Indie awards. The Indie Summit. Indie Agency top 100…There is indie exuberance in industry conversations. Meanwhile there are holding companies that don’t want to be holding companies anymore. And others with indie offshoots (or aspirations). Having a big parent seems not to be so much fun right now.
But you’re right. There are also voices of restraint about the indie surge’s future. And starting a business is hard in any industry. The stats on success across the board are not exactly encouraging.
So ADFEST & The Stable decided to find out what it’s like being an indie. This is the brief we sent throughout the world:
The brief is that it’s all about the story. Tell a great one, with honesty and in your own voice and style. You can talk about why you joined or started an indie, what you wanted to leave behind, what you wish you hadn’t left behind, what you got by being in an indie (why they’re winning business), why indies rock – why they don’t…even the environment that is giving indies the limelight. It’s your story. Please don’t chest-thump though. (It gets hate mail, and it’s not a business pitch.)
Below are the inspiring, enlightening, interesting and unique (all the indie things?) responses. (Note: there were many of these. This is episode 1. Stand by for episode 2.)
CHRISTINE JONES, FOUNDER, SIRENXYZ.
Jones is the newest indie adventurer in our story. She launched SirenXYZ late-January this year. In her backpack came nearly three years at Ridley Scott Creative Group where she built a department from the ground up as global ECD, to develop brand partnership ideas for global names such as Pepsi and Diageo, plus creative roles at Ogilvy & Mather TBWA, Publicis Worldwide Leagas Delaney & Rankin Group.
I got the idea to launch SirenXYZ at lunch one day with two ex-work collegues of mine, both incredibly talented females in their field. At the time, I was running the creative division of a network agency. I’d just had two brands come to me with projects specifically targeted at women. One was a luxury car company targeting high-net-worth women, and the other a beauty brand whose workforce was over 90% female. The two wonderful women I was having lunch with were talking about how difficult it was to be recognised and get consistent work. The penny dropped. I realised this was the moment to start a company focused on the amazing women I knew - smart, worldly, talented, inquisitive, financially independent and great at what we do.
I thought fuck it, let's do this. I knew there was a big opportunity to engage the world’s most significant growth market and 50% of the population: women. No other company was doing it at the time. Statistically, most small businesses fail, but that isn't a reason not to try. Without that leap of faith there wouldn’t have been a BBH or a Mother. As an indie you always have the fear. But without a new generation of independents we won’t evolve as an industry and let's face it the industry desperately needs to.
SIMON LEE, CCO, ENIGMA
Simon Lee is a 20+ year indie agency veteran. From 2011 to early 2025 he was the joint owner and CCO of The Hallway, helping to take the agency to the forefront of the Australian indie scene and winning seven Agency of the Year titles. He was appointed as indie agency Enigma’s first ever CCO and creative partner in March 2025.
LEARNING FROM PIRATES PAST
I’ve often likened running an indie agency to being a pirate. It’s you and your crew using your combined talents, energy, and guile to navigate the storms and lulls of a fickle market and outwit the opposition to gain unfair share of creative and commercial loot.
Until fairly recently in Australian adland, we were just a handful of indie pirate ships pitting ourselves against the vast might of holding-company navies. But the game has radically changed in the last few of years. The “treasure” prize pool has reduced so significantly that holding companies have had to radically downsize their fleets and in some cases phase them out altogether. Consequently, many highly competent professional ex-navy sailors have had to turn to piracy to keep food on their proverbial tables. So now’s a wild old time to be an advertising pirate. There’s a definite sense of opportunity in the crumbling of the old established order, but there are more of us than ever before, all as hungry and ambitious as each other.
So what happens next? Before we all default to a prolonged Darwinian Pirate eat Pirate war, it might be worth taking a leaf out of the OG pirates’ history book. In the 1710s, the Golden Age of Piracy culminated in the creation of the Republic of Pirates in Nassau, Bahamas. Far from being the pit of violent individualistic mayhem that one might expect it to have been (although I’m sure it had its fair share of mayhem), the Republic was - so the history books say - an extraordinary social experiment that pioneered many ideas and initiatives that would later characterise enlightened modern society.
Indie agencies probably aren’t going to reshape Australian society, but we do have a very real opportunity to change our own industry for the better. And if we can balance our own respective greed for gold with a measure of pirate unity, we might even find a way to ensure that pirate life remains an option for generations to come. An Independents’ Republic? Now there’s an idea.
NICK HUNTER, FOUNDING CEO & CCO, PAPER MOOSE
Paper Moose is the only piece of Adland Aus that Nick Hunter has every lived in. For the last three years, he has also hosted business podcast, The Mucky Middle, interviewing the world's most interesting business leaders about finding the balance between purpose and profit.
It'll be our 15th birthday in April. 15 years ago, five giddy 25-year-olds rattled up a lift to sign papers that would make us a corporation. We split the shares equally five ways with zero forethought, just a righteous excitement that we were wrestling the chaos of life into our own hands. I was a hungry actor, founding the business with four other out-of-work artists, sick of the complete lack of control the tiny Australian film industry afforded us. We over delivered for clients because we had no idea the value of what we were creating - we were just happy to no longer be pulling beers and getting paid to make art.
Paper Moose is shaped by its founders and the people who've come and gone. From a humble production company, we added design, digital, experiential, and eventually creative and media. I've never worked for a holdco, so I can't tell you that indies are objectively the best. But we've had a hell of a lot of fun designing from first principles what we think a great agency should be. We choose great clients and fire bad ones, say no to things that don't align with our values, and work really fucking hard. While we are 15-years-old we still maintain a startup mindset, constantly learning, adapting and changing which in the last three years feels like the only constant.
Yes, you have freedom. But you're tied to this entity that you own, which eventually owns you. It never leaves you. My wife snaps me out when I'm found staring into the distance "in a moose hole." So would I recommend it? Do you like security and switching off?
RICH DENNEY, CCO, ST LUKE’S
Denney began his career at RKCR/Y&R in 1996, picking up a Gold Lion for his St Mungo’s interactive cinema commercial in his first year. Two more big agencies followed, Saatchi & Saatchi & MullenLowe London, until he joined St Luke’s as ECD in 2017. He became CCO in January 2023.
I’ve been lucky. I’ve worked with some of the best people in some of the best network agencies in the business. And at their best, the culture felt fiercely personal, not just in the creative department, but across the whole building. Protective. Proud. Almost independent in spirit, even when the logo on the door said otherwise. One of those agencies had been independent before it merged into a bigger machine. That independence still ran deep in its DNA, and to its credit, it brought everyone with it, which I learnt so much from. But networks are networks. However brilliant the talent, silos can creep in. I’ve seen it. I’ve tried to break it. Brand teams can drift away from the agency’s wider culture and ambition, and when that happens, the heartbeat goes slightly off rhythm.
St Luke’s was my first true experience of independent life. From a senior perspective, the goals are no different. You want success. You want to make the best work that attracts brilliant people and ambitious clients. The difference is proximity. Success and failure live together. Sleeves rolled up. Owners in the trenches. No distance between decision and consequence. You’re accountable at every step.
What you don’t have is a distant layer of “superpowers” at network level who can drop you like a Premiership manager after three bad results, without really understanding how you tick or what you’re up against.
Independence sharpens you. It focuses you. And it really is personal. Wins mean so much to each and everyone in the building, and the losses are felt by everyone too. It really does bring everyone in the agency together. And you do it with people who feel like family. I love it. That’s why I’ve been here almost a decade. My only regret? Not doing it sooner.
MARC WESSELING, CO-FOUNDER & CEO OF ULTRASUPERNEW
International perspective? Wesseling has it in spades. Originally from Amsterdam, he has lived in Tokyo since 2002, after working in advertising and digital media in San Francisco, New York, and Hong Kong.
WHY WOULD AN INDEPENDENT AGENCY OPEN IN THE WORLD'S TOUGHEST MARKET?
Japan doesn't care about your reputation. I learned that fast when I was leading KesselsKramer's expansion in Tokyo. Even one of the world's most celebrated agencies starts from zero there. The island culture demands something genuinely unique; bring the same formula that worked elsewhere and the market spits you out. The graveyard of failed foreign agencies in Japan is proof.
I saw the gap - to position ourselves as a digital creative agency. Not as an add-on, but as the full offering - strategy, creative, production. My pitch to Amsterdam was to build something purpose-built for where things were heading. The reply? "Digital is for nerds”. On January 16, 2007, I started UltraSuperNew instead.
Here's the thing though; my business partner, Tomo Murakami, was already one of my closest friends. We'd even talked about working together at KesselsKramer. When that door closed, we opened our own. He's my co-founder, my business partner, and as it turned out, my best man. The yin to my yang. Where I push, he reads the room. Where I'm blunt, he's considered. When the head of Red Bull Japan told us he was awarding us the full account in year two of our existence, he was clear about why: the two of us together made the decision easy.
Now in our 19th year, with our 20th anniversary coming in January 2027, I'd say indie life is as good as it gets, but only if you're honest about the slog. The cash flow battles, the pitches lost to networks three times your size, the weight of keeping something independent alive while everyone around you consolidates. It's real. But so is what we've built. And right now feels like our moment. AI isn't killing creativity, it's making culture, community and genuine human connection more valuable than ever. If you can be replaced by a prompt, maybe the question is whether you were adding real value in the first place. What can't be faked is cultural intelligence.
That's why we built The KURA, our creative hub in Shibuya that keeps us genuinely wired into culture, creativity and community. Not as a concept. As a daily practice: https://kura.ultrasupernew.com/ Nineteen years of stubbornness. Still 100% independent. Starting to look like strategy.
ALICIA IVESON, CEO & CO-FOUNDER, HIJINKS
Hjinks was co-founded by three people who previously worked for big networks and set out to create something that they really wanted to work for. Iveson brought experience from Saatchi & Saatchi (Managing Partner), Joint (Partner), Ogilvy One (Account Director) and Neo@Ogilvy (Account Director).
In the current climate, post several big network mergers, there is very little talk about creativity. But brands still need creativity to differentiate themselves from the deluge of content that is being pumped out every second. And independent agencies will. It’s our bread and butter, part of our DNA and integral to the way we operate. Indies don’t wait to take their turn on a brief or a project. It’s all hands-on deck from the off, so everyone naturally becomes more multi-skilled as a result. Founders are practitioners - and nimble enough to jump on briefs without multiple layers of sign offs. We can be longer term in our decision making, unlike the bigger set ups who always have their eye on the numbers.
All Hijinks’ founders have similar stories, shitty bosses, burnout, watching clients who we liked and respected given the runaround, wading through a swamp of egos and bravado, mediocre straight white men getting promoted, career stagnation…the list goes on and on. We looked around at a broken industry and didn’t see a future for ourselves, so we set out to create the agency that we’ve always wanted to work for. We offer benefits like a “work from anywhere” summer, transitioning, fertility and menopause policies and individual training budgets. We have no office mandate, but the majority still choose to come into our Soho offices - because it’s a great community. Filled with people who care - about the work, each other and the industry as a whole.
JON AUSTIN, CO-FOUNDER SUPERMASSIVE
Austin’s indie mantra is “make people want things by making things people actually want”, and it stands on a great deal of big agency knowledge. Before co-founding Supermassive three years ago there was Host-Havas, Host, DDB Group Australia, Saatchi & Saatchi and Tribal DDB.
Bear with this analogy - it goes somewhere, I promise. Bigger network agencies are like cruise ships. They’re slow and hard to turn around, but they’re comfortable and it takes a hell of a lot to feel them rock under you. Indies are like speedboats. They’re faster, more agile, a hell of a lot of fun, and - right now at least - it looks kinda cool if you’re sitting in one. But they can also be pretty scary when you’re trying to steer one through a storm.
Case in point, we were awarded the entire P&O AUNZ strategic and creative business just two weeks after we started Supermassive. We didn’t even have a proper office, but we suddenly had one of the country’s most iconic heritage brands. That was James Bond levels of speedboatery, having a brand like P&O place such huge trust in an unknown outfit to turn their ships around (commercially speaking). And we did it. We worked our arses off day and night to deliver them their first new brand platform in a decade and their best commercial year in the last 15. It was a brilliant result for their team and ours, and it felt like the kind of momentum a new startup can only dream of.
But then, just 12 months later, we woke up to the news that, despite the brand’s success, P&O was being globally aligned into the parent brand. As the old saying goes, you can avoid everything but death, taxes, and South Pacific maritime operational costs. We were going to have to sunset our first and biggest client a year after we won it. The brutal unfairness of it; the up-close and personal impact of it was something I hadn’t experienced in my career. Would Supermassive get through it? Would the brilliant team at P&O who had worked every bit as hard as us be ok? What would the industry say? Would people think we’d tanked one of the country’s most beloved brands?
It was a horrible storm to endure, huddled together on our little speedboat, which at that moment, felt neither super nor massive. But we didn’t sink. We kept moving. We backed ourselves. We doubled in size and doubled down on the kind of work that made P&O believe in us in the first place. We continued winning new business, which turned into us winning AOTYs and awards. And before long, our agency mythology around P&O became more about self-belief, resilience, and optimism than loss. Because even though that storm was bad, it taught us a valuable lesson really early on: that it’s not actually about whether you’re on a cruise ship or a speedboat at all. Because it’s not the vessel that saves you - it’s the resilience, talent, and competence of the crew. And with the right one, you can weather any storm.
Shit, that analogy turned out better than I thought.
DAVIDE LABÒ & LUCA RIVA, CREATIVE DIRECTORS, DUDE MILAN:
Labo and Riva didn’t start DUDE Milan. They were drawn to it ten years ago – Labò from VMLY&R and Havas Milan, Riva from titamilano agency and Bill magazine.
Davide Labò: When a conversation about indie agencies begins, the first thing to do is define what “indie” actually means. Our way to do that is by looking at the world of music. Over the past twenty years, indie has come to describe bands that produce highly catchy songs, with music and lyrics that aim to distance themselves from mainstream conventions; often, paradoxically, ending up blending into the very world they are trying to escape.
Luca Riva: For those who like me and Davide were raised in the foggy Lombardia countryside between the late ’90s and early 2000s the word “indie” takes us back to our roots - the Italian independent punk scene, far removed, both in form and in content, from the pop music that has always dominated the charts. So when, after years of working in other environments, DUDE crossed our path, we realised that our way of understanding the word “indie” could also exist in the agency world - putting an underdog soul before anything else, without the obsession of chasing the trends of the moment.”
Davide Labo: That’s why we believe indie agencies can continue to grow only if they constantly remind clients that success doesn’t come from saying the same things everyone else says, just in a more “cool,” “smart,” or “young” way. The real difference lies in provoking in order to genuinely spark a reaction, and in having the courage to say things others haven’t said yet, in ways others haven’t dared to try. Trying to be a bit more punk than indie.
