There Is No Such Thing As A Big Agency.

A global behemoth like Ogilvy may have offices in every corner of the globe. But, in practice, each client gets a team of smart, motivated individuals dedicated to their brand. Example: When I was ECD on a giant financial news account at one of the big agencies above, we did the whole thing with about 20 people in total. That’s including the account team. And planners. Sure, we could call on the power of the network if we needed it. But, day-to-day, no more than 20 people did the work. Sometimes way fewer. And we rocked it. The big global snack company I ran got about the same (and a lot of them were the same exact people, honestly). One mega-client had the largest team in the whole place I would bet. But it amounted to less than 100 people in the end. And they all worked on other things, too. And took weekends off.

At BBDO, I was lucky enough to get hired to work in Gerry Graf’s group. There were eight creatives in that group. Those eight people made every ad for FedEx, Guinness, Red Stripe, Visa and Snickers. (To be honest, Gerry himself wrote a lot of the ads. He was tough to compete with.) I remember meeting Susan Credle, one of BBDO’s most celebrated ECDs, for the very first time in the halls. She was leaving to go to DDB. (Or was it Leo Burnett?) I shook her hand and she said “Are you new?” I said, “No, I’ve been here for two years.” We had never met until that moment. It makes sense. Susan’s group did M&Ms and AT&T. Were we working at the same agency? Does it matter?

It seems like the market is starting to understand the Big Agency myth. The stock prices of the holding companies have started dropping. Independent agencies are starting to be included in bigger pitches. Maybe technology has made finding great ideas easier. Maybe fracturing audiences and social media have made nimbleness more important than global scale. Maybe talent is realizing its own power and doing something about it. Many of the smartest people I know in this business have chosen to stay “small” as long as they can, at least in spirit. Jay Chiat famously said, “Let’s see how big we can get before we get bad.” But his creative leader, Lee Clow, may have said it best: “It’s more fun to be the pirates than it is to be the navy.” Arrrrr, matey. Arrrrrrrrr.

Everything else is just an illusion.

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