A cohort of indie creative agencies has bloomed over the past three years, amid turbulence headlined by a pandemic and cost-of-living crisis.
In 2020 came Howatson+Co (Howatson+White at its launch), Akcelo, and BULLFROG. Then in 2022: It’s Friday and Today the Brave. And in 2023, Supermassive and REUNION were added to the list.
They joined an indie creative landscape that already featured the likes of Bear Meets Eagle on Fire (BMEOF), Special, Thinkerbell, Cocogun and The Hallway.
But this new breed was born thick and fast, mostly founded by former network CEOs during the pandemic. Why now? Will we see more indies teaming up with bigger players in the wake of +61? And what does this year have in store? AdNews asked this new crop of founders these questions and more.
Values can get put to the side in big networks: The journey so far
Unsurprisingly, every founder tells a similar story: one of momentum, early success, and optimism. The newest of the bunch, six-month-old SUPERMASSIVE, was founded by ex-Havas execs Laura Aldington, Simone Gupta, and Jon Austin.
There’ll always be reasons to talk yourself out of setting up your own shop, but a key benefit is clear: control. Control over “how we grow, what levers we pull, what we say yes to, and, as importantly, what we say no to, how our brand shows up, where we invest and where we pull back,” Aldington tells AdNews. In its infancy, it’s already won P&O Cruises and Tropical Tourism North Queensland.
“Having all endured our fair share of tough years over the course of our long careers, I hope we’ll be forgiven for describing these six months as brilliant,” Aldington says.
“The quality of clients, brands and opportunities that have come our way, the amazing partners we’ve been able to bring in as collaborators, the support we’ve felt from the industry and just the sheer shot in the arm of energy, fun and joy we’ve experienced have all exceeded our wildest expectations.
“If we can find success and enjoyment in this climate, it bodes well for a time when hopefully the macro conditions aren’t so tough.”
Justin Hind’s REUNION - co-founded after he finished up as CHEP Network CEO with wife Dominique Hind and former boss Stephen Knowles - launched just 10 days before SUPERMASSIVE. Hind notes that the business’ first half-year hasn’t occurred in a vacuum, but rather off the back of three years of decline for legacy agencies, “indicating a compound revenue drop”. He’s happy with the agency’s progress in a short amount of time, which has included adding Rest Super to its roster.
“We’ve won great projects, good-sized pitches against larger incumbents, expanded our full-time team, built our client roster, and we’re profitable. We’ve laid a good foundation.”
It’s Friday founder Pete Bosilkovski calls 2023 “an incredible rollercoaster ride”, featuring “the highest of highs [and] lowest of lows”. The agency lost founding client Domino’s last March, when it reverted to former agency Elevencom. But Bosilkovski, the former CEO of Clemenger, Y&R, and Leo Burnett, is enthusiastic, echoing Aldington’s thoughts on the freedom of full control.
“You tend to eat fear for breakfast and use it as fuel to go forth. You are in total control of your destiny. No politics to get in the way of doing the right thing … No unrealistic mandates and financial targets handed down by the greater powers.
“You make the right decisions that are underpinned by your values and ethos. These values can get put to the side in big networks. You make the right decisions that put your people and clients first. No agendas.”
These indie agencies are almost entirely founded by former holding company executives, people who, as Jaimes Leggett puts it, “were running the best agencies when those agencies were at their best".
All except one: BULLFROG’s Dalton Henshaw. Henshaw’s career has spanned professional sports (playing for the VFL and a Hawthorn reserve), fashion (founding style site The Tailored Man), and now advertising. Plus there’s public interest in his personal life; he’s married to Kic co-founder Laura Henshaw. VOGUE covered their wedding.
Henshaw muses that there wouldn’t be many agency bosses who have built successful businesses in other industries, and applied that experience to adland. “I don’t think there’s anyone,” he says.
2023 was “an absolute tornado” for three-year-old BULLFROG: it expanded to Sydney, added new leadership muscle, won Oxfam, and began to plot its international expansion.
But, Henshaw notes, “to the point of tornadoes, it's been a tornado in the best possible ways and also the toughest ways.
“I've had some big conversations this year with people that have been hires and past leadership team members, to them not being in the leadership team, but they still sit in this business today, because they respect the journey, the way we've built it, the culture that we're building.”
Dynamic, hungry and interesting: An entrepreneurial mindset
When I walk into the Howatson+Co office on a Monday morning, it’s bursting at the seams - not a spare desk in sight. Chris Howatson didn’t think they’d run out of space this fast; they’re moving to bigger premises in April.
Howatson stresses that both independents and network agencies can thrive. He should know, leading CHEP before striking out on his own. The agencies that should be worried, he says, are those that have “kind of slipped to the middle”. But the strength of independence is entrepreneurialism - practising what you preach by building a brand - and autonomy.
“A nimble leadership structure, local accountability, the ability to take risks and invest ahead of the revenue, I think that is the independent mindset. You don't have to make profit immediately. You don't have to operate on the staff ratios that are required of holding companies,” Howatson articulates.
“It's really hard for people to be entrepreneurial anymore. Like, really hard. Because there's so many constraints and barriers and pressures. And I'm not saying that it's wrong, but when you're a public company, you have to behave a certain way. When you're a private company, you can behave a totally different way … So I reckon in times of change, being private is a really big advantage.”
He has also been able to create an agency shaped the way he thinks a modern agency should be shaped, with “more capabilities all in the one place”. Howatson argues, “Clients don't want to come into an agency and have to shop through four different doors to get the same capability.”
Today the Brave’s Jaimes Leggett was drawn to starting his own business because of the entrepreneurialism of which Howatson speaks. In fact, “I look back and I think 'God, I'm gutted I didn't do it earlier', because it's so much better.”
“The CEOs that are running agencies at the big end of town are all fucking great,” Leggett says. “There's awesome leadership teams in all those agencies. But there are systemic challenges. There's inertia in those businesses.”
Across Leggett’s career, which notably featured seven years as M&C Saatchi CEO, the best people he’s worked with have been “the hungry, the dynamic, the entrepreneurial”. But those people, he argues, have had to “behave in a way that wasn’t too counter-cultural”, to fit in at big agencies, in order to access big clients and creative opportunities.
“So you had these really dynamic, driven, interesting, creative people who were conforming to an environment because … it was more important to have access to those opportunities than to be themselves,” he continues.
“But what we've seen is that there is this shifting tide, largely driven by clients, where clients no longer feel like they need to be working with the big traditional network agencies to do the type of work that they want. So all of a sudden, those clients are open to working with smaller, leaner, meaner fighting machines, more independent agencies.”
I ask Leggett, why now? He notes that marketers are under great pressure, so they “put a bit more pressure on the agency to do more for less.
“But some of those agencies are less able, because of inertia and overheads ... to make those changes. Because there's a lot of non-billable overhead in those businesses. So they cut back until they can't cut anymore, clients get frustrated because they're not seeing the results that they asked for.
“So then they look for something new. Cut to a whole bunch of agencies out there who have got the same calibre of people, far less of an overhead, a greater sense of excitement about the way that they do things ... And that's pretty intoxicating for them [clients].”
+61 and Tourism Australia: New pitching models
In October, Telstra announced its new agency model, +61, a collaboration between Omnicom’s TBWA and OMD and indie hot shop BMEOF. The ongoing Tourism Australia pitch requested panels: indies teaming up as a coalition or with multi-nationals, and holding companies forming teams of stablemates.
Hind says the future of indies partnering with networks is “uncertain”, but “it’s an interesting experiment”. There are strengths and weaknesses in all models, he claims, and it comes down to “spirit, intent, and navigating potential challenges around politics and ego”.
“If the indies become the lead creatively and strategically … and the networks become the production workhorses, questions arise about where the value and IP ultimately sit,” he says. “Which party becomes the more dominant, unique and valuable to the client is the question that needs to be answered and only time will tell.”
Aldington adds that the success of these models will dictate whether a trend emerges, but the fact these two examples exist suggests blue-chip marketers want the best of both worlds.
“It’s a wait and see, but it’s an exciting shift to see new models emerging that offer clients more bespoke options than having to pick either a network or an indie,” she observes. “We’ll be cheering these new models and the agencies behind them on and hoping they really thrive in pursuit of a more dynamic and interesting industry for all.”
Proof in the pudding: Looking ahead
Howatson is the only one of these founders with his name on the door. He describes it as a “stamp of accountability”, and an indication of his ambitions in 2024 and beyond.
“This is the set of values, and the standard of work that sits behind the name, but also a commitment to the future. And I've been really clear that we're not doing this independent model to one day sell and say, 'See you, bye'. I think so many indies, that's their end game, is to get to a size, get to a level of margin, that they can then go to a holding company [and] sell.
“The end game is not to get big and sell. The end game is to stay medium, and maintain a consistent creative standard for a long time.”
‘Medium’ looks like this: a headcount of 200, split across Sydney (~120 people) and Melbourne (~80).
“And the reason we're doing that is a commitment to be small enough to have the intimacy with our clients, and have the work that endures over decades,” Howatson explains.
“I think agencies don't scale. They just don't. They can, if you then accept a lessening of the product.”
Henshaw has a different view. He plans to scale BULLFROG alongside his wife’s fitness platform, Kic, which is also a BULLFROG foundation partner. Kic is currently finalising a Series A fundraising round to expand into the UK, then the US. BULLFROG will follow.
Henshaw was recently in London to get a “pulse check” and observes the appetite there for indies is “in abundance at the moment for the right model and the right touch”.
The ambition is to become “a global business first, not an Australian indie or ANZ indie that grew fast”.
And while Howatson’s name on the door equals a founder’s promise to be in it for the long haul, Henshaw thinks it’s his duty to consistently check he’s the right person to be CEO, since “a founder story is sometimes the hardest thing to break away from”.
“Right now, I'm the right person to do that job. That might not be the case in one, two years’ time. That's okay.”
Leggett, meanwhile, foresees 2024 will involve more change, more pitches.
“I use pitches as proxy for more business moving, because actually, we don't really want to be in the business of pitching. It's not very efficient,” he says. “But I think there'll be more client moves.”
And he’s confident Today the Brave is in a good spot to capitalise on those opportunities.
“We've got momentum, we're winning clients, we're doing some good work, we're getting talked about … It feels like there's a bit of proof in the pudding.”
Aldington hopes for a year of “the sacred cow slaughter”, some momentum behind initiatives striving to move the needle, like Mums in Ads’ Part-Time Pitch, Drop the Shade and Love Our Work’s campaign against anonymously sniping at work, and Shift 20’s focus on disability representation.
“We’re hoping 2024 is the year we wrap our arms around the industry and each other, and realise that kindness, support, transparency and trust is really what helps creativity thrive.”
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