Independent by Nature: How Truant Keeps Creativity Wild and Human #AnnualSpotlight

Congratulations on your win! How does it feel to have earned the Creative Team of the Year People’s Choice award?

Thanks very much! We’ve always tried to make work that people in the real world like, so we were chuffed that real human beings voted for us to win the People’s Choice Award.

What made you decide to enter into The Annual?

To be perfectly honest, because someone kept emailing us to do so haha. So thanks for that.

But we’ve also had our work on CreativePool since we first started out. It’s been a real journey, so it was very nice to be nudged into entering this year's Annual.

What role do you think awards play in motivating creativity and innovation within the industry?

Awards are great when they help to get brilliant work on people’s radar and for setting a creative benchmark. But not so great when they encourage work that’s created specifically for award juries, without any real world impact, and littered with dubious results.

We’d really love to see a shift back to celebrating advertising that connects with real people in the real world. But done in a fun, entertaining, beautiful way. Bring back awarding work that real people see and love, you know. The beautifully written script that gets repeated endlessly in the playground. The crazy stunt. The brand mascot. The jingle. Man, all hail the jingle.

You embrace humour, irreverence and “silliness” as core to your creative identity. How do you keep that authenticity from being diluted when working with serious brands or clients?

Let’s be honest, the world’s pretty hardcore at the moment. So offering some light relief is no bad thing. In some ways, every brief is an opportunity to create the ultimate distraction, at least for a little bit. Which is always a fun way of looking at it.

When it’s done right, serious brands and causes can do some of the most powerful yet irreverent work out there. ‘Dumb ways to die’, ‘Even an asshole can save a life’, ’Make New Zealand the best place in the world to have herpes’. The list goes on. And they’re all ridiculously effective campaigns. It’s our job to sell the reasons why it works and take our clients on the journey, so there’s no other option but to do it.

You’ve done stunts (Super Bowl parody, UEFA Women’s Euro logo tweak, custom campaigns), guerilla things. How do you manage risk, legal, brand alignment and surprise in those stunts?

Well, we haven’t been sued. Yet. We’ve found it’s always better to ask for forgiveness than permission. But we’re also looking for a lawyer at the moment, if you know one, haha.

Confusion and ego are idea KILLERS! Great partnerships need respect and patience to turn confusion into curiosity, so you can properly explore thoughts and ideas. The worst thing you can ever do is to shut down the seed of an idea before it has a chance to become fully formed.

Great ideas SHOULD feel uncomfortable when you first hear them, that’s how you know it’s a new idea. And the best ones almost always start out as jokes. So create an environment of humour, fun, playfulness, and genuinely just have a laff with it. It’s a pretty great industry we work in, so we might as well enjoy it - am I right!

When your more offbeat ideas land (or don’t), how do you absorb feedback, pivot or double down? What decision or feedback process helps you refine?

Coming up with ideas is the easy part. The sell is the real skill, and it’s something we’re very much still learning how to master. You only really get one shot at selling an idea. So to give it the best chance of getting through, you have to really take the brand on the journey of your thinking.

You’ve got to make it an idea they can’t possibly say no to. And if they do, make sure whatever you sell next is equally as good. Never resign to the notion that a client will never buy a good idea. It’s much more likely that you just don’t understand the problem they’re trying to solve as well as they do.

You indicate you’ve launched short film, branding, stunts, viral content. How do you shift between mediums? What is your creative pivot strategy?

For us the medium is pretty irrelevant. What’s more important is ‘will anyone in the real world care about this thing we’re doing?’. And why? Is it shocking? Scary? Exciting? Repulsive? Entertaining? Does it have virality?

We love the Joe Staples quote, “Make sure your work is very SOMETHING because medium something won’t cut through”. That’s really stuck with us. That’s how you make work that really moves people. You’ve just got to focus on making it very something, and you can do that in pretty much any medium you like.

Given your irreverent identity, how do you balance it with brand professionalism, client comfort and long-term relationships?

There’s obviously a load of chat at the moment about the future of advertising. About AI. About automaton. But at the end of the day, people buy from people. It’s as simple as that.

The relationship - and most importantly, trust - between agency and brand is the foundation of absolutely everything. It’s no surprise that the best client agency relationships result in the best work being made.

You’ve got to be on the same page about what the work is trying to do and the problem you’re trying to solve, and the more you build and nurture that relationship, the better the work gets.

What opportunity (project, brief) have you passed on because it didn’t feel like “you” and how do you decide when to say no?

Every brief is an opportunity to solve a problem in a new and exciting way. Even if it doesn't instinctively look exciting to begin with. So I don’t necessarily think there can be a type of brief that we’d say no to.

Having said that, we won’t work with certain brands and businesses that don’t align with our values, and we have turned down a number of projects based on that. You have to have some morals in this game.

You describe working hard, hustling, “eating flies.” How do you guard against burnout, maintain sustainability, and keep the fun alive?

Work life balance is super important, right. Across the board people are suffering from burnout, big time. We’ve definitely had moments in the past where we’ve pushed things too far and become busy fools. Which is made a million times tougher if you don’t like the work that comes out the back of it.

That’s why nowadays we consciously make an effort to only present work that we’ll be (genuinely) happy dedicating the next 3-6 months of our lives towards. Otherwise, it becomes burnout city. It’s amazing the energy you generate by working on something you actually like, versus the wading-through-treacle-burnout feeling you get working on projects that feel like a real slog. Passion is one hell of a drug.

For each big brand collaboration (Rockstar, Fulham x Royal Caribbean), how do you scale your voice while integrating brand constraints?

There’s a lot of pretty ineffective advertising out there that follows brand constraints to the letter. Brand constraints are important, but good ideas are more important.

Ultimately as creators, the worst thing we can do is second guess ourselves into selling sanitized ideas that we think are more buyable. They might feel more comfortable for clients, but rarely move the dial commercially. Rick Ruben talks a lot about the dangers of musicians trying to write number one hits “that the public will love”. It’s impossible to do if you’re looking at it through that lens. You’ve got to stick to work that moves you personally, that you personally believe in and get excited about. That’s the only way to create really effective ideas that move the dial.

Looking ahead: how do you see the place for chaotic, boundary-pushing creative in a world of formulaic algorithms, measurement, and brand safety — what is your edge going forward?

A great strategist, David Terry, said recently, “This isn’t the end of advertising. It’s the start of everything.” What a mega inspiring way to look at the change we’re in right now. Advertising used to be constrained by media. A poster, a 30” TV commercial, a piece of direct mail. Now it’s everything. It’s partnerships. It’s social. It’s stunts. Activations. Everything has potential to grow your brand. So we’re excited about it, and that’s the lens we put all of our work through now.

Do you have any particularly exciting projects in the pipeline that might be contenders for the awards in 2026?

Yes! And excitingly, it’s from a brand that we’re launching. As the barriers to starting a business rapidly come crumbling down, we predict a real influx of creatives and creators starting their own brands and doing the sort of work that they actually want to create.

Perhaps born out of a frustration that the best ideas aren’t bought by their clients, they’re just going to become the clients themselves. It’s very powerful to the people. And that’s something we’re working on at the moment, the launch of a canned water company, Sexy Water. Watch this space.

What advice would you give to anyone looking to take home their own accolade next year?