In 2016, two couples sat down and asked themselves a question that most people in the advertising industry had thought about but never actually answered: What would you do if you weren’t afraid? Dave Lafond and Serge Rancourt, veterans of the big holding company world, had spent enough years inside the machine to know exactly what was wrong with it. So, after chatting with their spouses, they sold their homes, cashed in retirement savings, maxed lines of credit—deep breath needed here!—and started an agency in Toronto.

Fast forward: it worked out. Since launching, the independent creative studio has amassed enough award hardware to open its own trophy shop. But it has also done something the industry still doesn’t have a great word for: it built a platform for other agencies to exist. Not a holding company. Not a network exactly. Something purpose-built for the way creative people actually function, engineered from the ground up around a single radical proposition: the people doing the work should own what they make. It’s called The Grid. Inside it, you will find Mischief, Adweek’s 2025 US Agency of the Year. You will find Courage, NFA Health and the agency that started everything: No Fixed Address.

President Priyanka Goswami describes No Fixed Address (NFA) as a place that takes play seriously. This is the kind of thing agencies like to say generally during the interview, less so during the performance review. Except NFA actually means it.

“We believe that if we don’t have a good culture or people aren’t happy here, we’re never going to do good work for our clients,” she says. The team went to see the Barbie movie together when it came out. They have massive hide-and-seek games at their holiday parties. They encourage employees to develop actual hobbies outside the building. The logic is that people who live interesting lives make more interesting work. (Hmm, who wouldn’t get behind that?) Four words on NFA’s Instagram bio capture the ethos: “Nice People. Mean Ideas.” Co–chief creative officer Alexis Bronstorph, who has worked alongside co–chief creative officer Kelsey Horne for thirteen years, defines “mean ideas” simply: “They’re the things that make people jealous,” she says, “things you’re jealous of within the walls of the agency itself.” Horne, who comes from a deep design background, adds, “How do we create things in a way that won’t become wallpaper?”

Goswami sums up NFA’s founding creative philosophy in six words that sound like a contradiction: “a safe space for dangerous ideas.” And nowhere in NFA’s body of work does that philosophy prove itself more completely than in a ten-year partnership with the Canadian Centre for Child Protection.

C3P, as it’s referred to in shorthand, has been with NFA since the very beginning. Lafond puts it plainly: “I feel like we’re not an advertising agency to them. I feel more like we’re partners. Advisors.” Their work together has been shown at the United Nations. It has traveled around the world and generated millions of impressions. And it started with research that most agencies would have found too uncomfortable to act on.

NFA doesn’t make ads for C3P so much as it makes experiences you can’t un-know. In 2019, Lolli: The Exhibit Nobody Wants to Talk About arrived looking initially like a typical Instagrammable pop-up, which was entirely the point. Inside, 10,824 lollipops lined an industrial container from floor to ceiling, each one representing the fact that a new image of child sexual abuse material is detected online every twelve hours. Lolli, NFA had discovered in research, is a code predators use to refer to their victims. People walked in expecting to take a picture. They walked out wanting to tear something down.

Over three days, 13,000 Canadians visited. The campaign generated 125 million impressions with zero media budget and took home a Gold Cube at the ADC Awards. It was the kind of work that wows you with what advertising is capable of when people decide to stop selling something and start doing something. It also wasn’t the only time NFA has pulled that off.

Then came Happy Birthday, Twitter in 2021. It was a birthday card, essentially, except the message inside was from survivors of child sexual abuse calling out the social media platform’s failure to remove abuse imagery. 330 million impressions later, it earned a Bronze Lion at Cannes. (Twitter’s communications team did not, apparently, send a thank you note.)

Next, NFA created The Horse, a Trojan Horse tale reimagined for the era of the smartphone and its effect on children. It was presented at the United Nations while the C3P addressed world leaders on digital regulation.

Each campaign continues to escalate its impact. Each one goes somewhere the previous one hadn’t. Bronstorph frames the central creative challenge of the whole partnership in one sentence. “How do we tell these terrible stories in a way that people can understand and that they don’t just turn away from?” The answer, consistently over ten years, is to be smarter than the discomfort.

The range of what NFA produces beyond the C3P work is equally impressive. For Greenfield Natural Meat Co., the Bacon Is Rain campaign began with a conversation NFA spotted on TikTok about the fact that the sound of rain in movies is almost always created by frying bacon. (Who knew?) NFA found the insight, connected it to its carbon-neutral meat client and built a SoundCloud library of high-definition Greenfield bacon sizzle sounds, available for free to audio houses worldwide. The team also built a billboard that triggers automatically when it rains and displays an image of bacon. Bronstorph calls it “the perfect intersection of brand mission and cultural fuel.” It spawned a sequel, Cozy Bacon 4K: twelve uninterrupted hours of bacon sizzle as a holiday alternative to the fireplace channel. (Full disclosure: As a bacon lover, I have never been more personally invested in a piece of advertising in my life.)

Look For The Leaf launched for Maple Leaf Foods in the middle of the Canada-US tariff tensions of 2025. Feeling that the moment could use less animosity and more unity, NFA created a rallying cry that celebrated Canadian brands first rather than going on the attack, with Maple Leaf Foods paying to put its own competitors on billboards. “It was the uniquely Canadian way of telling that story,” says Bronstorph. That’s both a creative philosophy and, frankly, a pretty good argument for moving to Canada.

Then there’s the Dignity Bag. It started when a creative director looked at the binner community—people who collect recyclables in cities for income—and noticed something only a designer would: They had no visual authority. No insignia. No uniform. Nothing that said official, credible or important. The fix was almost embarrassingly elegant: give the bag the same typographic language as a firefighter’s jacket or a police uniform and then watch how people look at the person carrying it differently. “It was a real lesson for us in product design,” Horne says. “The bag had to stand up to the rigor of the street—waterproof, visible at night, cost effective. A lot of us were in uncharted territory.” NFA produced a prototype and put bags on the street. Cities from New York to São Paulo to Vancouver have since reached out to order their own. (NFA is, somewhat unexpectedly, now in the bag business. There are worse accidents.)

OK, you’ve seen the work. Let’s circle back to The Grid. Lafond will tell you the vision was always there even if the name wasn’t. From his years at holding companies, he had been thinking about how to take the best of a large agency model and compress it into something leaner and more agile. “I was very interested in building a model that wasn’t just a boutique independent,” he says.

By 2020, NFA had been ranked the number two agency in Canada. Then, Greg Hahn called. Hahn, the former chief creative officer of BBDO New York, was looking for new opportunities and had a very clear idea of what he wanted to build next. “NFA was my first call,” Hahn told LBBonline at the time. “It was instant love.” This was April of 2020. They got Mischief going by June 1. For context, most agencies spend five weeks debating the pitch deck font. The team launched a company—and to raise the difficulty level, this was during the start of the pandemic. Mischief has since been given several Agency of the Year awards, which is a pretty good return on a five-week build.

But Mischief was a confirmation of something, not the invention of it. The Grid is essentially the shared services infrastructure that sits underneath all the agencies: HR, finance and business development—a kind of Navy SEALs team, as Lafond describes it. Each agency operates independently, owns its equity, runs its creative and retains its own clients. What they do share are the things that creative people hate dealing with so they can focus on the creative work they love. Lafond’s leadership philosophy, as he puts it, is simply: “decide, delegate, disappear.”

Lafond is almost evangelical about NFA’s complete independence. “We’ve done this from scratch,” he says. No private equity. No acquisition strategy. No quarterly guidance calls. Just the model, the work, and the stubborn belief that the best thing you can do for creative people is get out of their way and let them create.

Ten years later, NFA is still independent and still asking the same question it started with: What would you do if you weren’t afraid? A decade in, it’s still answering it. ca