Article first published in Ad Age on July 23, 2026. Read the original article here. 

Christa Carone, LPL Financial’s chief marketing and communication officer, wouldn’t have blamed Zambezi for treating the relationship as a one-off. After all, when she hired the independent shop as the financial firm’s first creative and media agency of record in 2024, LPL had never run an integrated consumer campaign. “They could have looked at us like, ‘Oh, is this just a one and done? This brand has never done anything before, ’” Carone said.

But Zambezi has done anything but pump the brakes. When LPL Financial was exploring what became its first official sports partnership—a four-year deal with the PGA of America announced in June—it leaned on the agency to help evaluate the opportunity, drawing on its sports marketing background. “There’s this grittiness to working with them, ” Carone said of Zambezi, describing the partnership as a “roll-up- your-sleeves” type of relationship.

“We don’t just take the briefs that are given to us and just do the work, ” said Gavin Lester, the agency’s chief creative officer. “We’re thinking on behalf of our clients all the time, and if we see opportunities, even though they’re not asking for them, we will present those opportunities to them.”

That attitude helped fuel Zambezi’s revenue jump from $54.1 million to $76.7 million in 2025. Those results, along with Zambezi’s high-flying integrated model, are why the Culver City, California-based shop was named Small Agency of the Year, Silver at the 2026 Ad Age Small Agency Awards.

Breaking free from the category’s usual tropes—think the older couple sailing on calm waters—Zambezi’s first work for LPL featured Anna Kendrick lugging an impressive load of turf through a cityscape as a metaphor for the greener grass available to the brand’s investors.

The effort drove a 31% lift in aided awareness against an initial goal of 5% to 7%, according to Zambezi’s entry. LPL’s assets under management grew from $1.8 trillion to $2.28 trillion over the period the campaign ran, it stated.

The LPL win was emblematic of a broader shift at Zambezi, which was born as a sports agency but has pushed to become a proper integrated shop—a rarity among indies— and last year that pitch finally seemed to stick. More than half of its clients now use multiple services, up from a much smaller share in 2024, with Unilever among those deepening its relationship with the agency. Fin Studios, the agency’s production arm, now accounts for 30% of revenue, with work spanning premium long-form content and high-volume social output for clients including DirecTV.

Zambezi executives said the uptick in demand for integrated services is less about doing anything differently and more about the quality of work in one area opening doors to the next. They also acknowledge it presents more opportunity to market their full capabilities. “The moment that a client realizes all these things exist, it’s sort of like the floodgates open,” said Laura Stayt, Zambezi’s president.

Take, for example, Liquid I.V. The electrolyte drink brand initially came to Zambezi with a single media project, and by 2026 the agency’s fees had grown 144%, with the relationship expanding into creative and production, according to the shop’s entry.

Last year, Zambezi helped the company take over Times Square with an “I.V. O’CLOCK” activation, turning 4 p.m. —the infamous afternoon slump time—into a hydration wake-up call. The campaign featured a full Times Square screen takeover, dramatic “error” messages and 50 delivery robots distributing Liquid I.V. samples and reusable bottles.

Rewiring for success

Ahead of its 20th anniversary this year, Zambezi conducted an audit of its most successful partnerships, identifying its sweet spot as mid-market companies with world-class products but under-leveraged brands. That revelation led to a new agency positioning: “making brands as high-performance as the products and services they sell.”

To support that, the shop developed an AI-assisted diagnostic tool, called the Zambezi Brand Performance Gap, designed to identify where a brand’s equity lags its product quality and map a path to close it.

The agency has also invested in what it calls a high-performance culture, including more frequent feedback, exacting standards in creative reviews and upfront conversations with clients about mutual expectations. Some 41% of staff have reached or exceeded the five-year mark, and the agency is 62% women overall, with women leading every business unit.

“Independent agencies are sort of seen as a bit more soft, and things are easier, and that’s not necessarily true, ” said Stayt, who came up in holding company agencies, including Omnicom’s TBWA\Chiat\Day. “How do we combine the best of both worlds? The drive for excellence, winning really matters, pushing ourselves to be the absolute best … but at the same time keeping our humanity.”

What’s next?

Zambezi is looking to capitalize on its momentum by adding more staffers focused on new business, an area where it hasn’t had a formalized approach. The agency is also “entering into a new realm where M&A could be an option for us in terms of bringing in new services, ” said CEO Jean Freeman, including making “our media offerings more robust.”

As for whether Zambezi itself might be acquired or take on outside investment, Freeman didn’t close that door.

“We’ve been approached for a long time on opportunities, and I think it’s just really evaluating what the larger business is, ” she said. “At the end of the day, culture is first. That’s the lens we always look through on any partnership.”