The New Wave ~ Bonfire
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 Bonfire.
1. Give us the elevator pitch. Who are you and what do you do?
We’re Bonfire, a creative agency with a performance brain. Or a performance agency with a creative soul. Either way, we help brands give people a reason to find them, then make sure they can.
The creative agency turned one in June. The agency underneath it is 29. We spent most of three decades learning what people search for, then built a creative offer on top of it.
2. Are indies still challengers, or have they become the norm?
Still challengers, but the challenge has moved.
What’s changed is that clients no longer assume the biggest agency is the safest one. They’re looking harder at who’s actually doing the thinking, how close those people stay to the work, and whether the agency can move when they do.
Meanwhile the big groups keep getting bigger, which will always leave room for people who’d rather back their own judgement than inherit someone else’s system.
So the indie label means less than it used to. What matters is how independently you can actually behave. Plenty of independent agencies don’t.
3. What’s your unfair advantage over the networks today?
Who’d have thought that nearly three decades of search and performance data would make decent foundations for a creative agency.
The ability to know what people are searching, demanding, wanting, or not wanting provides an unorthodox and exceptional strategic foundation for the creative work at Bonfire.
4. How are you using AI to compete above your weight?
Systems. Not glamorous, but they’re why a small team can behave like a much larger one.
We use AI up and down Bonfire, but only where it makes us better, and we fence it off where it doesn’t.
Rollout? Tick. Research, analysis, admin? Tick. Concepting? Big cross. An idea a machine could have had is an idea a competitor can have too.
So we move faster through the work that doesn’t need a human brain, and spend what we save on the work that does.
5. What kind of clients are choosing indies right now, and why?
Hard to speak for everyone choosing an indie, but the clients who choose us tend to want their hands a little dirty.
They’re usually senior enough to make a call in the room and close enough to the business to care about the result personally. Often they’ve been through a process somewhere larger and found the distance frustrating.
So there’s a WhatsApp chat with the CD. The client throws an idea or two in. It gets better, because everyone’s actually in the room.
Less theatre, fewer handovers, more direct conversations with the people doing the thinking.
6. What’s next, growth, staying lean, or something else?
Scale, but the useful kind.
A year in, the job is straightforward. More people should know there’s a creative agency here, and the only way to manage that is to make more work worth noticing.
So we keep making it, keep it good, and let the name follow the work rather than the other way round. Ads clients are proud of and the public actually remembers. That’s the whole plan.
Pictured (L-R): Rene LeMerle, General Manager – Creative Division; Luke Williams, Creative Director; Mike Dann, Senior Art Director
Check out the other New Wave Q&As below:
Read Paper Stone Scissors’ Q&A here
Read Curious Nation’s Q&A here
Read cummins&partners’ Q&A here
Read Connecting Plots Group’s Q&A here
Read Jacko Jacko & Jacko’s Q&A here
Read Chimera Project’s Q&A here
Read Today The Brave’s Q&A here
Read Tightknit Studio’s Q&A here
Read Bastion Australia’s Q&A here
Read We Are Different’s Q&A here
Read SICKDOGWOLFMAN’s Q&A here
Read Kill Boring Dead’s Q&A here
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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