Thinkerbell

In 2025, Thinkerbell continued to demonstrate why it is one of the country’s top independent agencies — even despite it being a quieter year than some of its previous efforts.

On the new business front, the agency won seven new clients with work across varying scopes for Unilever, BCF, Super Members Council of Australia, The Colossal Foundation, Insignia Financial, the Leukaemia Foundation and, right at the end of the year, the Retail Food Group. It’s an impressive haul, to say the least.

There are two notes for Thinkerbell from the end of 2024. It declined to re-pitch for Dan Murphy’s creative account and it acquired CX agency Hardhat in October. While these are not included in this year’s Agency Scorecards judging, both are important for Thinkerbell’s operations in ‘25.

In 2025, Thinkerbell would fully integrate the CX skillset into its ‘Alchemy’ model, which it said aims to remove silos between strategy, media, creative, PR, production, CX, design and technology. This, the agency said, is not a ‘full-service’ model but it does have the skills to solve complex client problems organically.

Over the course of the year, however, Thinkerbell’s work proved to be both eye-catching and effective due to its swag of awards at leading shows.

Its ‘Australia’s Deadliest Predator’ for TAC was an interesting idea very well-executed. Its ‘Streets Meltdown’ for Streets was a great, innovative channel execution and its ‘Creatures’ for Vodafone flipped the script on category norms.

Similarly, the agency’s experimentations with AI began to bear fruit. Its ‘The Last Order’ for Menulog was an impressive execution with localised creatives for different suburbs around the country, a final campaign for the food delivery app before it left Australia. 

Adam Ferrier and Tom Wenborn have both been very vocal in this space, too, giving the agency a sharp point of view compared to the approach of some holding companies, which remain focused on output efficiency over almost anything else.

More work for brands including Tooheys, Horticulture Innovation, Vodafone and GWM continued to demonstrate the agency’s point of difference in the market.

Thinkerbell also brought its ‘Fire’ ‘un-conference’ back. It’s a three-day all-agency away experience with no set agenda. Instead, it’s curated the night before with the sole intention of having its people create, host and facilitate over 38 individual workshops. 

Yet again, it’s showing that Thinkerbell, quite simply, is not like other agencies.