Articles have been written at length about how the advertising industry has changed over the past decade or so, and the principles by which agencies used to conduct themselves are no longer the same. In order to stay in business, companies have had to adopt new models as it relates to all things ‘agency’, be it with creative work, account work, etc.

Not only is the industry changing but people’s perceptions about the industry itself are also changing—by people I mean clients and by industry I mean agencies. Gone are the days when clients blindly doled out monthly or quarterly fees to keep the agency on a retainer basis. Now, more than ever, marketing executives are being forced to be more accountable for their departmental expenditures, and will thus find it harder to justify spending money on agencies and/or initiatives that are seen as producing no return, redundant, or extraneous. For the most part, it is the larger agencies that are feeling this crunch.

In addition to this, the media that companies have traditionally used to advertise (TV, radio, print) are not as popular as they once were. While they are still being used, companies are looking for other ways to promote and market their product and services, and are increasingly turning towards smaller campaigns, things like online advertising and guerilla marketing for example, where they may see a tighter control over their budgets and be able to get more accurate ROI reporting.

Under this new way of thinking, the arguments for using a smaller agency have never been stronger or more compelling. Small agencies are run under a very different set of principles from the “big shops” and are thus able to offer clients certain advantages that the big agencies simply cannot, just by virtue of their size.

The most obvious example of this is with price. The cost of running a big agency vs. a small agency is quite different, with the latter not having to worry about as much overhead—either with regards to logistics or human resources—and so they are able to pass those savings directly onto the clients. The flipside to that argument is still something that translates into good news for clients. Small agencies are—by definition—small, and whereas this enables them to save on overhead, it also makes them very reliant on certain key client relationships, so they will make the effort to go that extra mile for their clients in all facets of the business, not just because their company philosophy states so, but because their company needs to do so in order to survive.

The other area where a small agency can provide better worth is in work efficiency. Large agencies have many layers and processes and there are sometimes numerous steps required in order to get a concept approved and then laid out, before it is even presented to the client. Then, once a concept has been approved and work has begun on it, any changes that the client requests will also need to undergo a series of approvals and steps. Within a small agency, however, all members required to take a project from start to finish, from creative to account and everything in between, can brainstorm collectively during all stages of a project and client-requested changes can be made much faster having only to go through 2-3 people vs. several people or even several departments. All of this translates to faster turnaround and a client can see projects completed in almost half the amount of time that it would take a large agency to complete the same scope of work.

Finally, smaller agencies are frequently in a much better position to respond to clients’ non-traditional media requests, an increasingly popular trend as explained above. Obviously, a small agency does not have experts in every single field-nor can they afford to hire them fulltime-but because of this, most of the smaller firms will engage the help of various strategic partners, from creative resource help to event management expertise, etc. When looked at from this bigger picture, small agencies on the whole are better suited to address these diversified needs and-between themselves and their large network of partners-there is almost no marketing and communications request that they can not tackle.

The old adage is that big things come in small packages. Now, more than ever, clients in the advertising world are seeing that big ideas, big service and big savings come in small agencies.