The Fold

Sam Stuchbury is the executive creative director and founder of Motion Sickness, and Lee Lowndes is the chief executive and founder of Daylight. Each of them run independent creative agencies, each is under 40, each took home golds at the recent Axis Awards, and - most importantly - each has a very differentiated conception of what an agency is in 2026. They have each found a way to thrive in an era where many of the big ad agencies feel defined more by their challenges than opportunities.Motion Sickness is on some kind of hot streak, and has just made the decision to rebrand as a creative company over an ad agency. That hasn’t stopped them taking home a raft of advertising awards. Cannes Lions have called them one of the top five global independent agencies this year, they took the Grand Prix for their herpes work, and were just named agency of the year at Axis for their Māori roll call, and their brilliantly original work helping bring people back to Karangahape Road.Daylight, meanwhile, defines itself as a “creative and technology studio”, meaning it builds digital products then wraps campaigns around them to get those apps to the right audiences. Its most recent output is Billy, a highly sophisticated tool to get consumers onto the best energy plan, with a major media campaign to help build awareness of it. They’ve also built platforms for media organisations like the Pacific Media Network and Fiji Sun, along with continuing their work for the World Health Organization.Duncan Greive is a shareholder and co-founder of Daylight.
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Glen Kyne returns to The Fold to catch up on all the biggest stories in recent times. We look at the existential challenge the BSA opened up, and try and figure out what’s really going on with Troy Bowker and Stuff. Then we look at the recent NZME workplace review, and contrast it with a much more substantial effort from Mediaworks a few years ago. We assess the early returns from Tova O’Brien’s arrival at TVNZ and John Campbell at RNZ, before finally weighing in on the Tom Phillips documentary controversy.
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He’s very familiar as the star of Wellington Paranormal, and a radio host with Hauraki – but Mike Minogue’s greatest achievement might be Frank, his burgeoning agency. Frustrated with the quality of talent representation in Aotearoa, Minogue started Frank to bring a different approach to the established players. But he added speaker representation and, crucially, podcast representation to Frank’s mix – and in so doing set it up for a landmark deal.Today, The Fold can reveal that Frank is the exclusive supplier of podcasts to TVNZ+ – a milestone for the form, and one which brings TVNZ into line with Netflix and YouTube, each of which is making a big play to make podcasts a big part of their strategy. Minogue joins Duncan Greive on The Fold to explain his motives for starting Frank, and why he is betting big on podcasts.
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Richard Edelman was deeply prescient, when he responded to the “battle for Seattle” by commissioning an annual global survey of institutional trust. For a quarter century the trust barometer has revealed the extent to which countries and societies have grown insular and mistrustful, and catalogued the downstream consequences. basically, it’s not just media, it’s everyone.New Zealand is no different, and Acumen, which runs the research locally, has the numbers. Chief executive Adelle Keely joins Duncan Greive to discuss what it shows, and what (if anything) can be done about it.
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After six months of careful deliberation, and six years after it first floated the idea, the broadcasting standards authority decided that it definitively does have jurisdiction over platforms like The Platform. This set off a firestorm stretching across politics, law and media, with the regulator having the temerity to suggest that one, relatively tiny corner of the internet was within its bounds. In a reversal of typical roles, Toby Manhire hosts Duncan Greive to break down this story, at once arcane and enormous.
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