In the June-August 2026 issue of NZ Marketing magazine, we asked agency founders to tell us the story behind why they started their agency, their favourite thing, what they’ve learned and their best advice.
Motion Sickness
- Founders: Sam Stuchbury, Hilary Ngan Kee and Alex McManus
- Year founded: 2012
Tell us the story behind founding your agency.
Motion Sickness started the way most good things do – organically with a lot of energy and ambition, but without a particularly grand plan.
Sam kicked things off, founding the business while still at university, brought Alex on board and Hilary followed soon after. None of us had ever worked in an agency before.
The early focus was on creativity, content and how brands could come to life in the emerging world of social media. We were figuring it out as we went, and finding our craft.
Fast forward through a lot of hard yakka, and then came Keep It Real Online – our first large-scale integrated campaign, created when we were a team of just 10 people. Unexpected, disruptive and genuinely effective. It set the tone for everything that followed.
Motion Sickness began in 2012.
What’s your favourite thing about running your own agency?
It’s probably the lack of permission.
When we decided we were something different to a traditional advertising agency – a creative company – we didn’t need a board sign-off or someone else’s blessing. We just did it.
That freedom shapes everything. The way we make decisions, the way we back our gut and especially the way we invest in our people.
We probably spend more time and money on protecting our team and culture than most would consider commercially sensible. But it matters to us, and has a very clear and direct impact on the quality of our work, so we do it.
The proof is in the numbers: something like 98% of people who have left Motion Sickness have done so to move overseas, not to another agency. That’s the thing about running your own creative company. You get to decide what’s important. And then you actually do it. It’s great.
What’s the most important thing you’ve learned?
Focus on the work, and the rest will follow. It sounds simple, but it’s easy to lose sight of in the day-to-day of running a business.
We overinvest in the work – time, cost, effort, all of it – because we know that’s where it counts.
First and foremost, we’re here to help our clients’ businesses succeed, but great work is also our best form of self-promotion. When something goes out into the world and genuinely connects, people notice. They come to you.
Last year’s Grand Effie win happened because our team was so focused on, and good at, what we do. So we’ve learned to always back the work. Be relentless about it. The rest has a funny way of working itself out.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve received or given out?
Ironically, I think it’s advice we received that turned out to be wrong.
Coming into the industry, a few people warned us to watch our backs, ‘it’s pretty cut-throat out there’ type stuff. We believed them, and came in guarding ourselves a bit more than we probably needed to.
The reality was much nicer to experience. In New Zealand and Australia at least, we’ve found an industry that genuinely celebrates great work and rallies behind people who put in the effort – even when they’re competing with you.
Sure, there’s the occasional dickhead. But by and large, the support we’ve received from people who had absolutely no obligation to give it has been one of the nicer surprises of building this business.
If you make work that earns people’s respect, that respect tends to find its way back to you. So that’s the advice we’d pass on: the industry is a lot friendlier than you think. Back yourself, be generous, don’t be a dick.
Anything else we should know?
Nah, that pretty much covers it! We’re a creative company now. Come chat if you’d like to make something great together.
This story comes from NZ Marketing magazine issue 87, June-August 2026. Why not subscribe? Get four issues a year for just $50 (including delivery) if you autorenew.
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