Our industry makes ads about Merdeka every year, but what does independence mean to us as an agency?

This post is sponsored by Yellow Paper Plane.

August is always a pretty special month in this part of the world.

Singapore celebrates its National Day. Indonesia celebrates its Independence Day. And, of course, we Malaysians end the month celebrating Merdeka.

For those of us in the advertising business, August also means something else: Merdeka ads.

Every year, some of Malaysia’s biggest brands and agencies produce beautifully crafted films about what independence means. Some make us laugh. Some make us cry. Some make us feel very Malaysian for three minutes on YouTube before we go back to complaining about the traffic, weather, politics etc.

And every year, we in the industry watch them, share them, debate which ones we liked best, and yes, hope MARKETING-INTERACTIVE writes about ours.

After watching another round of Merdeka work this year, all that talk about independence got me thinking about a much smaller and personal version of it. Ours.

Eight years ago, Yellow Paper Plane started with a couple of people working from a dining table and cafés. No global network. No big war chest. Not many clients either.

Looking back, we were probably too naive to realise how difficult it was going to be.

Fast forward to today and we are still only a 20-plus person Malaysian independent media agency. Yet this is the team that recently walked away from the MARKies/AOTY awards with seven wins, including two golds, competing alongside some of the biggest and most established agencies in the industry.

Not bad lah for an agency where the entire company could probably still fit two mamak tables combined. We know, we tried, and it actually fitted.

But this isn’t really about awards.

The trophies are not the point. They are proof of the point.

For a long time, it felt like independent agencies had to behave like smaller versions of big agencies.

Well, maybe now is the time we "memerdekakan" (liberate) ourselves from that notion.

Yellow Paper Plane doesn’t have 200 people. So, our 20-plus people sometimes have to think and move like 200.

We don’t have every specialist capability sitting somewhere in the same building. So we find good people who are better than us at certain things and collaborate with them.

And we certainly don’t have 10-20 layers of approval, from some “regional” chief-something-officer, before making the big decisions. Sometimes that’s quite useful.

All this, to me, is the true meaning and essence of Merdeka (independence).

It is having the freedom to decide what kind of agency you actually want to build.

The freedom to give young people responsibilities that might normally go to someone several levels above them. Experiment with AI. Change our minds quickly. Try something, get it wrong, kena a bit, learn and try again.

Technology is also changing the equation. Tools, data and AI capabilities that once required serious scale and investment are becoming accessible to much smaller businesses.

Being independent doesn’t have to mean “think smaller” anymore.

But there’s another lesson we’ve learnt. Independence doesn’t mean being out there on our own.

Our clients take chances on us. Our partners amplify exponentially what our small team can do. And our people keep stepping up when, on paper at least, we probably have no business competing against some of the agencies we have found ourselves competing against.

I don’t think independent agencies need to prove we’re better than the global networks. We’re not trying to replace them. We just need to prove there is more than one way to build a good agency.

So, after another Merdeka spent watching wonderful films about independence, maybe those of us in the agency business should ask ourselves the same question. What does independence mean to us?

For me, it’s the freedom to choose your own path. The humility to know you can’t walk it alone. And then working damn hard to prove your choice wasn’t such a crazy one after all.

Eight years later, we’re still small. Still independent. Still figuring things out and still being able to win the way we want to win, with the people we want to win with.

And to be honest, I think we quite like it that way.

Merdeka means different things to different people. This is what it means to us.

The writer is Fan Chen Yip, executive director of Yellow Paper Plane.