product versus paying a person, that's when relationship things go wrong."
— Lori Golden"There is no amount. You can own the human-created elements if you identify them clearly. Documentation is key."
— Sharon Toerek"Just because you can own the IP doesn't mean you need to, or that it has commercial value. Factor that into what you're willing to pay."
— Sharon ToerekSeparate lines for SAG pension and health, payroll fees and taxes, glam/wardrobe, travel, and publicist vetting. Stop folding them into "talent."
Costs nothing to include. Can save you seven figures. Write it broadly enough to cover public stances, not just criminal behavior.
Use Paul's exact structure. Stop negotiating full buyouts you don't need.
They're different rights. Your contract probably treats them the same. Fix it.
The client falls in love with the backup once they hear what's wrong with the A-list pick.
Not the same thing. Pad the usage window. If the client wants to sign early, charge for the extra exclusivity months.
Also the external-facing one. Share both with clients. When the next RFP asks, you're already there.
Client acknowledges your use, confirms their policies allow it, accepts that training-data risk isn't something you can warrant.
Screenshots of prompts, revision notes, named human contributors. If ownership is ever contested, that paper trail is your only defense.
Names/taglines cleared. Microsite code licensed vs. transferred. N.I.L. releases on the clipboard. Jingles double-registered. Synthetic likeness rights addressed. Run the treasure hunt on your own campaign before the client does.
This recap is part of the Indie Agency News Blueprint series — the premium content product built from our live events. You were told not to take notes. We meant it.
…Anthony stopped, looked at the room, and admitted it.
"Over my career, I have sat in the safe, comfortable middle too much. So often you hear the word fine, or that will do, or that's okay. And for an indie agency, that's not where you should be."
He'd just come off Session 1. He had a book out — Eat the Donkey — and a Kirkus review pending. He could have given the victory-lap talk. He didn't.
Instead he told the room the safest thing an indie can do is be forgettable in the middle — the most dangerous place he ever sat. And then the question that doesn't have an easy answer:
"If you are everything, you are nothing."
That's it. That's the talk.
The rest is the mechanism — Foundation Theory, pressure-tested against Amazon, Airbnb, Starbucks, Porsche, Patagonia — for doing something about it.
Two halves: Foundation Theory (what it is, how the big companies use it, why agency decks are indistinguishable, why AI makes that worse) and How Clients Actually Buy (long-term vs. short-term, procurement, "dumb fuckery," and why opinion beats options).
Energy: quiet, forward-leaning. Anthony was doing the thing he was telling the room to do — having a strong, specific, slightly uncomfortable opinion and not apologizing for it.
What Amazon, Airbnb, Starbucks, and Porsche actually share — and why most agencies don't.
"Over my career, I have sat in the safe, comfortable middle too much. So often you hear 'fine,' or 'that will do.' For an indie agency, that's not where you should be. You should come with a very strong point of view about life."
— Anthony Reeves"I can't remember anything about those agencies, except two things. One is the guy from Jones is an Australian. The second is, there was a group whose work was absolutely phenomenal. But they are assholes."
— Anthony ReevesThe diagnosis: "Every font, I guarantee, was a version of a sans font. The color of the year was purple or red. Every deck was the same. Especially now we have AI, it's all going to be the same."
"What is that one thread you can stand on? The one thing that sticks in the mind of a client all the way through? It's not people, it's not even the work. It's got to be your foundations as a company — what's at your core."
— Anthony ReevesThe confession that followed: "Marketing agencies — we are the worst at marketing ourselves. We are horrible at it."
Anthony pieced it together while leaving Amazon and working on Airbnb: "Amazon has 1.6 million people all aligned to the direction the company goes. Imagine if you can get all your team heading the same direction."
"It's not about the food. The food has to be great. It's not about the service — it has to be five-star. But they had the foundation of who they really wanted to be."
— Anthony Reeves"Another confession: Doug is an awesome guy. I forgot his birthday, and I feel really bad. So make sure you give him a hug and wish him happy birthday."
— Anthony ReevesIt belongs here because it's the demonstration of the argument — a small, specific, human, self-deprecating thing done in public, mid-keynote.
Anthony now sits client-side on a cola company. From that chair, he named the single biggest anxiety in the CMO seat — and it is not AI.
"If anyone comes in talking about AI at the moment, they are out the door very quickly. It's not headcount, not people. The biggest fear we have as a company is what's happening in the long term."
— Anthony ReevesThe specifics: "We needed 2,500 assets. Anyone can pump those out with Adobe now. That's the easy part, and there's no money in it. Where we struggle is that long term."
"Dumb fuckery is a new word. I love it so much. But the internal dumb fuckery that goes on inside of a business is absolutely phenomenal."
— Anthony ReevesHis advice: ask the questions clients aren't asking themselves. "The more questions you ask, the more you make them think — is this the right call, has everyone signed off, is the CEO aligned?"
"For an indie agency, you should not be going in saying 'we're full service, we'll do everything.' It's too hard, too complicated. When you say full service, what does it mean?"
— Anthony ReevesThe counter-example: "Airbnb doesn't own a whole pie. They don't do hotels. Amazon tried a lot — the Fire Phone was a phenomenal error — but they stuck to their core: customer experience over everything."
"Tell me about a time when you're two hours before a presentation and realize what you're presenting is incorrect. What do you do? The answer is clearly you say no and don't present the work."
— Anthony ReevesExtended to agencies: "If you say, 'we don't do that because of these reasons,' the amount of trust you build further down the path is astronomical."
"Get Naked talks about the difference between selling and solving. When you walk into a client, solving the problem immediately gets you away from the selling side of the business."
— Anthony Reeves"Options aren't going to win the day. Having an opinion is. We are paid for opinions as marketers. All we have is an opinion."
— Anthony ReevesBacked by the Verizon / AT&T story: every time they gave customers more phone choices, response rates dropped. His advice: "You can be nice about it. You don't have to be a dick about it. But having opinions is really important."
"Now is your time to have a really strong opinion, a really strong voice, and you are going to rise. There's going to be a huge rise of the indies. This time 2027, it's going to be swelling even further."
— Anthony ReevesHe named the economic shift: "The money's moved away from hourly rates, away from margins. Get out of those conversations and have a very strong opinion."
"Everyone has to put food on the table, everyone has a mortgage. Understand what is risky and what is not. Risky work puts their job at risk — and I've done some risky shit in my life, and it's hurt me more than anything else."
— Anthony Reeves"If you are everything, you are nothing. Don't be everything, be one specific thing."
— Anthony ReevesPorsche as the model: "They are so specific. 'We're going to have rear wheel drive. Screw what happens with aerodynamics.' They fought to the point of being uncomfortable to stick to what they want to do." The final ask: "Uncover who you really are. If you can't answer that in two or three minutes, your team won't be able to answer it at all."
Anthony's one thing other speakers wouldn't say: most of what's slowing your agency isn't your positioning. It's your client's internal dysfunction — and you are complicit in it.
"The corporatization of the marketing department is bad. Marketing teams are so unusually not aligned, it's phenomenal. How do you get alignment when people disagree with each other?"
— Anthony Reeves"If I'm a client and my bonus is attached to a sales number, what do you think I'm going to do? I'll push everything through as a sales, because I'll get an extra 10, 15, 20% at the end of the year."
— Anthony ReevesUncomfortable because it reframes where agencies spend their anxiety. Most indies are still auditing their own decks. Anthony's argument: the decisive variable in most lost pitches isn't on the agency's side of the room. It's the CMO's bonus structure, an unaligned CEO, a brief nobody signed off on.
The open question it leaves: what would change in your pitch process if you treated client internal alignment as the #1 thing you underwrite?
| Term | Who Named It | What It Means |
|---|---|---|
| Foundation Theory | Anthony | Every durable company runs on a small, non-negotiable set of principles that filter every decision made when founders aren't in the room. |
| The Safe Middle | Anthony | The most dangerous place an agency can sit. "Fine," "that'll do" — the pre-elimination words. |
| The Long-Term Fear | Anthony | The single biggest anxiety in every CMO's head. Not AI, not headcount — whether the brand will still be alive in three years. |
| Dumb Fuckery | Anthony | Internal client dysfunction that kills good work before it ships. Misaligned CMO/CEO, short-term bonuses, unsigned briefs. |
| Own A Slice, Not The Pie | Anthony | Full-service is defensive. Owning a single specific thing, phenomenally, is the positioning. |
| Opinions, Not Options | Anthony | Every option added to a pitch lowers response rate. You're paid for an opinion. Deliver one. |
| The Two-To-Three-Minute Test | Anthony | If you can't state who your agency is in under three minutes, your team definitely can't — and they're in the next room. |
| Filters | Airbnb / Apple, via Anthony | The term for foundational principles. Every decision gets run through them. |
| The Third Place | Starbucks, via Anthony | Starbucks' foundation: a place between home and office. Foundation over product. |
"The safe middle is the most dangerous place you can be."
— Anthony Reeves"If you are everything, you are nothing."
— Anthony Reeves"It's got to be your foundations — what holds you together as a brand."
— Anthony Reeves"We are the worst at marketing ourselves. We are horrible at it."
— Anthony Reeves"Every font was a version of a sans font. Every deck was the same. Especially now with AI, it's all going to be the same."
— Anthony Reeves"If anyone comes in talking about AI at the moment, they are out the door very quickly."
— Anthony Reeves"The internal dumb fuckery that goes on inside a business is absolutely phenomenal."
— Anthony Reeves"Own a slice. Don't own the whole pie."
— Anthony Reeves"Options aren't going to win the day. Having an opinion is."
— Anthony Reeves"Uncover who you really are. If you can't answer that in two or three minutes, your team won't be able to answer it at all."
— Anthony ReevesIf it takes longer, you don't have a foundation yet. You have a draft.
Three different answers means it hasn't been installed. That's the quarter's work.
Cut what's generic — font, color of the year, same-shaped strategy.
Cut it before your next RFP response goes out.
Make the call this week.
Clients hear AI and mentally walk you to the door. Lead with the long-term brand question.
Has everyone signed off? Is the CEO aligned? What does success look like in 18 months? Watch what comes back — or what doesn't.
Options are friction. Opinions convert.
Lead with the belief, the way Starbucks and Airbnb do.
The way Airbnb defended belonging for Ukraine refugees. If you can't name it, that's your project.
Two hours. The cleanest articulation of selling vs. solving.
Not about restaurants. Foundation Theory at full volume in a service business — which is your business.
If incentives reward short-term revenue, you'll unconsciously push clients toward short-term work.
The "no" is the foundation showing up in public. The most trust-building act in your fiscal year.
This recap is part of the Indie Agency News Blueprint series — the premium content product built from our live events. You were told not to take notes. We meant it.
