Tell us about your organization. How big is your team? Where are you based? What is your organization’s specialty in the film and video space?
Hitch is an independent, social-first creative and advertising agency headquartered in Austin, with a presence in New York and Los Angeles.
Our 18-person team brings creative strategy, production, post-production and paid media together under one roof. We develop the idea, make the work, distribute it and learn directly from how audiences respond. That closed loop allows us to move faster, protect the original creative idea and continually make the work stronger.
Our specialty is creating films and campaigns that feel worth watching—whether that means comedy, cinematic storytelling, creator-led content or performance advertising. Our work has generated more than 1.2 billion views, but the number we care about most is whether the work created a real reaction.
Why do you do what you do? Was there a transformative moment that solidified your career choice, your org’s success, or your commitment to storytelling?
We started Hitch because too much advertising was being created through a broken process. A creative team would make the campaign, hand it to a media team and rarely learn what actually happened once real money was placed behind it. At the same time, performance advertising was becoming more disposable, formulaic and forgettable.
The transformative realization was that creative and media shouldn’t operate as separate worlds. The people developing the idea should understand how audiences are responding, and the people managing distribution should help shape the creative from the beginning.
That became our model: make things people choose to watch, put real money behind them and prove that the work moves the numbers. We do this because advertising can still be culturally interesting, beautifully made and commercially effective at the same time.
Tell us about your Telly Award winning piece. What’s the story behind it?
Hitch received four Silver Telly Awards for four very different campaigns.
For Chike Nutrition, “Starbucks Whistleblower Parody” turned a product benefit into a comedic piece of internet culture. Instead of producing a conventional protein-coffee advertisement, we built the campaign around a fake whistleblower exposing what people were supposedly missing from their daily coffee. The film generated more than four million views and won in Social Video / Comedy.
For Cuvée Coffee, “Pushing the Good Stuff” treated coffee like contraband. The campaign used secret exchanges, suspicious characters and cinematic tension to create a distinctive vertical-video world around the product. It generated more than 1.3 million views and won in Vertical Video.
For Adidas Pickleball, the “ADIPOWER Launch” used custom sets, visual effects and cinematic storytelling to give a paddle launch the scale and energy of a larger sports-film universe. It won in General Sports.
For Nowadays, “Don’t Drink Hard, Drink Easy” challenged the conventions of alcohol advertising. It introduced a lighter, more intentional way to drink through lifestyle-driven storytelling designed for a generation rethinking its relationship with alcohol. It won in Food & Beverage.
Together, the four pieces represent what we want Hitch to be: an agency capable of finding an original creative language for every brand rather than forcing every brand into the same formula.
Can you share a behind the scenes story or fun fact about the making of your piece?
A fun connection between the four campaigns is that they look like they came from completely different creative worlds—and that was intentional.
One played like an internet conspiracy, another like an underground exchange, another built a cinematic sports universe, and another reframed the rituals of drinking. We never begin by asking what format is currently trending. We begin by asking what world only this brand could credibly own.
What was your biggest challenge during production and how did you solve it?
Social-first should not mean creatively disposable. We had to build custom environments, coordinate talent, execute visual effects and preserve cinematic craft while ensuring that each film communicated immediately on a phone screen.
We solved that by planning creative, production and post-production together from the beginning. Composition, pacing, transitions and product visibility were treated as part of the original idea—not adjustments made after the shoot. That integration allowed the work to feel crafted without losing the immediacy that makes social video effective.
What are you most proud of about this piece? What is the most memorable response you got from this work?
We are most proud that the work earned both recognition and a real audience.
The Chike campaign surpassed four million views, Cuvée generated more than 1.3 million, and all four projects helped their brands show up in ways that felt distinct to them. The most rewarding responses were from people engaging with the ideas as entertainment—not simply recognizing that they were watching advertisements.
Being selected from more than 13,000 entries and having four campaigns recognized across comedy, vertical video, sports and food and beverage reinforced something important for our team: there is no single formula for effective creative. The common thread is a strong idea executed with conviction.
You won a Telly Award for this piece. Why is recognition important for you, your team or your work?
Recognition matters because it validates the belief Hitch was built around: brands shouldn’t have to choose between work that is creatively ambitious and work that performs.
These four Telly Awards belong to our entire team. Every project required strategy, creative, production and post-production to work as one unit, often under tight timelines and with very different brand challenges. Seeing campaigns for four completely different brands recognized together proves that our approach is repeatable—not limited to one category, format or creative style.
Most importantly, it gives our team permission to keep taking creative risks. It reminds us that the work people choose to watch can also be the work that moves a business forward.
Tell us what you’re up to! If there’s a new project, launch, or milestone you’d like us to celebrate with you, let us know, and we might share it with our community.
Hitch is building the next generation of independent advertising agency—one where creative, production and paid media are no longer fragmented across different partners.
We are expanding our team and capabilities while staying focused on the advantage that got us here: small, highly integrated teams making ambitious work quickly. Our next milestone is to make every major campaign both a creative statement and a measurable business case study.
As advertising becomes increasingly automated and flooded with interchangeable content, we believe original ideas and real craft will become more valuable—not less. Hitch intends to be one of the companies proving that.
