The New Wave ~ Supermassive
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 Jon Austin and Laura Aldington, Co-founders of Supermassive.
Give us the elevator pitch – who are you and what do you do?
Well, if it was a quick elevator ride, I’d blurt out that Supermassive is currently Spikes Asia’s #1 Australian Independent Agency of the Year, both B&T and Mumbrella’s PR Agency of the Year, and was ranked in The One Show’s Top 20 Global Independent Agencies of the Year in 2025.
Then, because I didn’t want us to get pigeonholed, I’d hit the emergency stop button and awkwardly clarify that we’re a full-service creative agency that sits at the intersection of strategy, design, advertising, PR and non-traditional creativity. That breadth is pretty fundamental to who we are. We don’t really believe the best answer to an advertising problem is necessarily an ad, or that a PR brief should necessarily result in PR. We start with the problem, then build whatever the most interesting and effective answer to it is. So on any given day we might be developing a global brand strategy, designing an identity, making an ad campaign, creating something engineered to earn its way into culture, or doing something that doesn’t have a particularly convenient industry label yet.
Then I’d probably get escorted out of Barangaroo Tower, where I’ve been riding their elevator for 6 hours trying to hustle new biz opportunities by hitting the emergency stop button and cornering terrified strangers with an agency pitch.
Are indies still challengers, or have they become the norm?
I think the old definition of ‘challenger agency’ no longer applies. Not so long ago, what made a ‘challenger’ was pretty clear. They were the small, independent upstarts taking on the big, established networks. But that definition sort of assumes those big networks aren’t facing their own big challenges, and as we all know, that’s just not the case. Right now, whether you’re an agency of four or four hundred, we’re all facing both similar and wildly different challenges: shrinking budgets, changing models, fragmenting attention, AI, procurement, consolidation, clients bringing capabilities in-house, and an industry reinventing itself in real time.
In our eyes, that makes every single agency out there still flying their flag and creating in the face of adversity a challenger, and we salute every one of you badass, punk rock motherfuckers.
What’s your unfair advantage over the networks today?
I think Supermassive’s unfair advantage comes down to collapsing two kinds of distance.
The first is the distance between the people running an agency and the work itself.
One of the main reasons we started Supermassive was that we’d held executive leadership positions in big networks, and realised that the more senior we became, the further away we were getting from the thing we were actually best at: the work. So we built Supermassive around a very simple promise: the same people who run our business work on yours.
We’re in the strategy, in the ideas, on the shoots, and in the edits. Hell, we even sit on advisory boards to our clients to help shape strategic and creative conversations further upstream.
Not because we’re control freaks (although you should see Jon’s fridge. It’s like something out of American Psycho), but because we genuinely believe seniority should bring you closer to the work, not further away from it.
The second is the distance between two sides of the marketing conversation.
On one side, you have the enduring fundamentals of brand building: strategy, distinctiveness, consistency, reach and long-term thinking. On the other, you have the increasingly urgent need to earn attention: creativity that people actively seek out, participate in, share and talk about. The industry has increasingly separated the two. You tend to find agencies (both big and small) built brilliantly for one side or the other. Our Magnetic Brands philosophy, and really Supermassive itself, was built to collapse that distance too. We call those two forces Direction and Pull: the rigour to build brands for the long term, and the creative magnetism to make people give a shit about them right now.
So maybe that’s our unfair advantage: less distance between senior people and the work, and less distance between brand building and attention earning.
How are you using AI to compete above your weight?
I reckon you’ve probably had every conceivable answer to this question. Using AI as part of your everyday workflow is pretty table stakes now. It’s the same reason you no longer hear agencies say ‘and we also do digital!’. It is (or should be) a fully integrated part of what agencies offer.
What we’re mindful of however, is separating the practical efficiency of AI from the creative effectiveness of AI. Yes, AI can undoubtedly make us faster and more efficient. It’s allowing us to create, test and deploy at a scale that was previously unimaginable. But AI alone won’t solve our core problem: It can’t make an idea interesting. It can’t make a brand distinctive. It can’t make people care. It can’t make your brand famous.
For us, what’s really interesting is the company we find ourselves in around AI. We recently started working with XPENG – one of the world’s foremost AI innovation companies. They’re living proof that AI, when combined with genuine human creativity, can be more than a tool. Applied well, in ways that genuinely reduce friction, it can be indecipherable from magic. With that in mind, we’ve got a few things boiling that use AI in ways that we’ve never seen before, and we can’t wait to share them.
What kind of clients are choosing indies right now – and why?
What’s really exciting is that every kind of client is choosing indies right now. Or, at the very least, not discounting them on the basis of ownership structure. We’re no longer operating in the ‘only big agencies can hold big relationships and make big ideas’ paradigm (shit, did I just say ‘paradigm’? How embarrassing.) The best clients are choosing agencies based on much more valuable alignments than headcount and proximity to Salesforce Tower. Things like shared ambition. Chemistry. Belief in each other. Effectiveness. That’s the stuff that matters. And that’s the stuff that leads to great work.
What’s next – growth, staying lean, or something else?
Something else? All of the above? We have a funny reaction to the question, tbh.
It assumes growth is about increasing headcount. And while that may have been true in the old world, we’re championing the idea of growing while staying lean in the belief the two don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
Our model is deliberately designed to allow us to shapeshift the agency around the wide array of briefs we get that require different combinations of talent to answer them. We actually have quite a big team that we’ve worked with since we first opened our doors (in fact, we have a crazy 100% retention rate in our flexible team), but we’ve intentionally chosen to keep our fixed team more super than massive. It allows us to remain neutral about what the right answer is, because we’re not trying to cover costs; and to take on projects because we want to, rather than because we have to.
We also want our people (and ourselves) to give it 100 fucking percent when they’re in, to do extraordinary things because they’re extraordinarily clever, but then leave at a reasonable time, go home to their friends and families, not think about work, and lead full, interesting, rewarding lives. To achieve that, we need agility, flexibility, and the ability to say no.
Check out the other New Wave Q&As below:
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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