Indie Agency News presents the Top 40: Classic — 2026 Winners

The Super Bowl is advertising's biggest Sunday. Curiosity decided to make it PEEPS' second-biggest. Without paying for a spot.

The insight was already there. PEEPS fans don't just eat the product, they build with it. Dioramas, scenes, entire worlds. So Curiosity built a handmade marshmallow stadium, a roster of bunny players, and recreated the game's biggest moments in real time.

While every other brand reached for AI, Curiosity went tactile and analog. Ten days to plan, build, and rehearse. They pre-shot what they could control — fan reactions, a spiraling football, a PEEPS Bunny halftime show (a nod to Bad Bunny) — and reacted live to the rest, filming, editing, and posting within minutes of key plays. Fans started timing the campaign against the game itself.

In 48 hours: 11.3 million impressions. 332 pieces of content. 175,000 engagements. A 10% engagement rate. 2,000+ new fans (a 9,350% jump over an average week). And $8 million saved from not running a Super Bowl spot.

The pet food category runs on sappy, heartfelt ads about how perfect every dog is. Good Conduct went the other way for The Honest Kitchen. The campaign opened with the actual unconditional truth pet owners live with: yes, your dog is the love of your life. And yes, sometimes your dog is also a real bastard.

The line: Give them the best, whether they deserve it or not.

The work led with four painfully relatable scenarios of dog misbehavior — a drooling Saint Bernard, a feather-strewn aftermath, a meatball who's "more like an alarm clock that drools" — and landed each with the same punchline: they may destroy the house, but what are you going to do? Not feed them the very best?

The 360 campaign extended across TV, paid social, and out of home. The Honest Kitchen used the work to move from performance marketing to long-term brand building as it expanded retail nationally.

Sales lifted 23%.

(Production note: the Saint Bernard's drool on the lead actress's shirt was real. She didn't break character.)

The heart has always been the universal symbol of life in video games. It's how you stay in the game. But in the game of life, over 10,000 children are waiting for a heart transplant — and nearly one in five won't survive the wait.

Their only power-up while they wait is a real-world mechanical heart backpack that keeps their hearts beating.

Murder Hornet and Enduring Hearts reimagined gaming's Extra Life mechanic as an interactive educational experience inside Fortnite — the first-ever charitable side quest in the platform. Inside Super Pet World, players met Alice, inspired by real transplant children, and completed guided challenges to assemble a mechanical heart backpack, learning how transplant devices like the Berlin Heart work as they progressed.

The build was a six-to-twelve-month development effort with Ghost Gaming, made possible because one Enduring Hearts board member happened to be connected into Fortnite's universe.

Launched during Heart Health Month and amplified through creator livestreams: 11.5 million earned impressions and 173,000 plays. A universal gaming symbol transformed into a tool for understanding.

CeraVe is the gold standard for dermatologist-developed skincare. By 2025, that authority needed to find its way out of the clinical white-coat aesthetic and into the cultural conversation of the feed.

1stAveMachine turned brand authority into a high-stakes social-first competition. NBA icon Anthony Davis became the Head of CeraVe, gatekeeping the brand and challenging creators to prove they could pass style and beauty authority. Paige Bueckers and Charli D'Amelio brought their communities into the fold — auditioning, consulting on routines, and treating the brand lore as completely real.

The campaign was built for the scroll, with GRWM cadence, sharp comedic timing, and a modular content approach optimized for the native visual language of TikTok and Instagram.

A small production note that didn't make the deck: a week before delivery, Anthony Davis was traded from the Lakers to the Mavericks. The VFX team rebuilt all the Lakers logos and purple-and-yellow into Mavericks white-and-blue at the last minute. The work shipped on time.

For decades, Quebecers had been hearing The Knack's "My Sharona" and noticing it sounded suspiciously like "Mike chez Rona" — French for "Mike at Rona," the beloved Canadian hardware chain. The mishearing had become a quiet inside joke.

RONA's recent history made the moment meaningful. The brand was sold to American Lowe's in 2016 ("70 years of history slowly faded away") and re-acquired by Canadian ownership in 2023. The new leadership wanted to reclaim the homegrown legacy.

So Circonflex made the joke real. They re-recorded the 1979 track as "Mike chez RONA" with uncanny accuracy — instrumentation, tone, rhythm, and a singer who could channel the original's energy. A one-minute TV spot introduced Mike, the ultimate handyman.

It took off. Construction workers danced and sang along on TikTok. A fan-run Instagram account appeared overnight. An AI version of the Quebec Premier dancing to the song surfaced online.

Mike became one of Quebec's top 10 cultural icons in Google's year-end review — between Six Seven and Justin Trudeau's romance. Not bad for a home hardware store.

Nearly 14 million older adults in America worry about having enough food. Fifty-six percent report feeling lonely. And the system designed to support them can't keep up — one in three Meals on Wheels providers operates with a waitlist that averages four months and stretches, in some cases, to two years.

Public Inc. was brought in with one mandate: turn passive awareness into urgency. The insight was sharp. Waiting isn't neutral. It's a signal that help isn't coming.

So Public Inc. stopped explaining the problem and made people feel it. "On Hold" turned one of life's most universally hated experiences — the looping music, the dead air, the endless delay — into a metaphor for senior hunger and isolation.

The 60-second hero film delivered 14 million impressions, 5.5 million views, and a 35% engagement rate. The real result: the campaign helped drive a $70 million unrestricted gift from MacKenzie Scott — the largest single donation in Meals on Wheels history.

Skilled trade professionals are essential to the businesses Carhartt supports — and the labor gap in those industries is widening fast. Then, in fall 2024, hurricanes struck the Southeast. Recovery efforts stretched on for months. The storms didn't create the workforce crisis. They made it impossible to ignore.

Mower built The Next Responders around a single reframe. First responders save lives. Next responders — line workers, utility crews, restoration teams — rebuild them. The campaign positioned skilled trades not as jobs but as mission-driven callings, with disaster recovery making the impact undeniable.

The work launched as a documentary content series filmed in Spruce Pine, North Carolina — one of the towns hit hardest by Hurricane Helene, where crews were still replacing infrastructure more than a year later. It expanded across paid and organic social, YouTube, connected TV, and trade media, culminating in a partnership with Asheville's WLOS on the one-year anniversary of the storm.

In October, Carhartt brought the next responders to its global sales conference for a live Q&A. They got a standing ovation.

660,000+ CTV views at a 99% completion rate. A 10% spike in traffic to Northwest Lineman College the day of launch.

In Quebec, dairy farming is more than an industry — it's a legacy built over generations. But Quebec is also Canada's most progressive province, and even its most traditional sectors are evolving.

The film follows Jeanne, a young woman growing up on her family's dairy farm and standing at the intersection of past and future. Like many of her generation, she doesn't just inherit. She chooses to transform.

At the heart of the film is "Fils de Personne II," an iconic Quebec song by Hubert Lenoir. The lyrics — "You are not your father's daughter, not even your mother's. I came to tell you that you have the right to change. I saw the future of a liberated woman" — became the narrative thread.

Circonflex convinced Lenoir to re-record his own vocals for the film. The track was reimagined from the ground up: Moog bass, analog synths, live drums, saturated textures, breaths and silences. Through micro-scoring, the music evolves with the visuals instead of sitting on top of them — shifting, breaking, breathing with each moment.

A legacy preserved by being transformed.

JanSport had near-universal recognition — and a "the bag your mom bought you as a kid" problem with Gen Z. Party Land launched the Always With You platform in 2024 to fix it. Year one drove JanSport's highest-grossing month in company history.

For 2025, the agency kept the irreverence and shifted the perspective. What if the JanSport could talk? Or sing?

Party Land built five musical comedy films using practical puppetry — no CG. The front zipper pouch became an expressive pocket mouth so each bag could sing its own melodramatic anthem about the indignities of young adulthood. Original songs across genres. Untrained vocals. Lo-fi production. The team asked the music house to write deliberately bad songs, then cast actors to sing them deliberately off-key.

"Unlearning your job to do a better job," the agency called it.

The cockroach was real (a Madagascar hissing one). YouTube engagement rose 435%. View-through rates climbed 110%. CPMs dropped 20%. TikTok view-through hit 99%, up from 85% the year prior. Ad Age called it one of the best Gen Z marketing ideas of the year.

Mobile, Alabama is the birthplace of American Mardi Gras — a point of pride often overshadowed by New Orleans. But Mobile has always had something New Orleans doesn't: the MoonPie, the city's iconic parade throw, tossed by the millions every year. And just as consistently, crushed underfoot.

Lewis and the City of Mobile turned that overlooked behavior into a movement. The campaign began three days before Mardi Gras, after the creative team slipped a "what if" idea into the back of a client meeting — and the client said, "I think we could do that this year."

Hand-painted signs. Posters. Stencils. Deadpan public-safety language: "High MoonPie Loss Area." "Respect the Throw." "1 out of 3 MoonPies will not survive." No paid media. A production budget of roughly $4,000.

The city took it from there. Parade-goers sought out the team. Businesses displayed materials. Civic leaders joined in. Even Chattanooga Bakery (the official MoonPie manufacturer) said the team was "fighting the good fight." 785 million impressions. $5.3 million in earned media value.

Louisville's West End is one of the most systematically underserved neighborhoods in the country. Centuries of redlining have left the area to largely fend for itself, with consequences that show up in drastic health inequity — life expectancy 15 years lower than the predominantly white neighborhoods just a few miles away.

Norton Healthcare, the largest healthcare provider in Kentucky, decided to act. They built a new hospital in West Louisville — the first west of Ninth Street in over 150 years.

For Doe-Anderson, the brief was to mark the moment. But for a community deeply (justifiably) skeptical of corporate healthcare, the brand couldn't tell its own story. So the agency handed the entire budget over to a real West Louisvillian filmmaker — Imani Dennison, born and raised in the neighborhood, fresh from a residency in Senegal and on her way to Stanford for her MFA.

Doe-Anderson provided equipment and crew. Then stepped back. The resulting film captures what the hospital means from the only perspective that matters — and makes the case Norton couldn't have made for itself.

Light pollution is a real and growing environmental and safety problem with a fundamental communications problem: people don't notice it.

For this pro bono brief, Bray & Co and DarkSky International made an unusually bold decision. Instead of trying to explain the problem better, the nonprofit stepped directly into the industry causing much of it. DarkSky International became DarkSky Motors — a car company — for the campaign.

DarkSky Motors created the DarkSky One, the first vehicle ever designed for night-time first. The principle: darkness helps you see better. By carefully controlling glare, contrast, reflection, and light distribution, the car demonstrated that visibility improves when light is used more intelligently.

The development was real. Professional automotive design processes. AI-assisted modeling. One of the world's great car design firms in Tokyo, also pro bono. The launch followed real automotive conventions — pre-release spy shots seeded to bloggers, then a full reveal at the Detroit Auto Show.

Less than two months after launch, U.S. Congress directed regulators to examine overly bright headlights for the first time. A nonprofit became a car company. Then a car company changed a regulation.

NJM Insurance was entering new markets as a relative newcomer, facing a category dominated by long-established names — and decades of jingles, mascots, and character-led advertising. Born and Raised looked at the playbook and walked the other direction.

The insight: jingles and mascots make insurance companies feel interchangeable. For consumers looking for substance, those tactics read as superficial. What people wanted was a company with integrity — one that would do the right thing when something went wrong.

So the strategy turned into a position. NJM has no jingles or mascots, because NJM is focused on great insurance and doing right by its policyholders. The campaign satirized the same devices competitors depend on — stunt sharks, imported nitrogen-infused water, film-school directors lamenting their fates — then contrasted the noise with a simpler, more credible proposition.

The results: doubled quotes in year one. Expansion into Maryland and Ohio. At one point NJM had to slow ad spend because they couldn't keep up with the inbound. The rarest insurance problem to have.

Four hundred thousand dollars. That was the paid media budget for a campaign that needed to get an entire city to act on the most politically charged issue in America. In three months, it delivered $263,000 in earned media value, 58% awareness, and a 24.7% increase in Denverites planning new climate-friendly actions.

The context made the challenge sharper. In 2025, states and municipalities across the country were going quiet on climate — pulling back language, softening commitments, so as not to draw federal attention. Denver did the opposite.

Sukle's research surfaced the real barrier: people wanted to help, but didn't know what to do. The answer was a campaign of radical simplicity — Do More. Do Less. Do Something. The line was simple because the specificity lived everywhere else.

More than 70 individual climate actions across 200+ Denver locations. Pollution-free pedicab rides. Permanently installed "Do More"-shaped bike racks. A custom Little Man Ice Cream flavor called Not Today Apocalypse.

Yale's program on climate change called it among the most strategic municipal climate communication efforts worldwide.

Seven minutes. That's how long the average American child spends in unstructured outdoor play each day. They spend more than seven hours on screens. Those two numbers frame everything Generation Wild is trying to change.

For 2025, Sukle's answer was simple: seed packets. Free packets of native Colorado wildflowers, vetted by Colorado Parks and Wildlife and the Butterfly Pavilion. Plant them. Check on them. Watch them grow. Each visit a small act of curiosity. Each visit another day a kid chose outside over a screen.

The hero spot brought the seeds to life with handcrafted practical puppetry — not CGI. Wildflowers growing through the floorboards, climbing the couch, spilling up the walls, until a child puts down a tablet and follows the flowers outside. The choice to build physical puppets was deliberate: a campaign about reconnecting kids with the tactile, real, living world had to feel tactile, real, and living.

126,000 seed packets picked up statewide. 151 million individual seeds. A 26% lift over the prior year. Distribution doubled to 585+ partner sites, including 663 classrooms.

In early 2025, a wave of Canadian pride swept the country — sparked by U.S. tariffs, political tensions, and the threat of becoming the 51st state. Canadians rallied to support local. Nearly every brand jumped to capitalize on the moment.

Maple Leaf Foods could have planted itself at the center of the conversation. The brand's logo literally carries the national symbol. Instead, FUSE Create made a more Canadian call: share the spotlight.

The campaign — Look for the Leaf — pointed shoppers to Canadian products on shelf, even when those products weren't Maple Leaf's. Strategy met execution with a 48-hour national media takeover in both languages — newspaper dominations, Reddit category takeovers, paid placements at the top of TikTok feeds, and a placement in Ottawa for the returning politicians.

By the end of those 48 hours, the campaign had reached nearly 70% of Canadian shoppers. The most Canadian thing a Canadian brand could do — sharing the spotlight at exactly the moment when every brand was trying to grab it.

Duke's Mayo has fans who tattoo the logo and pound jars on live TV. As the brand expanded out of the South into new territory — DC to Austin and beyond — Duke's needed to welcome the newcomers without losing the quirk that built the fandom.

The brief asked for a 30-second radio spot. Familiar Creatures asked a different question: how long does it take to drive from Washington, DC to Austin, Texas? Answer: 23 hours. So they wrote a 23-hour song.

A fully original composition. Nearly 1,000 verses. Shoutouts to 15,000 cities and towns. Recipes. Coupons. Jam sessions. Dozens of instruments. A 140-word coupon code in the lyrics. Nine months to write.

And critically: zero AI. Because Duke's uses no artificial flavors.

The song lives on Spotify (released as a full album, because it broke Spotify's file size limits). It plays over Kroger loudspeakers. Duke's is now the second-largest mayo brand in the country and the fastest-growing.

Whataburger turned 75. McGarrah Jessee asked what would happen if the brand stopped promoting products and let the fans do the talking instead. The answer was the Whataburger Museum of Art — a physical museum at SXSW 2025 in Austin, built entirely from fan-created artwork.

Hundreds of fan submissions filled the space: sculptures, murals, digital pieces, 3D installations — each one a different way someone expressed loving the brand enough to make something for it. Interactive moments turned the visit into part of the work. The Day Dot Room transformed a blank restaurant interior into a collaborative canvas covered in fan-placed dot stickers. The Table Tent Mugshot Wall let visitors pose for portraits and take home limited-edition 75th anniversary table tents — honoring a long-standing fan tradition of collecting them from Whataburger restaurants for years.

A cinder-block building in Austin turned into the iconic orange-and-white. The brand didn't have to write itself, because the fans had already been writing it for decades. McGarrah Jessee just gave them the walls.

Wild Oats was organic before organic had its own aisle. The Boulder-born brand helped launch the natural foods movement in the 1990s and was the Ford to Whole Foods' Chevy. Then Whole Foods acquired it, the FTC stepped in, and Wild Oats spent years passing through corporate hands. The name all but vanished.

When KEHE — the national natural-foods distributor — picked up the IP, they brought Sukle a brief that rejected the obvious nostalgia play. Bring it back as a brand with something to say about what's happened to the American food system since.

Sukle sat with founding-era Wild Oats employees and found real anger. The new positioning: Mad About Food. The new visual identity: Raging Red, designed to scream from the shelf in a category that reaches for earthy greens and pastoral tans.

Wild Oats relaunches mid-2026 with the first Regenerative Organic Certified juices, smoothies, and eggs — the newest highest standard in natural foods. A 15-person Denver indie built a nationally distributed CPG brand from IP acquisition through launch.

Butter is a parity category. At shelf, the sea of yellow and red packaging blurs together, and Land O'Lakes dominates share of voice. Drake Cooper's research surfaced something more useful than another differentiating claim: people who buy Challenge don't always remember it's Challenge they bought. They remember "the one with the Elk on it."

That insight unlocked a strategy no competitor could copy. Challenge already had a distinctive mascot sitting on every package. Drake Cooper turned the Elk from packaging artwork into a long-term brand asset — the speaking face of broadcast spots, the brand's full-time social media manager, the voice launching Challenge's first-ever Butter Cubes.

Numbers proved the bet. 90% unaided awareness. Purchase intent up 50%. Sales up 34% in campaign regions. Facebook engagement nearly doubled. Positive sentiment moved from 40% to 62%.

In a category where most brands are forgettable, the Elk gave Challenge what no competitor can replicate: a character that compounds in value the longer the brand commits to it.

Soles4Souls Canada had a quiet challenge during the 2025 holiday season: strong brand recognition in the U.S. but low awareness in Canada — at exactly the moment when consumer attention is locked on shopping, not giving.

FUSE Create flipped a familiar cultural format. Instead of launching the latest sneaker drop, they staged a "Not-So-New Arrivals" pop-up on one of Toronto's busiest streets — a display of worn-out shoes reflecting what many people in need rely on every day. The format was sneaker hype. The contents were the opposite. The juxtaposition did the work.

This wasn't a donation campaign. It was an awareness build, designed to put Soles4Souls Canada on the map for the future. The media noticed. Coverage across Canadian outlets gave a smaller charity a presence usually reserved for organizations ten times its size.

The whole approach: meaningful without guilt. Bring attention. Let people choose what they do with it.

By 2025, Blue Apron had become synonymous with the very thing modern consumers had grown to resent: the rigid subscription model. Quirk Creative spotted the wider cultural backlash — subscription creep, the slow drift toward locking everything down — and gave Blue Apron a sharp position inside it.

The line: Keep the Flavor. Ditch the Subscription.

The spots dramatized the absurdity of subscriptions in adjacent corners of life — pay to unlock steps 23 through 50 of a workout, subscribe to a meal that "didn't feel like a lifetime of sadness" until somehow it became one — to force a category reappraisal. The strategy didn't just rewrite the ads. It rewrote the business model in public.

By mid-2025, Blue Apron hit all-time high order rates, directly attributed to dropping the subscription barrier. By early 2026, Expert Consumers ranked the brand the #1 meal delivery service for home cooking, citing the balance of convenience and consumer-friendly structure.

A strategy that changed how the brand shows up in the world — not just how it advertises.

The challenge from Denver's Office of Climate Action was simple but huge: make climate action a social norm citywide. Sukle's insight cut through the cognitive overload — when everything feels urgent, nothing feels actionable.

So as part of Denver's broader "Do More, Do Less, Do Something" campaign (which highlights 70+ specific climate-friendly actions), the agency turned one of the simplest behaviors — thrifting — into both message and model. They partnered with Goodwill Colorado and local makers on an upcycled fashion line, rescuing items from Goodwill's clearance bin (literally headed to landfill) and giving them new life through local artists. The campaign's own billboard vinyls — 14-by-48-foot ones — became branded tote bags. Proceeds funded Goodwill's Clean Tech Accelerator.

The collection sold out before the campaign ended. The broader effort drew $263,000 in earned media and 58% campaign awareness in three months. Yale's program on climate change called it among the most strategic and comprehensive municipal climate communication efforts worldwide — at a moment when other cities were quietly softening commitments.

Stripes Beauty had $30,000 and a single sharp point of view: what comes after the period has been reduced to a question mark. Corner Table Creative flipped it, reframing menopause not as an ending but as a powerful next chapter — for the founder (Naomi Watts, who started experiencing perimenopause at 36) and for the women her brand was built to meet.

The hero film leaned on contrast: a familiar flood of messaging about becoming a woman, then abrupt silence. Into that void, the brand introduced facts, empathy, and community — including the truths that nine in ten women never learn about menopause, and that med students receive an average of two hours of education on the topic.

The team stretched the budget through craft: existing brand video, new voiceover from Naomi, found footage, a scrapbook-inspired collage system. The result: Stripes' top-performing post during International Women's Month, engagement up 485%, and a comments section that became a community.

While insurance competitors go for big laughs, American Family Insurance goes for big feels. The brand has been about dreams for 15 years — and Dream Fearlessly Series doubles down on it. A five-part film series shot in cinematic naturalism, tracing the bonds between generations and the legacies worth protecting.

The story follows a father and coach passing his dream to the next generation, his daughter balancing family with her dream job, her kids beginning to imagine a future of their own. Elite Media built it for the holidays — the moment when multi-generational families gather to watch things together — and released it like prestige TV, with trailers driving viewers to a custom hub on FireTV, Amazon, Peacock, and YouTube.

The numbers backed the bet: 400 million impressions, ad recall lift of 5.3% on TikTok and 4.9% on Meta, and video completion rates that outperformed benchmarks across every placement. A mid-sized carrier broke into entertainment-grade territory normally reserved for the giants.

Home security got priced into a category war, and Master Lock needed out. Laughlin Constable repositioned the brand around responsibility — every life stage adds more, from the locker in school to the gun in the house. The platform line: If it means something, master it.

For Master Lock's SentrySafe gun safes, the strategy got specific. Research surfaced the truths: 4.6 million American children live in homes with unlocked, loaded guns. Nearly one a day is involved in an unintentional shooting. Secure storage cuts that risk by 90%. The agency landed on one undeniable insight: a child cannot reliably tell the difference between a real gun and a toy.

The film was built around that — and ran 15 seconds, the same length as many unintentional shootings. No politics. No judgment. Just the stakes.

Notably, the work wasn't asked for. The agency brought it to the client. They said yes immediately. Sales of SentrySafe rose 34%. Every safe sold is a child no longer at risk.

Stow, Massachusetts is a small town — 7,000 people, 30 miles outside of Boston. For years, it was also a Dunkin' Desert. WBZ NewsRadio's Matt Shearer covered the story in 2022 and it went national.

When Dunkin' was ready to return to Stow, A&G refused to do a standard ribbon cutting. They called Shearer back to break the news. They petitioned the town to officially change its name to "Dunkin" for one day. Road signs got swapped. Apple Maps showed Stow as "Dunkin, MA."

People lined up in the middle of the night. Opening day sales hit 150% above normal. Traffic stayed 25% above average for the following two weeks. The story drove 300+ media placements and 100 million impressions, including USA Today.

The team called it the kind of work that's "unignorable" — what happens when a brand throws the templatized approach out the window. The next Dunkin' Desert is already waiting.

The largest bourbon toast in history happened on the main stage at Bourbon and Beyond, the marquee Louisville festival, with 50,000 glasses raised at 4:40 PM Eastern. Live-streamed every hour leading up. Elizabeth Banks, Governor Andy Beshear, Terry Bradshaw, and Jim Gaffigan made the cut.

Lewis built World Bourbon Toast for the Kentucky Distillers Association as a single, simple act of unity: bring the world together around America's only original spirit. The inaugural 2024 toast claimed the title of longest. The 2025 version went for largest — and beat the previous record (held by a Boston ballpark) by a wide margin.

A few celebrity interviews came together with five minutes' notice, the team pairing microphones with phones while running across the festival grounds.

All of it sits inside a bigger story: a three-year KDA partnership that's helped position the Kentucky Bourbon Trail against bucket-list destinations like Napa and Hawaii, with 2.7 million visitors this past year. The Kentucky Bourbon Trail isn't promoting bourbon. It's making the case for the entire Commonwealth.

In 2024, Habit Burger won USA Today's Reader poll for Best Burger in America. Most brands would have run a press release. Optimism built a billboard.

The billboard — placed right across from an In-N-Out location — sincerely congratulated their arch-rival on second place. Local press picked it up. National press picked it up. International press picked it up. Burger Twitter ignited. It should have been a one-time gag.

Then Habit won again in 2025, and In-N-Out slipped to fourth. Optimism did what any sincere back-to-back champ would do: congratulated In-N-Out on their fourth-place finish, in the same gracious tone, on the same billboards.

The work landed in dictionary.com's definition of trolling. The accompanying social campaign extended the bit to the other winners on the list — every spot from #2 down. The result: a brand that started in Santa Barbara, mostly West Coast, took up category-leader-sized real estate in the cultural conversation. Without ever raising its voice.

When DC Studios needed to launch Krypto Saves the Day — an animated comedic series starring Superman's caped canine companion — the conventional play would have been a press kit and an influencer mailer to the usual humans. Lupine Creative built influencer kits for the dogs instead.

The kits were engineered to be opened, sniffed, chewed, and posted — by actual dog influencers, with their humans documenting the unboxing. Ninety branded recipients in total, plus four custom kits sent to LA-area animal shelters loaded with toys, supplies, and donations.

The results: 3.9 million views. Episode three pulled 12 times the audience of episode one. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, a team member working on the campaign adopted a dog from one of the shelters they'd partnered with.

Cute animals are a trap — easy to lean on, hard to make matter. Lupine built something that fit DC's brand, lived inside actual fan habits, and gave back along the way. That's the bar.

Every August, Bama Rush takes over TikTok. Sorority recruitment at the University of Alabama becomes a full-on cultural moment — the kind of thing most beauty brands try to chase and miss. Lewis built directly into it instead.

For Revive Light Therapy, Lewis loaded a wagon full of red-light skincare kits and rolled onto campus during rush, hand-delivering to sorority houses with sisterhood-inspired messaging that felt made by the rush class, not at it. Campus tabling, outdoor placements, and an influencer partnership rounded out the activation. Start to finish: three weeks.

The math: a 999% increase in TikTok views. 3.2 million new viewers on Gen Z's first platform. A 211% lift in Amazon sales. A brand whose typical age range starts at 30 suddenly owned a piece of Gen Z's first August.

Cross-office effort from Mobile, Birmingham, and Nashville. Built on a client relationship where the answer to "we've got this kind of nutty idea" was a quick yes — followed by the receipts.

Mower had an awareness problem — and a pronunciation problem. Despite repeat Agency of the Year wins, prospects kept calling them "Mauer" at trade show podiums. The team turned that into a strategy.

Mower Mania is a retro-arcade video game where players race against the clock on a riding lawnmower — the visual mnemonic, hiding in plain sight. The game launched at the ANA Masters of B2B, where lines formed at the booth, players entered names and emails to join the leaderboard, and prizes from Mower's own client roster anchored every gameplay. Daily winners walked off with Carhartt jackets, everyone left with branded socks.

Built entirely in-house — the team's developers, gamers themselves, kept iterating between other projects.

The numbers: more than 30% of conference attendees played. Holiday emails generated an 83% engagement rate and 1,900 gameplays. Over seven months, the work delivered 71 MQLs, a 6.2x increase in average pipeline value, and a 50% RFP win rate. Active participation drives memory. The data agrees.

Bowling doesn't have a perception problem — it has a memory problem. Research told Poke the Bear that 90% of people who'd been bowling in the last five years would absolutely go back. They just forget to. Up against a multibillion-dollar entertainment category, Go Bowling needed a reminder, not a sales pitch.

The strategic insight cracked it open: you can suck at bowling and still be awesome at bowling. Don't Go Boring, Go Bowling was built around the feel of a night at the lanes — the smack talk, the sticky shoes, the unhinged group chat the next morning — captured with two cameras running loose, nothing staged. The agency fought for the dorky rental shoes, the $9 plastic pitchers with foam spilling over the ridges, the dancing on the table instead of polite high-fives.

Representing more than 3,600 bowling centers nationwide, the work gave a whole industry something it can finally point to and say: yes, that.

Kentucky leads the world in bourbon and racehorses — and ranks 48th in poverty, 46th in quality of life. Doe-Anderson and Maker's Mark looked at that gap and made a bottle. Ten of them.

Greats of the Gate is a decade-long series of commemorative bottles, each celebrating a legendary Thoroughbred and each feeding directly into Kentucky food banks and arts centers. The partnership has roots — Keeneland was Maker's Mark's very first customer back in the 1950s.

Each new bottle sells out fast. The third release is already on the secondary market for north of $500 against a $175 retail. The agency works a collaborative spreadsheet six years ahead, mapping jockey silks, colors, and patterns to which bottle comes next — and the backs of all ten boxes will eventually form one continuous illustration when collectors line them up.

Maker's Mark is the world's largest B Corp distillery and the first Regenified-certified bourbon. A $4 million commitment has already delivered 30,000 pounds of food to 1,500 Kentucky families. Forty million media impressions. Zero paid.

When Love Island breakout star JaNa Craig landed in some post-show relationship drama, Truly's social team showed up with an organic Instagram post putting their "Loyal-tea" behind her. There was no brief. Party Land — Truly's AOR for organic, social, and digital — runs a writers'-room-style morning round table looking for cultural moments the brand can show up for in real time. This was one of them.

The post took off. Fifty thousand shares inside the first 24 hours. The fans called for a real collab. Party Land and Truly listened, fast: deal signed in under two weeks, limited-edition flavor on shelves in six. Over 500 million earned media impressions. A 5% follower bump. When the audience writes the brief, the smart play is to pick up the pen.

Every business starts somewhere. For most of us, that somewhere was a folding table and a sign that said "Lemonade — 50 cents."

Lewis took that universal memory and made it tangible for Always.bank — a new online bank built to grow with small businesses, from lemonade stand to storefront to warehouse. The activation landed at a popular farmers market in Birmingham, with a real stand and a QR code on every cup. The role was cast carefully — an aspiring influencer with a 70,000-plus follower count who was a trooper on a brutally hot Birmingham day.

The stand wasn't a one-off. It was designed to travel — built to stand out at small-business trade shows next to the sea of squishy balls and pens with bank names on them. Facebook views climbed nearly 10x. Instagram traffic more than doubled. LinkedIn engagement tripled. When the idea is universally understood, you don't have to explain it.

Boston in summer is the postcard — the harbor cruises, the bricks, the ballpark, the lobster rolls. Winter is the city's other personality, and it doesn't always get the same love.

A&G put cold-season Boston on summer tourists' radar with a budget that barely covered the craft store run. Eighty-nine dollars in materials, a glue gun, and an in-house crew got "Dying For Winter" out the door: melting snow people posted around the city's busiest tourism corners, each one making the case for a return trip when the temperature drops.

The number stuck with the panel. Eighty-nine bucks may be a new floor for Little Budget + Big Impact — proving the most useful thing about the category: the budget doesn't determine the sharpness of the idea. The campaign became part of a larger winter push for Meet Boston that turned the off-season into a season people actually book.