1. Give us the elevator pitch – who are you and what do you do?
Having spent years working inside global network agencies, I became very frustrated by how cumbersome they were. Everything was a rigid, linear process. Different departments had separate P&Ls, chasing completely different objectives. It often felt like the last thing the agency was actually set up to do was fulfill the client’s needs in a nimble way. As a creative, being cut out of upfront client meetings felt wrong. The fact that a client couldn’t just pick up the phone and talk directly to the creative team seemed bizarre.
Thinkerbell is the antithesis of that old world. We’ve dismantled the traditional network model, collapsing the usual silos and layers of account management. Instead, we partner every client directly with a ‘Thinker’ (a senior strategic brain) and a ‘Tinker’ (a senior creative) from day one. Because both strategy and creative have a direct ear to your challenges, nothing is lost in translation. Everyone stays on the same page, and we get things right more often.
For me personally, the biggest unlock has been learning how to bake earned media directly into our model. Early on, I’d proudly pitch a creative idea to Ellen, thinking it was absolute gold. She’d look at me, deadpan, and say: ‘It’s a nice idea. But you’d literally have to pay journalists to get them to write about it.’ After my ego recovered from that confrontation, I started to actually unpick what drives real earned thinking. Flipping the script, thinking earned first, paid second, forces you to think in a completely liberated way. You’re no longer encumbered by traditional media formats, and free to create ideas that have their own momentum. It’s been the greatest area of personal growth for me, and frankly, it’s the only approach that feels right for the times we’re in.
2. Are indies still challengers, or have they become the norm?
Indies are absolutely still the challengers, not because of their size, but because of their mindset. While indies might feel like the norm due to their sheer volume in the market, they represent a fundamental challenge to the broken, legacy structures of global networks.
Network agencies have decades of institutional muscle memory. Changing their mindset is like turning an oil tanker, their siloed P&Ls and hierarchies are part of their DNA. Indies, by contrast, are born from scrappy beginnings. But the real challenge is retaining that agility as you scale.
At Thinkerbell, we are fiercely protective of that mindset. We run intense, regular “baptisms” for new hires to explicitly deprogram the bad habits and muscle memory they’ve picked up at traditional agencies, opening their eyes to a completely new way of working.
3. What’s your unfair advantage over the networks today?
Our unfair advantage isn’t just a nicer mindset, it’s a completely restructured model that’s brand led and future fit.
4. How are you using AI to compete above your weight?
We’ve operationalised AI across the business, from workflows to execution. We created a dedicated engineering and systems team to map out every department, from finance, earned, studio to creative. Their brief was to create AI tools from the ground up, to our model, to enhance what we do. We use it to strip away bureaucracy so our senior talent spends less time on less valuable tasks, and 100% of their time on the strategic thinking that actually drives commercial results for our clients.
We also recently collaborated to build and launch Inclusivelymade.ai, a platform designed to tackle disability bias in creative production. Standard generative AI models are notoriously flawed – they reflect historical biases in their training data and effectively automate the exclusion of people with disabilities. Inclusivelymade.ai serves as a creative intervention. It builds accessibility standards, inclusive casting guidance, and tokenism checks directly into the early prompting stage, allowing brands to design out bias from day one. Backed by major brands like Woolworths, Bupa, and Mastercard, it’s a prime example of how we use AI to make the work better and more authentic, without taking the human heart out of the story.
5. What kind of clients are choosing indies right now – and why?
Smart ones.
6. What’s next – growth, staying lean, or something else?
For us, the future isn’t about choosing between growth or staying lean, it’s about scaling our impact. We operate a borderless trans-Tasman structure across our Auckland, Sydney, and Melbourne offices. It means we can instantly pool our resources to give clients expanded expertise and deeper regional insights. For brands operating on both sides of the Tasman, this is a massive advantage, they get frictionless access to the best category brains across both markets, without the baggage of localised overheads.
In terms of where we are investing, the focus is squarely on modern content creation, socially driven earned media, and creator-driven ideas.
A prime example of this is our work with Jetstar. We’ve been deeply embedded in this space, creating highly effective, entertaining work that actively shapes and responds to culture rather than just interrupting it to change brand perceptions.
What’s next for Thinkerbell is doubling down on a highly dynamic creative consultancy model. We sit right at the intersection of marketing science and fast-moving cultural execution.
And we want to keep having fun doing it.