Below are the Blueprints from every session of Indies Rising — Chicago 2026. Each one captures the moments, the quotes, the frameworks, and the Monday-morning moves from the room. 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 come fill them.
A rotating cast. A hot mic. Two open chairs in the back half.
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.
His 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.
Haley 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.
The 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."
Anthony's cleanest framing of what makes indies structurally different:
The closing round — start-stops from every panelist — got loud. The loudest moment of Part One:
Two 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?
Haley asked the indie version of "can you scale?" — how do you convince clients to buy into a newer, smaller agency?
Roberto 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.
The 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:
And 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."
Eric 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.
Masha Spaic from Transport (NYC) tapped in. Transport had just won a pitch that week — with a client they'd lost to the year before.
Roberto 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:
That's uncomfortable because most agency principals overcorrect after every loss.
Worth bringing to the follow-up session: where is the line between useful pattern-finding and reactive over-dissection?
The named concepts Block 1 gave the IAN community. 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. |
Steal these verbatim. Words picked on stage for a reason.
Pull these out. For your team channel. For your standup. For your own notebook.
Seven concrete moves. Pick one. Put 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 here. We'll open the live session with them.
The Chicago Summit doesn't end when the lights go down. The week of May 18, a 90-minute live conversation for every session — same time every morning, 7am PT / 10am ET. Come to yours. Come to all five.
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. She has spent 13 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. I've gently helped them try to pivot back to the business strategy. They're pushing anyway. And I'm like — they want to win an award for this. And I'm fucking done with that."
Then the actual punchline: "It's just easier to say you're done. We're not going to be working together anymore."
The room held its breath. Four CMOs on stage — all of them with holdco scars, all of them working with indies right now — and every one of them 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.
That footnote is the whole session.
Indies spent most of Session 1 saying what makes them different. Session 2 put those talking points on trial.
Anthony Romano moderated a panel of four brand leaders — each with experience working inside holding companies and hiring both kinds of agencies from the brand side. Three movements: Indie Tinder, What Indies Do Better / What Holdcos Do Better, and a live Fictional CMO Sim.
Four CMOs with holdco scars. One moderator. One audience tap-in for the sim.
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 — "we make thoughtful, high-effort things for people who appreciate that sort of thing." 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.
Three reds, one green. Russell's red was the loudest: "I don't know how you prove this one. 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 was the cleanest defense of the pro-CFO frame: "The agencies I've worked the best with have that understanding of how to get things done within the organization. They're not this kind of separate entity of 'we're just coming up with cool creative ideas — you figure out how to bring it to life.'"
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."
The prop was a picture — big "advertising sucks" headline, tagline underneath about "building narrative worlds behind modern brands."
"I'm sorry, but 'narrative worlds' gave me an eye roll. What the fuck is that? I literally don't know what it means. I could guess — but don't make me guess." — Jen Martindale
Dense, jargony, strategic-intelligence-and-connected-experiences copy. Four reds. Kim: "this could be any agency." Ashley: "it felt like it could have been an AI-written phrase."
"You have to know who you are. What is your DNA? I picked our last agency because they knew who they were. And then in that second layer, it's 'here's what we're good at solving for you.'" — 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."
Hybrid creative-plus-production shop, flexible teams, "no handoffs," "advertising your customers actually enjoy." Four greens — but with a genuine critique.
Jen caught the double meaning in "invite you in" that saved it: "I actually took the 'invite you in' as a double entendre. It's inviting the consumer — but I also thought about it as they are very collaborative, and they invite their clients into the process. In-house teams and agencies are going to be a competitor for everyone in this room."
A stop-start audit of behaviors, not infrastructure. Before the panel would grant indies a single win, Anthony asked: what's the most frustrating thing agencies — any agencies — keep doing?
Kim named the single behavior every indie should bank on: "Speed and the lean-in and the hustle. You don't always get that from a bigger holding company. You get real razzle-dazzled with a holdco. And then it comes to actually trying to get speed to market, and it's challenging."
Ashley's version of what indies do better was quieter and harder to replicate:
The contrast she named — the "finance tax" on holdco relationships: "I've been at holding companies where every time we do something slightly out of scope, I'm having to have a conversation about finances. That just kills the momentum on the business."
Russell gave the panel's sharpest indie critique. He prefers to work CD-to-CMO, direct line, no account layer. When that works, indies are unbeatable. When it breaks:
Kim's fair credit to holdcos was specific: "When you're in a pitch with a big holding company, they're great because they're a damn machine. They know what they're doing. They have their dossiers on everyone in the room, and it's very formulaic."
Then the tactical counter: "The good part about the machine also can be an opportunity for you to think about how to outsmart what that machine would deliver. How can you nail that to make sure it feels personal?"
Ashley gave the single cleanest indie differentiator of the session. This is the one to steal:
Anthony gave the panel a choice: fire (push the work with conviction, sometimes over the relationship) or heart (EQ, alignment, relationship-first). All four CMOs chose fire. Unanimously. But every answer came with a qualifier.
Ashley: "You're hiring an external partner to challenge you. We want that partner to get us to a different place than we would have otherwise."
Russell: "It's my job internally to clear the way for an agency to do exceptional work… if you can bring me fire that creates value, we're all in."
Kim: "If you can bring the strategy with the fire, now you know you're getting what you need."
Jen: "It's fire. But it's fire that has to come with mutual trust, and a really deep understanding of the business."
Jen's story about the holdco that wouldn't let go of an idea was the sharpest tension moment of the session:
Ashley stacked on it: "We're not getting what we want from the brand team — let's go above their heads and pitch the idea to someone else. That's when it really kills the relationship."
The closing round — start/stop advice for indies. Russell's stop was the best line in the session:
Kim's close, a restatement of "Know Who You Are": "Stop trying to do everything. Don't chase after every new business. If you know who you are and you can find that intersectionality with what the client needs, you're set up for success."
The CMO sim did something the rest of the session couldn't: it made the panel critique a real agency interaction in real time.
Jen played a nervous CMO who'd slept on a bold creative direction and wanted to pull back before a meeting with her CEO. Alex Goulart, from the audience, played the agency leader. He was warm. He listened. He offered to pivot. He protected the long-term relationship. The panel's verdict was polite. Also, pointed.
The uncomfortable truth the sim surfaced: When a CMO gets cold feet on the work, the agency's instinct is to protect the relationship by softening the ask. That instinct is wrong. Every CMO on the panel — the same four who had unanimously chosen fire over heart — said the agency should have pushed harder, not softer.
Worth bringing to the follow-up session: where's the line between "reading the room" (good) and "letting the CMO's anxiety kill the work" (bad)?
Concepts Session 2 named. Use the language — it's cleaner than your current one.
| Term | Who Named It | What It Means |
|---|---|---|
| Indie Tinder | Anthony Romano | Live audit of agency value props with no names attached. If your prop 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, cold outreach, and jargon. |
| The Fire Meter | Anthony | CMOs want fire over heart. But fire = conviction on work, in service of business strategy, with mutual trust. Anything else reads as recklessness. |
| The Pitch Team Problem | Ashley Findlay | The specialized team that pitches the account 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 | The holdco pitch polish that doesn't translate into post-signing speed. The promised data takes months to unlock. |
| The Continuity Gap | Russell Barnett | The indie flex ("scale up, scale down") that reads from the client seat as constant training of new people. |
| Speed Has Been Commoditized | Russell | "We move fast" is now the 2026 version of "full-service agency." Speed-plus-something is the next positioning. |
| The Award-Chasing Tell | Jen | The moment a CCO overrides brand strategy to push an idea toward a case study. CMOs from the agency side spot it immediately. |
| The 15-Minute Rule | Jen (implied) | The floor of cold outbound quality: 15 minutes of ChatGPT or Googling on the brand's business model. Below this floor, you get deleted. |
Steal these verbatim. Scripts you can lift straight from this session.
Pull these out. For your team channel. For your Monday standup. For your own notebook.
Thirteen concrete moves. Pick one. Put it in motion this week.
Read 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. Kim's filter: can I get past the first sentence?
Russell's rule. Everyone moves fast. Replace with speed-plus-something: speed + continuity, speed + insight, speed + taste. Pick one.
Did you spend 15 minutes understanding the brand's revenue model before you sent? If not, rewrite them.
Ashley's tell. Literally say out loud: "The people in this room today are the people who will run your account." Then design your staffing so it's true.
"Narrative worlds." "Brand ecosystems." "Connected experiences." Pick the one you lean on hardest. Replace it with a concrete verb.
Russell's stop. 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: DNA first, capability second. "We are [DNA]. We do [capabilities] in service of it."
Jen's test: am I pushing this because it's right for the brand, or because it's right for a case study? If you can't answer immediately, the CMO already has.
Ashley's "integrated team" frame. The indies she loves didn't earn it by pitching. They earned it by being present without a scope in their hand.
If nothing in your deck makes anyone in the room nervous, you're not pushing hard enough. Jen's boss's rule.
Kim's exact move from the sim critique. Don't pivot to softer until you've confirmed the problem is the work itself — not the nerves.
For every account: how many different people has the client been introduced to in the last 12 months? If the number is climbing, you're eating the training cost.
Kim's closing. You can't do everything. Naming what you won't do is the same move as defining what you will.
Jot your real answers here. We'll open the live session with them.
The Chicago Summit doesn't end when the lights go down. The week of May 18, a 90-minute live conversation for every session — same time every morning, 7am PT / 10am ET. Come to yours. Come to all five.
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 fired.
It was 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 as a creative before that — took a breath and just said it.
"We were working together, and the team that initially won the business left the company. And as hard as we tried, I don't think we ever filled their shoes in a way that was as good as what you bought. 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 laugh — it leaned in. Because every founder in the room had lived the other side of that sentence: holding on too long, hoping the team could be rebuilt, watching a great client drift because the people who'd won the business were gone and the agency never 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.
If you only took one thing out of Session 3, take that.
Marketing panels usually end with a polite "communication is key" and everyone goes to drinks. Session 3 refused to do that. Jonathan King put two senior marketers on stage and framed the whole 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 it: what do brand-side marketers actually want from their agency partners — at every stage of the relationship — that agencies keep getting wrong?
Two senior brand-side marketers. One indie moderator nine months into a relationship with one of them. No sugar coating.
Jonathan took the room through the opening arc of an agency-client love story — 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 — distribution, CEO pressure, sales. Myra's green flag came from a different angle entirely — LinkedIn as dating app.
Anup listed three red flags: misrepresenting who you are, over-indexing on beautiful creative versus business outcomes, and chronic people-pleasing.
Myra, on the pull of founders: "You have someone that — their blood, sweat and tears are literally in it, as opposed to someone who's just doing it as a job. I want to work with the people that have a lot invested in it."
Anup, the operator: "Clarity on the problem you're solving for. Clarity on the actual deliverables — what's in, what's out. And clarity on staffing. Those are the three things I'd look for in the scope."
Jonathan pulled an audience question: what if an agency offered to tie 50% of its scope to business results? Both panelists killed it on the spot.
Myra: "I think it's crazy, and do not do that. 50% is way too high. Even the best work — it's the 1984 Apple ad — it may not work. But I do like a strong KPI discussion."
Anup: "I love the intent. I'd get worried about whether the actual measures of success are directly linked to the work, and does it incentivize bad behavior like short-termism?"
From the six-month check-in through fighting, keeping the spice, divorce, and dating again. The panel got specific about the moves senior marketers wish agencies would just make.
Jonathan asked how they want to communicate day-to-day. Both panelists said text message before he finished the question.
Myra added a tier of counsel: give creatives the ability to connect with clients directly — and check in when they go quiet.
Myra's 11-month reversal, the sentence she wants on a t-shirt for every brand manager she ever worked with:
Myra's first-weeks anecdote at Fortune Brands — a senior leader said "I don't really get what you do" to her face. Her follow-up point about selling marketing inside a large company:
Anup echoed it: "Every other function — they're closet marketers. The more you can come back and help your brand teams with data around why this is going to work with a consumer, the more effective they're going to be selling it in."
Jonathan asked the hardest question of the session — how agencies should help navigate the corporate hierarchy when their day-to-day contact reports up to a CMO they've never met.
Myra's tactic: spend time on the strategy and work the strategic idea, then encourage your client — if they're comfortable with the President or CEO — to go sell in the strategy before you get to the campaign. "Pre-selling on both sides is really, really effective."
Jonathan moved to fighting. Myra told an agency-side story from 15 years ago — a new CCO forced her to bring in award-chasing work to a longtime client she knew would hate it. After the meeting, the client called:
Anup, same frame: "Be honest, be direct, but don't let issues fester. When client-agency issues arise, it's because there's a small problem that gets to be a big problem later."
Year two, year three — how do you keep it fresh without faking urgency?
Myra: "Try something new. Don't try to be everything to everyone. Focus on earned media, big brand ideas, PR… Then pitch provocatively. If you know your client's business, offer up, 'Let us take a shot at this.' Even without budget, pitch it."
Myra name-checked a PR agency whose whole brand is built on the trust-vs-complacency problem:
Anup added the other half: "It's on the brand team to also just push — push the agency to keep it fresh. It's a two-way street."
Jonathan moved to the D-word. Myra made the admission that became the cold open — the team that won the business left, and she probably should have said "fire us." Anup connected it to a broader pattern:
Jonathan's final question — for every indie still trying to get the first date with a bigger brand, what breaks through?
Anup: "Speak the language of business. The more you can tie the work you do to measurable business outcomes, the more you'll get clients to really be interested."
Real disagreement came early, during the DTR/scope question — between Anup and Myra.
Anup wanted the prenup detailed: "Clarity on the problem, clarity on the deliverables, clarity on staffing."
That's uncomfortable because agencies build their entire commercial practice around what Anup said — and half their clients are running Myra's mental model in parallel. An indie that defaults to Anup's framework without asking will feel bureaucratic to a Myra. An indie that defaults to Myra's without asking will get into the six-month fight that Anup was trying to prevent.
Worth bringing to the follow-up: what's the first-meeting question you can ask a brand-side client to surface whether they're a Myra or an Anup?
The named concepts Session 3 gave the IAN community. Now shared shorthand — use them.
| 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 self and in-person self 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 should be surprised. |
| Trust vs. Complacency | Anup | Year-two killer. Trust built in year one becomes complacency if nobody is keeping 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 out loud. The agency that earns the right to say it first wins the next pitch. |
| Green Flag: Business Curiosity | Anup | Ask about distribution and CEO pressure before you ask about the creative ask. |
| Red Flag: People-Pleaser | Anup | Saying yes to everything in meeting one loses respect by meeting three. |
| The Sell-Through Kit | Myra (extrapolated) | Sizzle, one-pager, internal deck. The unbuilt indie deliverable. Make it without being asked. |
| The 48-Hour Departure Alert | Anup (extrapolated) | When senior people roll off, the client hears from you first — names, backgrounds, handoff plan. |
| Pitch Provocatively | Myra | Unsolicited, no-budget, quarterly. Trust-vs-complacency defense. |
Steal these verbatim. Words picked on stage for a reason.
Pull these out. For your team channel. For your standup. For your own notebook.
Thirteen concrete moves. Pick one. Put it in motion this week.
Myra's rule. If 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. Show you care about business before you show the reel.
Myra's note. Don't silo the account team as the relationship layer. The creative-to-client text is where the best briefs get written.
If the client's been silent four business days, someone on your team sends the four-sentence "how can we help" text. Not a status ask. A wellness check.
Sizzle video, one-pager, internal deck. Treat every client as someone selling the work to thirty people she doesn't love.
Myra's move. If your client's comfortable bringing you to the President/CEO at strategy stage, offer it.
Myra's Stepford Wife moment. 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 the agency first — with names, backgrounds, and handoff plan.
Myra's "it's time to fire us" admission. 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're pitching, fix yours before you pitch theirs.
Jot your real answers here. We'll open the live session with them.
The Chicago Summit doesn't end when the lights go down. The week of May 18, a 90-minute live conversation for every session — same time every morning, 7am PT / 10am ET. Come to yours. Come to all five.
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.
He and his partner at DNA had been looking at what was next. They had long-term retainers, a strong account shop, and a hole where creative ownership should be. Building that creative muscle from scratch meant new hires, new risk, and still no guarantee of the ownership they wanted. And there was another agency in town — a small one — that kept beating them on the work.
So the two founders had a conversation about what to do. Alan's framing, unsanitized:
"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 small talk and a polite exit. Instead, it kicked off a year-long conversation that became DNA's merger with Hands of Stone — the biggest bet he's made in 26 years of running an agency, and, in his words, "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.
The operators on this stage didn't grow by imitating a holdco. They grew by naming the gap and buying, merging, or building exactly into it.
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?
Every indie founder eventually hits the same wall. Organic growth plateaus. The services the market wants aren't the ones you built to be known for. Payroll gets heavier. The ground — AI, media, holdcos, PE money — keeps shifting underneath.
Session 4a opened Block 4 with the question nobody on stage wanted to answer generically:
Moderated by Lori Murphee — Founder & Managing Partner of Evalla Advisors, an M&A advisor who sits between agencies and the strategic, PE, and independent paths they might take — the panel surfaced the full spectrum: a 30-year indie doubling down on independence (McGarrah Jessee), a PE-backed 240-person agency that acquired four shops and is now picking it back up (Rain), a 40-person Seattle shop that just finished an indie-to-indie merger (DNA&Stone), and — read into the record by Lori — a 450-person PE-backed serial acquirer (Mod Op).
The starting question from the moderator was simple: "How many people in this room have a three-to-five-year plan? Keep your hands up if you have a ten." A few hands up on three. Almost none on ten.
A moderator who works the deal side. Three operators with very different cap tables. One absent panelist read into the record.
Lori asked each operator for the single biggest bet they'd already made. What came back wasn't a deck. It was founder-level honesty about mergers, survival pivots, and the middle lane between the boutique and the holdco.
Alan's founding story for the merger. DNA had creative-ownership deficits they couldn't cure organically fast enough. A smaller indie in town kept beating them. The partners went to get a drink expecting a polite dead-end.
Jane on what forced Rain's biggest bet — the full conversion from linear TV to what they now call "converged TV."
Britton on the doubled-down investment: a real media practice, a real data science practice, and continued investment in McGarrah Jessee's Fair Share profit program.
The "one thing" framing: "leveraging uncommon sense to drive rational fandom for brands."
Alan on the hardest part of the DNA + Hands of Stone merger — the part no amount of planning deck solved.
The fallout: culture became a year-long work-in-progress. Some people didn't buy in. Some left. Some had to be moved out. And the business model mismatch — DNA was retainer-heavy and full-time; Hands of Stone was primarily freelance — was a whole second integration problem.
Alan, pressed on what specifically he'd do differently:
Jane on Rain's integration lessons from 2004–2008, still being lived in 2026.
Rain kept some acquired shops running as separate entities under the portfolio on purpose. They're now restarting M&A activity and the cultural fit question is leading the diligence — not the capability.
Lori turned the room from "what did you bet?" to "what are you betting next?" Self-funding vs. PE, change management timelines, AI adoption, and the quiet signal that it's time to go shopping.
Britton on the McGarrah Jessee reality that most agencies don't say out loud.
Every McGarrah Jessee investment in data science, media, AI assists, or a partnership draws down the same pool that funds Fair Share profit-sharing with employees.
Jane, dropping the unglamorous truth on change management that everybody in the room quietly wrote down.
Britton on the post-COVID pivot McGarrah Jessee had to make when the original plan didn't survive contact with the P&L.
McGarrah Jessee runs flexible now — ~60 in Austin, ~40 across 22 other cities. The bond is built differently. "We refer to it as turning our creativity onto ourselves."
Britton on how McGarrah Jessee actually landed AI internally, without the fear spiral.
The finance example he gave: closing the books takes a week, the whole department effectively shuts down. "What if that were two days? What if we could templatize and systemize and automate some of that process so you could trade back time for gray matter — for strategic and creative work?"
Jane, on the internal discipline that's now driving Rain back into the acquisition market.
Britton on McGarrah Jessee's next bet — the one that isn't an acquisition and isn't a vertical.
He invoked Amazon's vertical-integration logic: "You look up — we've built all these e-commerce and cloud systems, why don't we rent those out? You look down — why are we using UPS and FedEx when we could have our own delivery? Open that aperture more: where else can you go with the actual minds you have in your building?"
Lori asked Alan directly. His answer was the tightest summary of what he'd learned:
Lori, closing the room out with the line that runs her practice.
The real disagreement on this stage wasn't loud. It was structural — and it sat between Britton and Jane.
Britton went all-in on self-funded independence and framed PE and external capital as risks to culture, to transparency, and to the staff's paycheck through Fair Share. Jane, without pushing back at him directly, made a quietly confident case that PE had been a 17-plus-year partner for Rain — "they're great partners, and they mostly let us run our business" — and that it's exactly what enabled the acquisitions, the converged-TV pivot, and the ability to go shopping again now.
Both were right about their own agencies. Both were also arguing for a different future for the indie category.
Two agencies can be "indie" in the IAN sense — founder-owned, creatively self-directed, culturally integrated — with completely different funding structures underneath. Britton's McGarrah Jessee is self-funded because he believes the trade-offs flow to his people. Jane's Rain is PE-backed because she believes the trade-offs flow to scale and survival. Both models are producing the work.
Worth bringing to the follow-up: where does "indie" end and "PE-backed indie" begin — for the IAN definition, for clients, for talent?
The named concepts Session 4a gave the IAN community. Now shared shorthand — use them.
| 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 is on the table whether you know it or not. |
| Indie Amplified | Britton / McGarrah Jessee | The deliberate middle lane between the creative boutique and the holdco: indie agencies that actually build their own media and data capabilities. |
| Converged TV | Jane / Rain | The market-facing name for 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, not the slide. |
| Clear Swim Lanes | Alan | In a four-owner structure, the decision architecture is the culture. Write it down, 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 strategic partnership or acquisition. |
| Lead With The Benefit | Britton (on AI) | AI adoption as a desk-to-desk gift-giving program, not a threat. Engineers find busy work, return gray-matter time, let adoption follow voluntarily. |
| 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, the deal gets riskier. M&A requires a named internal owner, not a side-of-desk assignment. |
Steal these verbatim. Phrases picked on stage for a reason.
Pull these out. For your team channel. For your Monday standup. For your own notebook.
Thirteen concrete moves. Pick one. Put it in motion this week.
Lori's opening test. If your leadership team can't answer "what if the plan breaks?" you don't have a plan. You have a budget.
Alan, Jane, and Britton each named theirs in under thirty seconds. If yours takes three paragraphs, you haven't decided yet.
What gap can you not close yourselves? What gap can they not close themselves? If the Venn is clean, have the drink.
If it's in secular decline (Jane's linear TV moment), your three-year plan is a repositioning plan. Start now.
Britton's Fair Share math. Don't let the trade-off be invisible. Make it a company decision, not a founder's.
Alan's four-owner problem. Who decides what, which meeting, on what cadence. Re-publish quarterly.
Jane's running joke is the room's real planning horizon. Your change-management plan and your long-range plan are the same document.
Britton's model. Engineers + a PM. Their first 90 days is desk-to-desk interviews, not a tool rollout.
Jane's diagnostic. Tracked rate of internal build × capability importance = your shopping list.
Lori's rule. Time kills all deals. "The founders" is not an answer — one name is.
Britton's $75K-a-pop lesson. Fewer, more intentional convenings beat more, more diluted ones. Build the rituals that survive.
Which three of your 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.
Jot your real answers here. We'll open the live session with them. (This session covers both 4a and 4b.)
The Chicago Summit doesn't end when the lights go down. The week of May 18, a 90-minute live conversation for every session — same time every morning, 7am PT / 10am ET. Come to yours. Come to all five.
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 on the panel tilted the same way. Lauren Ridgley first — "Not yet. The questions are being asked. Nobody's putting enough pressure to actually say we have to act on it." Jaime Ekman next — "Yeah, same, not yet." Then Rachel Brandt, flipping the frame entirely:
"It's not like downward pressure. It's almost an upward lens of that — 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. Clients know AI exists. They haven't yet figured out what it changes in the contract. But they've absolutely figured out what it changes in the deliverable — and "better and faster" is already table stakes.
If you only took one idea out of the room, it was that one. The margin squeeze is not here yet. The expectation upgrade already is.
Session 4 was IAN's "Where Adland's Placing Its Bets" block — four chairs, real numbers, honest operating questions. 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) who lives between the agencies and the data and therefore hears every version of this question. No slides. Mic passed down the row.
Four operators comparing notes. One moderator who hears every version of this question.
Four operators on in-house vs. outsource. No two answers the same. A posture shift across the indie landscape, quietly underway for five years, finally spoken out loud.
Lauren opened the block with the line every media principal in the room had been waiting for someone else to say out loud. Her response: Left Hand has invested hard in training protocols and systems for the way they plan and buy. Repeatable without being formulaic.
Four years ago, Stolz brought media fully in-house. Over the last 18 months, media revenue has declined dramatically through client changes. Now, another decision point.
Corner Table Creative needed the revenue. They didn't know what else to do. So they went freelance-only.
Kyle Eckhart is the 21-year veteran, sitting inside an integrated shop (Rain) built from a merger plus a series of acquisitions. He named a posture shift that has quietly happened across the indie landscape.
What replaced the old posture: a dedicated task force reviewing conversations with potential partners. Part for evolving their own business. Part because clients are constantly asking, "What's out there? Who does the best work in this space?"
The moderator shifted the conversation to AI. Ten moments later, the sharpest indie positioning on AI this year was sitting on the panel — and nobody had pitched it as positioning.
Lauren: they don't use AI for planning. They use it for validation — after the plan is written, running the whole proposal through CMO-brain prompts: what are the white spaces? What have I forgotten? What is the client going to ask me?
Jaime also on the tool churn: "So many AI tools we have tried that are now those companies are out of business. It's just moving so fast. The key is just trying as much as you can, seeing what helps, seeing what sticks."
Rachel Brandt took the AI conversation to a place nobody expected — her own Financial Dashboard, built in a week and a half by her fractional CFO. Cash flow, plan vs. actuals, per-client forecast, profit margin by client, invoice status, with the pipeline underneath. Then they added agents.
Not a cost saving, she said. A creativity unlock. "It's also reshaping how I'm thinking about tools for our clients. Like, what is the dashboard my client needs to see right now?"
Kyle described the AI rollout posture at an integrated shop of real size, and it's the opposite of how most leaders picture it. First they put a policy in place. Then they realized nobody was really experimenting. So they had to put process and tools in place to give people the latitude to experiment.
The internal ROI story he told: "We had a particular thing we were using to help in a certain space. Our CTO saw the demonstration of it and said, 'I think I could build it.' He built it over the weekend. And now we're starting to productize it."
The moderator dropped in the most quietly important observation of the session. Speaking from Pathlabs' vantage point, working across many agencies:
Kyle separated the client expectation on creative work vs. media work — a nuance worth putting on a poster. Creative side: a lot of nervousness, not much client expectation. Media side: "How are you using AI to drive efficiencies in my business?" On a regular basis.
Rachel's sharpest contribution came as a quiet counter-line to the AI-optimism running through the panel.
The moderator asked: are any of you seeing downward pressure on margin from client AI expectations?
Lauren: "Not yet. The questions are being asked. Nobody's putting enough pressure to actually say we have to act on it."
Jaime: "Yeah, same, not yet. I don't think."
Rachel: "It's not like downward pressure. It's almost an upward lens of that — actually, I want to see the work get better. I want to see you respond faster because of these tools."
The moderator asked the session's softest and most important question. He started his career as an unpaid intern prepping reports and taking notes — exactly the tasks AI now does.
Lauren: "They know how to use AI better than all of us. The younger ones are coming in to teach me. Teaching them to prompt, teaching them to ask the right questions is where I have to come in and say: the strategic thinking behind what you're asking is where you need to work."
Kyle: "Use case demonstration. A little road show with all our teams to inspire them to share use cases with each other."
Jaime: "Now that AI is doing note-taking and reporting, we have an opportunity to get the younger team members into the work faster. This summer we're aligning our internship program with our pro bono program so they actually get to be working."
Rachel: "They're spending time thinking about, 'here's an idea I can bring to the client,' instead of the time it had been spent in interns past: 'where can I find that answer?' I'm inspired by them every day."
Kyle closed with the sharpest line of the session. On a stage last year, a very large agency said their ambition was to take their operation from 2,000 people to two people. It struck a chord.
No shouting match on this panel. The tension was quieter and arguably bigger — a structural disagreement about what in-house means as a posture.
Jaime's position: full in-house media, built four years ago, is now a cost structure she's actively questioning. Declining media revenue + rising complexity = overhead she's not sure she can justify.
Kyle's position — from a much larger integrated shop — was the opposite: the five-year shift has been away from "do everything ourselves" and toward a dedicated partnership function. More partners, not fewer. A task force just to vet them.
Rachel's position was the hybrid compromise: in-house + partner agencies + freelance, specifically because one-track models (she tried freelance-only and got burned) are fragile.
Worth bringing to the follow-up: how often should a principal formally re-evaluate their media operating model, and what are the trigger conditions?
The named concepts Session 4b gave the IAN community. Use them.
| 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 current 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 quickly so the team gets to interesting ones faster. |
| 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. Actively opting out of platform auto-optimizations on meta etc. 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 now read their own data with AI before the call. Arrive with the agency's narrative, they arrive with the data's — you lose. |
| The In-House Re-Decision | Jaime | In-house media is not a destination. It's a current 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. |
Steal these verbatim. Words picked on stage for a reason.
Pull these for your team channel, your Monday standup, or your own notebook.
Thirteen concrete moves. Pick one. Put it in motion this week.
Every 12–18 months. Put it on the books. Jaime's decision point is not an accident — it's a posture. Make it yours.
Lauren's move. Run the finished plan through AI prompts: "You are the CMO. What questions would you ask? What's missing? What will you push back on first?" Before the client does.
Kyle's task force at agency scale. At indie scale: one person, one spreadsheet. Clients are asking who else you know.
Rachel's rule. Go account by account. Make "here's where we turned AI off, and why" a line item in your next client QBR.
Rachel's financial dashboard, built in a week and a half with a fractional CFO. Pick the spreadsheet you hate most. Start there.
Kyle and Jaime's model. 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 or a live account from day one. Put them in the meat of the work.
A senior and a junior, 30 minutes a week. Junior teaches prompt-craft. Senior teaches strategic framing. Both learn what they don't have.
Lauren, Jaime, and Rachel all said "not yet." The pressure is coming. Model it now so you're not negotiating blind when it does.
Kyle's observation. Creative clients want reassurance. Media clients want evidence. Walking in with the wrong script is a tell.
Rachel's inspiration pivot. If it worked for your CFO view, it works for a brand-performance view.
Pathlabs' smarter-client warning. Arrive at the meeting with your narrative AND the data's narrative. If you can't, the meeting's not yours anymore.
Or your version of it. Kyle's response to the "2,000 to 2" story is the indie sector's cleanest AI counter-positioning. Claim it.
Shared with Session 4a — Thursday, May 21. Jot your real answers here. We'll open the live session with them.
The Chicago Summit doesn't end when the lights go down. The week of May 18, a 90-minute live conversation for every session — same time every morning, 7am PT / 10am ET. Come to yours. Come to all five.
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 and Lori and Paul were about to walk everybody 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 ever goes live.
The opening beat was a fake brief: Golden Organic Popcorn, a World Cup tie-in, a retired soccer player, a celebrity chef, a licensed song. Looks clean on paper. $225K budget. And 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 that isn't in your budget line.
The Talent Trap — bad behavior, morals clauses, and brands behaving worse than the talent.
The IP Treasure Hunt — a hypothetical insurance campaign dissected for every piece of intellectual property it generates, including the AI layer.
Every indie agency signs statements of work, negotiates with influencers, and drops generative AI into the workflow. Most do at least one of those three things badly enough that it costs them money, a client, or a night of sleep.
The session asked two connected questions:
A note on overlap. This session overlaps ground covered in IAN's AI + Legal Blueprint already published on indieagency.news. Where Sharon touched AI contract policy and human-authorship ownership, we've noted it briefly and pointed you there. Everything else here — celebrity deal economics, morals clauses, influencer content licensing, synthetic likeness pricing — is fresh from Chicago and not in that earlier report.
A moderator, two long-time partners who finish each other's war stories, and a room full of principals with their own horror stories — bribed into sharing with Starbucks cards and Paydays.
Sharon set the fake brief. Lori and Paul walked the numbers, the contracts, and the people. What started as a line-item exercise turned into a string of unprintable on-set stories — morals clauses, nine-minute shoots, and the brand that demanded 200 takes.
Sharon set up the fake brief, Lori walked the parameters: a World Cup tie-in, not an official sponsor, salty-snacks exclusivity, a :30 spot, some influencer PR support, a wish list that included Megan Rapinoe, Guy Fieri, and Imagine Dragons' "On Top Of The World" for the music bed.
Lori's addition: a past Super Bowl campaign had SAG side costs — roughly 18.5% of talent fee, over a million dollars — accidentally deleted from the budget by a brand director.
Influencer wants exclusivity for a defined term. Brand wants to own the content outright. Agency gets squeezed in the middle. Paul's framing, the cleanest put-it-in-a-sentence version anyone has offered:
Sharon, from the IP-lawyer chair: "Just because you can own the IP, or you would like to own IP in the content, doesn't mean that you really need to, or that it has commercial value. You have to factor that into what you're willing to pay for it."
An attendee volunteered a story: media agency missed that the talent deal had a hard end date. Content ran past the window. Agency had to go back to the client for more money. Paul pulled up a current deal that illustrates the inverse trap — a client wants to sign now for usage that starts in October:
Lori's set piece. A-list celebrity, campaign shooting in Spanish, Mexico City-based agency, Long Island mansion location. Red flags before shoot day:
Paul's add: phoner day, connection keeps dropping, by the third drop the talent chucks the PR agent's phone against the wall — "I'm done with this shit." His summary: all talent influencer deals with personality are a hurricane. Lori and Paul's job is to sit in the middle and be the calm.
An attendee, fast and flat, bled into laughter:
Sharon's own story first: a campaign launched, old social content resurfaced that was racially inflammatory, termination had to happen same day. "We had quite a fight on our hands, because they wouldn't go down without one."
Paul's story, ten years back, is the one to memorize:
Sharon, adding the legal nuance most agencies miss: "It's not always about the talent doing something illegal or immoral. Sometimes it's them taking a stand where the brand wants to be completely neutral. Sometimes it's a cause the brand does not want to be allied with. These clauses are written to provide a lot of discretion to the brand."
Lori raised the reverse: at the height of Me Too, sophisticated talent reps started asking for mutual morals clauses — protecting the talent if a brand exec or ingredient issue blew up.
Paul's second horror story — the one that matters because most of Session 5 makes the talent the villain, and it's not always the talent. Creative approved, contracts signed. Then the brand and agency quietly changed the creative, asked talent at the wardrobe fitting to wear something she hadn't agreed to, added an unapproved prop. On a two-day shoot, they kept her for nine hours and had her read a line 200 times. They wanted 50 more.
Day two, different problem: director gifted the talent a scarf from his wife's company and then proceeded to shoot the setup as if it were an advertorial. "We had to sign a contract on set, handwritten, old-school, so it wouldn't get publicized — like a will."
Sharon's setup: a hypothetical insurance campaign targeting Gen Z professionals who think they'll live forever. Integrated: social channels, influencer content, direct response, a microsite with a proprietary quote calculator, original product names and taglines, celebrity testimonials, people-on-the-street interviews. The prompt to the room: find all the IP. Candy for every landmine spotted.
Zanger called out the first one. Sharon's response: "Trademarkable, ideally — but need to be cleared first. You don't want a product name or tagline that will cause confusion with any other products on the market in a similar category."
The layer agencies forget: visual identity elements — logos, jingles, sonic trademarks — carry both copyright and trademark implications.
The quote calculator generated the longest answer of the treasure hunt:
Sharon made the distinction explicit:
Quick hit from Sharon: any interview or ambient capture at a sporting event, a concert, a street corner requires name-image-likeness releases. Not just for the big talent — for the background.
An attendee asked whether commissioned audience research (the Gen Z avatar) counted as IP. Sharon's answer refined the category:
Sharon, on the part she gets asked about every week. (Fuller treatment lives in IAN's AI + Legal Blueprint — here's what was fresh from Chicago.) Two implications every agency has to address:
On ownability, she was direct: "A question we get frequently is how much human creation piled on top of AI output will make it ownable. My answer is: there is no amount. We don't know. It's possible to own the human-created elements of a final piece of work, if you can identify them clearly. Documentation is going to be key. But there's no magic percentage."
On the CGI comparison from the audience (isn't this just a new tool?): "The primary distinction is that these major AI purveyors have admittedly used IP owned by other parties without permission, and it's in their training data. You cannot know whether you've infringed somebody else's rights by using generative AI."
Sharon's close on the AI topic widened into the next-five-years fight in the influencer economy:
The disagreement wasn't loud. But it ran between Lori and Paul on one side and the room on the other.
The audience kept expecting a cleaner answer to "how do you protect against this?" Paul and Lori kept refusing to give one. The underlying tension: a lot of this cannot be planned for. It has to be absorbed.
The legal paper is necessary but insufficient. The real protection is the person in the middle 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. Bring it to the follow-up.
The named concepts Session 5 gave the IAN community. Now shared shorthand — use them.
| Term | Who Named It | What It Means |
|---|---|---|
| The Invisible Invoice | Sharon | Every cost in a celebrity/influencer deal that isn't 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 actually happens on set. Managed with backup options, diligence on reps, and thick relationship muscle. |
| The Hurricane | Paul | The state of any celebrity deal in active production. IAT, CMO, talent, director, agent, publicist — each with their own agenda. Your only job is to be the calm. |
| Mutual Morals Clause | Lori / Sharon | Standard brand-protective morals clauses should now run both ways. Sophisticated reps ask for reverse morals clauses. Refusing signals only one side has a reputation. |
| 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 as 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 tools. You can't own the AI output. You might own what you provably added on top. |
| Synthetic Likeness Rights | Sharon | The next frontier in talent contracts. Rights to digitally replicate a performer's image, voice, or likeness beyond the original capture. A separate line item — or the lawsuit. |
Steal these verbatim. Language built on stage for a reason.
Pull these out. For your team channel. For your standup. For your own notebook.
Ten concrete moves. Pick one. Put it in motion this week.
Separate lines for SAG pension and health, payroll fees and taxes, glam/wardrobe, travel, and publicist vetting fees. Stop folding them into "talent" and watching the client flinch later.
Paul's non-negotiable. Costs nothing to include. Can save you seven figures. Write it broadly enough to cover public stances and cause alignment, 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 as the same deal. Fix it.
Lori's rule. The client falls in love with the backup once they hear what's wrong with the A-list pick. Build optionality into your process so the pivot doesn't feel like a demotion.
They are not the same thing. Pad the usage window. If the client wants to sign early, charge for the extra exclusivity months.
Sharon's rule. Also write the external-facing one. Share both with clients. If the next RFP asks (they will), you're already there.
Client acknowledges your use, confirms their policies allow it, accepts that training-data risk is not something you can warrant. Use Sharon's version in the Scripts section as a starting draft for your lawyer.
Screenshots of prompts. Revision notes. Named human contributors. If ownership ever becomes contested, that paper trail is the only thing standing between you and a public-domain deliverable.
Names/taglines cleared. Microsite code licensed vs. transferred. N.I.L. releases on the clipboard. Jingles double-registered. Synthetic likeness rights addressed if AI replication is in scope. Run the Sharon-Paul-Lori treasure hunt on your own campaign before the client does.
Jot your real answers here. We'll open the live session with them.
The Chicago Summit doesn't end when the lights go down. The week of May 18, a 90-minute live conversation for every session — same time every morning, 7am PT / 10am ET. Come to yours. Come to all five.
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. And 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 the stage from Session 1. He had a book out — Eat the Donkey — and a Kirkus review he'd been waiting on for a week. 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 in his career, the place most agencies are quietly parked right now.
And then he handed the room 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 actually doing something about it.
Structured loosely in two halves: Part One — Foundation Theory: what it is, how the big companies use it, why most agency decks are indistinguishable, and why AI is about to make that problem worse. Part Two — How Clients Actually Buy: long-term vs. short-term, procurement, the "dumb fuckery" inside marketing teams, and why opinion beats options.
Every indie agency is under pressure to do more, say more, win more, add more capabilities, add more AI, bolt on more services. Anthony's keynote asked the opposite question.
The talk was structured loosely in two halves:
A single-speaker keynote. No panel, no moderator, no tap-outs.
Anthony piecing together a theory of durable companies: what Amazon, Airbnb, Starbucks, and Porsche actually share — and why most agencies don't.
Anthony opened the keynote by calling himself out.
A cola company pitch he sat on the client side of, twelve to fourteen months ago. Search consultant sent 22 agencies. Whittled to 12. Then 8. Then six came in and pitched.
Then the diagnosis: "Every font, I guarantee, was a version of a sans font. The color of the year was probably purple or red. Every deck was the same. Especially now we have AI, it's all going to be the same."
The confession that followed landed hard: "Marketing agencies, or creative agencies or media agencies — we are the worst at marketing ourselves. We are horrible at it."
Anthony pieced it together while leaving Amazon and working on Airbnb. The setup: "Amazon has 1.6 million people that are all aligned to the direction that the company goes. Can you imagine whether you're 10 people, two people, 200 people, if you can get all your team heading in the same direction."
Three big companies he pressure-tested the theory against:
The bridge from big-company Foundation Theory to service-business Foundation Theory. Anthony referenced the Eleven Madison Park story (the source for the book Unreasonable Hospitality and for the show The Bear).
Midway through the opening, Anthony stopped.
Not a moment you'd flag in a generic recap. It belongs here because it's the demonstration of what the rest of the keynote is arguing. Anthony came off a pitch-war story and a Foundation framework and then — without breaking stride — did a small, specific, human, slightly self-deprecating thing in public.
Anthony switched sides. He 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.
The specifics: "We did a campaign cola six months ago, and we needed 2500 assets. Anyone can pump those out with Adobe now with Gen Studio or Adobe Express. That's the easy part of the business, and there's no money in that part of the business. Where we struggle is that long term."
Anthony's sharpest client-side rant. The "Uncomfortable Truth" of the keynote — logged separately below, introduced here.
His advice to the room: ask the questions clients aren't asking themselves. "The more questions you ask, the more you make them think about — is this the right call, has everyone signed off on the brief, is the CEO aligned?"
The direct rebuttal to "we do everything" full-service positioning.
The counter-example: "Airbnb doesn't own a whole pie. They don't do hotels. They're sticking very much to their core. Amazon has tried a lot of different things — even the Amazon Fire Phone was a phenomenal error — but they've stuck to their core about customer experience over everything else."
An interview question Anthony has used for years — because the answer applies equally to a hire and to a pitch.
Extended to agencies: "As an indie agency, if you say, 'we don't do that because of these reasons here,' the amount of trust that you're going to build further down the path is going to be astronomical."
Anthony recommended two books: Unreasonable Hospitality and Get Naked (Patrick Lencioni).
In Session 1 he said the same thing from the panel — "Within indie, they came in and solved the problem. And the revenue was always there." In the keynote, it got its source text.
The cleanest articulation of the anti-options argument in the whole keynote.
Backed by the Verizon / AT&T direct-marketing story: every time they gave customers more phone choices, response rates dropped. And the Cheesecake Factory aside — "it probably took about 55, 60 minutes to order because those kids can't make up their mind" — was the consumer version of the same truth.
His advice, slightly softened: "You can be nice about it. You don't have to be a dick about it. But having opinions is a really important thing to do."
The keynote's closing motivation, and the cleanest quotable line for where the indie moment is right now.
He also named the economic shift: "The money's moved away from hourly rates, or moved away from margins. Get out of those conversations and really have a very, very strong opinion."
The keynote's one moment of self-check. Anthony pulled back on his own loud-and-opinionated framing to remind the room their clients are humans with mortgages.
The closing thesis.
Porsche as the model: "They are so specific in what they want to be. 'We are going to have rear wheel drive. Screw what's going to happen with aerodynamics.' They fought to the point of being uncomfortable to stick to what they really want to do."
The final ask: "Uncover who you really are. If you can't answer that within two or three minutes, I guarantee that your team won't be able to answer that at all."
Keynotes don't have panel disagreement. They have one speaker with one thing they're willing to say that other speakers aren't.
Anthony's was this: most of what's slowing your agency down isn't your positioning. It's your client's internal dysfunction — and you are complicit in it.
Uncomfortable because it reframes where agencies spend their anxiety. Most indies are still auditing their own pitch decks, tuning their own positioning, polishing their own case studies. Anthony's argument is that the decisive variable in most lost pitches isn't on the agency's side of the room. It's the CMO's bonus structure. It's an unaligned CEO. It's a brief nobody at the client signed off on.
Worth bringing to the follow-up conversations this week: what would change in your pitch process if you treated client internal alignment as the #1 thing you underwrite?
The named concepts Anthony gave the room. Now shared shorthand — use them.
| 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," "that's okay" — 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 bonus structures, unsigned briefs. |
| Own A Slice, Not The Pie | Anthony | Full-service is a defensive posture. 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 the ones in the next room. |
| Filters | Airbnb / Apple, via Anthony | The term used by Airbnb and Apple for their 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. |
| Bring Them A Gift | Anthony | (Carried over from Session 1.) Every touchpoint, plant a small, free nudge of adjacent value. |
Five scripts you can lift from the keynote. Anthony gave two of them; the other three are derivable from his framework and fit the keynote's voice.
Pull these out. For your team channel. For your standup. For your own notebook.
Fourteen concrete moves. Pick two. Put them in motion this week.
If it takes longer than three minutes, you don't have a foundation yet. You have a draft.
If you get three different answers, the foundation hasn't been installed. That's the work for the quarter.
If the answer is any of them, run the Anthony diagnostic: font, color of the year, same-shaped strategy. Cut what's generic.
Cut it before your next RFP response goes out.
Make the call this week.
Anthony's warning is explicit: clients hear AI and mentally walk you to the door. Lead with the long-term brand question instead.
Has everyone signed off? Is the CEO aligned? What does success look like in 18 months? Watch what comes back — or what doesn't.
Lencioni's Get Naked. Anthony's direct mail data. Same answer. Options are friction. Opinions convert.
Starbucks doesn't lead with "we roast coffee." Airbnb doesn't lead with "we run a booking platform." Lead with the belief.
Whatever it is, that's your foundation. If you can't name it, that's your project.
Two hours. The cleanest articulation of the selling-vs-solving frame Anthony has made a career on.
It is not about restaurants. It is about Foundation Theory applied at full volume in a service business. Which is your business.
If the incentives reward short-term revenue, you will unconsciously push clients toward short-term work. Anthony's "CMO bonus" rant works on agency principals too.
The "no" is the foundation showing up in public. It is the most trust-building act in your fiscal year.
Jot your real answers here. Use them as the opening questions at whichever session follow-up you attend Mon–Fri, May 18–22.
The Chicago Summit doesn't end when the lights go down. The week of May 18, a 90-minute live conversation for every session — same time every morning, 7am PT / 10am ET. The keynote doesn't have a dedicated live follow-up — bring your Foundation answers to any of the five session conversations below.
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.
These Blueprints are yours. Share with your team. Come back to them when you need them. If something in them sparks a conversation, that was the whole point.
↑ Back to the Hub