Agency executives are launching awards and conferences around diversity, marketing psychology, agency independence and more.
By
Brian Bonilla
It started, in Slap Global CEO and Chief Creative Officer Gerry Graf’s case, with a nagging realization: “The industry I’m supposed to know about was changing a lot, and my first thought was: It’s mostly people with not a lot of time in the advertising industry who are doing all these changes. I wonder what they think is good.”
That, paired with a sense that “the definition of what an ad has just exploded” coming out of the pandemic, led to Graf launching the Astroland Advertising Festival, a new kind of ad awards show judged not by industry veterans, but by emerging talent.
Across the industry, agency leaders like Graf are filling the gaps they feel exist with their own conferences, festivals and award shows. While few are significant moneymakers, they are paying dividends in helping not just solve what they say are problems plaguing the industry, but enabling organizers to raise the profiles of their agencies.
Gerry Graf’s Astroland Advertising Festival launched in 2024 (Gerry Graf)
Solving a problem
“Blackweek was to some degree born out of frustration,” said Hero Media CEO and founder Joseph Anthony. That frustration was rooted in how decisions get made across the advertising industry—decisions that, in the view of Anthony and his contemporaries, including Walter T. Geer III, chief creative officer of innovation North America at VML, often disproportionately impacted Black and brown professionals. Blackweek held its first conference in 2024.
“Instead of slinging mud and getting angry,” said Anthony, the group viewed it as an opportunity to “create a forum under the guise of really educating those who are in command of these budgets to understand why they may be looking at things through a skewed lens, and how we can bring greater objectivity and value and start to kind of refine the term ‘Black’ or ‘diversity’ to mean a growth engine.”
Others saw gaps not in fairness, but in focus. Stout Collective, an eight-person agency focused on design for beer brands, launched its BOPP conference in 2022, zeroing in on a highly specific intersection: beer branding and design.
“There’s this huge gap,” said Matt Tanaka, CEO and founder of Stout Collective. “There are people who love beer, but they don’t want to just sit around and talk about hop varietals. They want to talk about the brand, and they want to talk about the art, and there was no space for them.”
BOPP beer design conference
Stout Collective’s founders were able to recruit talent thanks to their BOPP conference (BOPP)
Young & Laramore CEO Tom Denari launched the Unreasonable Conference in 2019 to bring academic rigor into marketing conversations. Unreasonable features professors and researchers as speakers with a focus on understanding consumer psychology.
“A lot of times agencies talk about ‘insights,’ and all they’re really talking about is an observation,” Denari said, noting that the conference, which attracts 200 to 300 attendees each year, aims to “understand what’s actually motivating people versus what they say is motivating them.”
Unreasonable features professors and researchers who focus on marketing psychology (Young & Laramore)
Laugh Your Ads Off, an ongoing event series featuring stand-up comedians and creatives, was launched by ad creatives who felt there was a gap in understanding what makes comedy in advertising work.
“We want to provide practical tools to help people create funnier, more engaging work,” David Roth, an Argonaut creative director, comedian and co-founder of the event, told Ad Age last year.
Laugh Your Ads Off take NYC, a workshop & celebration of comedy in advertising.
Laugh Your Ads Off will have its next event on April 9 at Mother LA’s office (Laugh Your Ads Off)
Unfettered, a conference for independent agencies, was born out of the need for indies to work together and connect more in the wake of holding company consolidation. Launched by Venables Bell & Partners, the Ad Club, Kempner Communications and ad veteran Rick Boyko, Unfettered debuted this year, hoping to attract 150 attendees and just break even. It exceeded expectations by attracting 225 attendees and turning a small profit.
Any profit made from Unfettered went to the Ad Club Foundation, which is focused on helping the industry to attract and retain diverse talent, said Katie Kempner, founder of Kempner Communications. Future profits will also go to the foundation, Kempner added.
Others don’t start with a conference in mind. Own It, co-founded by Cornett CEO Christy Hiler and Zambezi CEO Jean Freeman, is emblematic of that shift. What started in 2022 as an effort to track female-owned agencies quickly evolved into an entire ecosystem—a podcast, a database of over 1,000 female-owned agencies and now a conference, launched in 2024, expected to draw more than 400 attendees in its third year.
Christy Hiler and Jean Freeman on the OWNiT conference stage.
Own It expects to make a profit from its upcoming conference.
Building a business
While many of these efforts begin as passion projects, some are quickly evolving into full-fledged business lines. Stagwell’s Sport Beach is perhaps the clearest example.
What started as a Cannes International Festival of Creativity activation has grown into something far larger—now a standalone company designed to connect “athletes, brands and marketers … for the purpose of driving business,” Sport Beach CEO Beth Sidhu said.
Stagwell’s Sport Beach 2024 group workoutStagwell’s Sport Beach features panels and interactive sports and work out sessions. (Richard Theemling/Stagwell’s SPORT BEACH)
The platform has already proven its value as a marketing engine, helping Stagwell generate “hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue,” she said. Now, as its own entity, it has expanded with activations at the Super Bowl and CES.
From side project to strategic asset
Beyond ticket sales, community building or sponsorships, these events generating benefits ranging from talent recruitment to new business to entirely new forms of intellectual property.
For Blackweek’s founders, one of the most immediate effects has been visibility, elevating the profiles of the executives behind it—positioning them as leaders in conversations around equity, culture and business.
Over the course of BOPP’s run, the team at Stout Collective ended up recruiting talent directly from the event—turning attendees into employees. “We hired two people onto our team that we met through BOPP,” Matt Tanaka said.
BOPP was paused in 2025 as the agency wanted to maintain its focus on client work; there are plans to bring the event back in the future.
In Astroland’s case, what began as an awards show is evolving into a potential source of insights around emerging creative talent and Gen Z perspectives. Graf said he has been approached by brands to speak to their corporate insights teams and understands that people may be interested in insights and trend reports in the future.
“So, is there value in what we’re looking at? Yeah. Do I want to monetize that value? I don’t know. I have an agency to run,” Graf said.
Astroland has also helped Graf in his new business strategy. “I actually got an RFI a couple of months ago, and one of the big questions was they wanted us to show our knowledge of Gen Z,” Graf said. “We put, ‘We’re the only agency that started the only award show judged by Gen Z,’ and that got us through to the next round.”
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