The New Wave ~ Emotive
The New Wave is Campaign Brief’s Q&A series spotlighting the next generation of independent creative companies and exploring how the indie model is evolving. From structure and speed to culture and capability, we unpack where these businesses are finding their edge and what’s driving client decisions today. Next up is Emotive.
1. Give us the elevator pitch – who are you and what do you do?
Emotive is an independent creative company built around a simple idea: if you can change how people feel, you are more likely to move them to act.
Emotive was founded on the belief that too much advertising had become easy to ignore. The market had overinvested in short-term performance marketing and underinvested in brand-building, where emotional connection sits at the centre. The brands that make us feel something are the brands we remember when it matters.
That’s what Emotive was built to do: create ideas that connect emotionally and deliver commercially.
We’ve always believed the best ideas aren’t confined to a channel. Sometimes it’s an ad. Sometimes it’s entertainment. Sometimes it’s a partnership, an experience or a social idea. Sometimes it’s something that doesn’t fit neatly into a category at all.
Today, Emotive brings together creative, strategy, design, earned, PR, social, partnerships and production under one roof. Alongside Emotive Creative Agency sits Emotive Productions, because we believe in this changing market, the thinking and the making are stronger when they happen together.
We’re independent by ownership, but also by mindset. Curious, ambitious and close to the work. We like ideas that don’t always look like advertising, but still move people all the same.
2. Are indies still challengers, or have they become the norm?
The better indies have moved well beyond being challengers in the traditional sense.
Clients aren’t choosing independents as a wildcard anymore. They’re choosing them because they want senior people on the business, faster decision-making and teams that have a vested interest in the outcome.
At the same time, independents have become a magnet for a certain type of talent. People who want less bureaucracy, fewer layers and more direct impact. People who want to challenge convention and have a voice.
So yes, independents have become a much more established choice. But the best ones still operate with challenger energy.
The best indies grow up without growing old. They build experience and capability without losing the curiosity, hunger and entrepreneurial spirit that got them there in the first place.
For us, independence isn’t just an ownership structure. It’s a mindset. It means staying curious, moving quickly, challenging respectfully and building around the client’s problem rather than forcing them into a predefined agency model.
3. What’s your unfair advantage over the networks today?
Our unfair advantage is proximity.
The people making decisions are usually the same people in the room, on the brief and in the work. There isn’t much distance between strategy, creative, production and decision-making.
That matters because today’s briefs move quickly. Great ideas, cultural relevance and the reality of how something gets made need to happen together, not one after the other.
It’s one of the reasons we launched Emotive Productions. We believe ideas get stronger when making is involved from the beginning, not bolted on at the end. Production isn’t simply about delivering work. It’s part of how ideas are shaped, challenged and improved.
Increasingly, our advantage is also speed. We’re operating in a period of enormous change. AI, technology and new platforms are reshaping the industry faster than at any point in its history. As an independent, we can make decisions quickly about the tools, partners and technologies we adopt. We don’t have to wait for a global mandate or network rollout.
It means we can adapt in real time, build around what clients actually need and evolve as the world around us changes.
Networks will always have scale. Our advantage is staying close to the work, moving quickly and making decisions based on what’s right for clients rather than what’s right for a system.
4. How are you using AI to compete above your weight?
At Emotive, we talk a lot about unfair advantage.
As an independent, we’re constantly asking ourselves what allows us to punch above our weight. Right now, AI is one of the biggest opportunities we’ve seen.
Not because it replaces creativity. Quite the opposite. It gives creative people more leverage.
We’re applying it in four ways.
The first is how we run the agency. We’re embedding AI into workflows across every discipline, helping people automate repetitive tasks, work smarter and spend more time doing the things humans are uniquely good at: thinking, creating and solving problems.
The second is creativity itself.
AI is collapsing the distance between thinking and making. We’re seeing a new generation of creatives emerge who don’t just come up with ideas, but can create and bring those ideas to life themselves. That’s one of the reasons Emotive Productions has become such an important part of our model. The old boundaries between creative and production are starting to disappear, opening up entirely new creative possibilities.
The third is production at scale.
Brands need more content, in more places and at greater speed than ever before. AI is helping us create, adapt and distribute assets more efficiently while maintaining the quality of the idea at the centre.
The fourth is opportunity spotting.
We’re building always-on cultural scouts powered by AI. Their job is to identify shifts in culture, emerging conversations and opportunities before they become obvious. They help us connect dots faster and turn those opportunities into the beginnings of ideas for our clients.
What’s exciting is that this is one area where size isn’t necessarily an advantage.
The holding companies are investing heavily in global AI systems and platforms. But independence gives us a different advantage. We can experiment, adopt the best tools as they emerge and evolve our approach in real time.
That has always been our mindset. We’re constantly looking for the edge, the opening or the opportunity others haven’t spotted yet. If a new tool, technology or way of working can help our people create better outcomes for clients, we’ll explore it.
For us, AI isn’t about making average work faster. It’s another way to combine human imagination with new technology and make things that weren’t possible yesterday
5. What kind of clients are choosing indies right now – and why?
The clients choosing indies right now tend to be equally ambitious and commercially focused.
They want senior people in the room. They want an agency that cares enough to challenge them. They want pace, but not at the expense of craft. And they want a partner that can bring strategy, creative, design, earned, PR, social, content, influence, partnerships and production together under one roof without everything becoming overly complicated.
We also think clients are looking for partners that are permanently iterating. The market moves too quickly for rigid agency models. At Emotive we talk about always being in beta, constantly looking for a better way to solve the problem.
The relational side matters too. Great work still comes from trust. It comes from knowing your clients as people, understanding the pressures they are under, and building the kind of relationship where you can have honest conversations quickly.
That’s where we think independents can really win. When the relationship is right, you can create a level of trust, speed and personal accountability that is hard to manufacture from a distance.
6. What’s next – growth, staying lean, or something else?
Firstly, we have no desire to sell Emotive. The ambition is to build the best independent creative company we can, with the best people, doing the best work, for clients who genuinely value what we bring.
That’s why we’ve capped the agency at 70 people. Big enough to deliver at scale, but small enough to protect the culture, agility and closeness to the work that make us who we are.
The next phase is about continuing to evolve the model. Building a best-in-class AI capability across the agency. Taking Emotive Productions to the next level. Strengthening earned, PR, social, influence and partnerships. And investing in our own research to better validate the feeling shift our work creates.
Just as importantly, it’s about protecting the culture. We want Emotive to always be an additive environment, where a good idea can come from anywhere, people feel safe to speak up, and everyone is invested in making the work better.
We want to grow, but only in a way that protects what makes the agency special: the people, the culture, the closeness to the work, the pace, and the belief that great ideas will always have the power to change how people feel.
Check out the other New Wave Q&As below:
Read Oblong Creative’s Q&A here
Read The Many Australia’s Q&A here
Read Bureau of Everything’s Q&A here
Read Art of the Possible ANZ’s Q&A here
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