Adweek’s 2023 Breakthrough Agency of the Year Finalists

This year, Adweek is not only celebrating the best ad agencies in the business but also striving to help other shops understand what makes the best of the best truly stand out.

That’s why, for the first time, Adweek has a theme for its Agency of the Year awards program: Building a Better Agency. Adweek asked each finalist across all seven categories to explain how it is building a better agency for the future.

Last year, Majority took home the title of Adweek’s Breakthrough Agency of the Year.

How we got here

Adweek invited any agency to enter (without a fee) its yearly Agency of the Year awards program by providing information about its past year and best work.

A team of Adweek editors and reporters combed through the entries and generated a list of five finalists in each category. Adweek’s internal jury deliberated over these finalists, taking into account three main factors:

• Business success (client wins and losses, revenue growth, strategy and use of technology).
• The work (a reel featuring the agency’s 10 best and most effective pieces of creative).
• Talent and ESG (creating an environment for employees to succeed through its culture and benefits, as well as advancing DEI and sustainability).

On Oct. 10, Adweek will reveal the winning agencies. Below, in alphabetical order, are the finalists for Breakthrough Agency of the Year.

Courage

In May 2022, three former Rethink partners, Dhaval Bhatt, Niki Sahni and Joel Holtby founded the shop, which is part of the No Fixed Address family of agencies. In its first year of operation, Courage inked an all-star lineup of clients, including CIBC, KFC Canada, Nescafé and KitKat.

The agency has delivered an array of campaigns for KFC Canada over the past year, spotlighting The Colonel, which often hasn’t showed up in KFC’s Canadian advertising before. What the agency doesn’t deliver, though, is Monday presentations. The agency has banned presentations internally and for clients to start the week to prevent employees from working over the weekend.

The shop has also created a number of strong purpose driven pieces for CIBC and Nescafé that celebrate immigrants and sustainability.

How it’s building a better agency: “Too many times agencies fall into the trap of treating clients like they’re scary entities that need big decks and fancy slides, when often the best work is an outcome of a conversation or a text message,” said Dhaval Bhatt, co-founder and CCO. “It’s never strategists talking to creatives or accounts to production. It’s always human to human, leading with empathy and honesty.”

Gut

Gut, the network founded by former David execs Anselmo Ramos and Gaston Bigio, has been building momentum for several years. Now with seven offices across three continents, 2023 is the year it all came together for the shop to get noticed on the global stage at Cannes. The shop won Independent Network of the Year and Indie Agency of the Year for Gut Buenos Aires at the festival.

Gut leans into bravery as its core principal, asking its clients to take a leap and become braver over time. It scores its clients on a bravery scale to measure their progress. The result has been spectacular work across the region from a DoorDash Valentine’s Day bouquet featuring a vibrator to a movement that removes the “yellow filter” from Mexico for Corona to a bevy of culture-tapping campaigns in Argentina.

How it’s building a better agency: “In a world surrounded by data coming from every brand touch point, being intuitive has become a competitive advantage,” said Anselmo Ramos, co-founder and creative chairman, Gut. “At Gut, our mission is to inspire the world to trust their guts.”

Party Land

In an era where agencies are working overtime to try to brand their themselves to stand out in a sea of sameness, Party Land is embracing comedy and making laughter its identity. Nowhere is that clearer than its work for Liquid Death, which often pushes the envelop with its marketing. The agency helped create the brand’s Greatest Hates Volume 3 pop album, which featured an absolute banger of a music video.

The shop, which was an early signer of the Clean Creatives Pledge to not work with fossil fuel clients, landed work with new clients L’Oreal’s Urban Decay, Jansport, Every Man Jack and Impossible Foods over the past year. When beginning a relationship, the agency asks its clients, “How Party Land do you want to go?”

How it’s building a better agency: “Party Land is an experiment that seems to be working. We identified our passions and created a business around them,” said Andy Silva, managing partner, Party Land. “Our brand is the best filter for finding talent that wants to elevate our unique comedy offering and for attracting the best client matches for this agency.”

Quality Meats Creative

Brutal honesty powers Quality Meats’ (electric—it also signed the Clean Creatives pledge) engine. Or as co-founder and co-CCO Gordy Sang puts it, “We can’t really help it, it’s just who we are as human people. But it always leads to better relationships, better work and a more efficient way of doing business.” In a few short years of operation, Quality Meats has landed work with Kimberly Clark, Regal Cinemas, DoorDash, Buffalo Wild Wings and Saxx.

When it’s not blowing up Walter White’s tighty whities, it’s making ads for a different kind of underwear—Huggies diapers. The agency created a song “For All Baby Butts” and the appropriately titled children’s book “The Alphabutt Book” as an extension of that campaign.

How it’s building a better agency: “We never set out to build an ‘agency,’ just to make great work with great people for clients who appreciated those things,” said Brian Siedband, co-founder and co-CCO.

“Being small, we’re able to maintain top-to-top relationships with clients, and keeps our team feeling invested. Being virtual, we can find and keep the best and most diverse talent regardless of geography,” said Amy Edwards, partner and managing director.

Supernatural

Supernatural has been at the forefront of the AI revolution in advertising as the agency has put AI at the center of everything it does. Founded in 2021, the shop trains its AI on a brand so that it can ask it questions and unearth marketing challenges and campaigns for its clients. The scalable tech allows the agency to service brands far beyond the manpower of a 17-person agency.

With AI as its backbone, the agency has created a number of clever campaigns including DTC work for Wandering Bear to make the brand more memorable with consumers and Kayak, which features a council of elite ruling class dolphins hellbent on getting all of the best travel deals for themselves.

How it’s building a better agency: “Everyone has an opinion about AI, but no one hires us because we’re ‘the AI agency.’ Clients hire us to get results, and we do that for different clients in a variety of categories by using AI in practical ways,” said John Elder, co-founder and CEO. “To be on this shortlist more than makes up for the validation we never got from our families.”