I’m going to say a few things loud and clear (louder for the people in the back who need to be listening): When you work on two (three, four) briefs at once for your big agency; the only loser, is you. They are charging for your time, twice. Client is paying, twice. Are you getting paid twice? No. Loser.
Thing is, the bigger an agency gets, the more overlords it has to please, the more profit it needs to make. How do you get more money out of the same cake? You start cutting the pieces smaller, and selling them for the same amount. In this case, your time is the cake. And they are getting more pieces out of you. It sucks for the client, but it sucks even more for the creatives.
It’s time someone said it plainly: the giant, monolithic advertising agency structure is broken.
B. R. O. K. E. N.
And the reason is simple. Inefficiency caused by cutting corners.
Sure. It is simultaneously more complex and simpler (money!) than that, but in essence it is this. ☝️
I’ve been contracting for one of the biggest global agencies; a sprawling, cannibalistic behemoth that devours medium sized agencies, digests them for profit, and spits them out hollow. I won’t name and shame here (do I need to?), but what I’ve seen from the inside is an industry slowly eating itself. The obsession with margins, shareholder reports, and endless hierarchy has turned what used to be a creative playground into a bureaucratic black hole.
Because I also run my own small agency, I get to see the contrast firsthand. The difference between how a big agency runs a brief and how a small one does is night and day.
Let me give you a few examples.
Example One: The Wrong Brief
I sat in a kickstart meeting with six agency people - including a Creative Director who probably bills at R2,000 an hour. Half an hour in, we realised we had the wrong brief.
The wrong brief.
We’d have to reconvene, do the meeting again, and start over. That’s six people × hundreds of rands per hour × zero actual progress. And guess what? When we finally got the right brief, another designer somewhere else in the system had already done exactly the same work. Two people, two rounds of creative. That’s double the cost, zero efficiency.
Example Two: The Phantom Product
Different brand. We get a content calendar brief, start ideating, storyboarding, and contacting suppliers - all based on a client-supplied product list. A week later we learn that the product doesn’t even exist yet.
No stock, no shoot. Back to square one.
We rework everything, present the new version, and the client says, “Why is there so much content about this product?” Because you asked for it! Again - two weeks of billable time evaporated. No accountability, no consequence, just another shrug and another status meeting.
Example Three: Luxury Ideas, Budget Price
Another global brand. Weeks of concepting, strategy sessions with 12 people on the call, endless brainstorms, beautiful moodboards - only to get to the presentation and hear, “Budgets have been cut.”
They want “luxury ideas,” but they can’t pay for luxury production. When we offer ideas scaled to their actual budget, they say, “These feel too low-end for our brand.” It’s madness. Creative whiplash born from a system that doesn’t know what it wants - except to look busy and protect the margin.
The Root Problem
The big-agency model rewards inefficiency. It rewards people for being in the room, not creating something great. You could shave off half the time wasted in meetings and duplicate efforts and immediately improve creative output by 20%.
Meanwhile, small agencies do the same calibre of work - faster, cheaper, and with more care. Give me the cost of one of those wasteful meetings, and I’ll give you a polished, strategically sound content piece that actually lives in the world.
The takeout?
If you are an agency (and I’m quoting here); “Start small. Stay small. Think big.”
If you are a client; go small. Small is tailored, personal, crafted. Big is wasting your money.
The future of good creative doesn’t belong to the giants. It belongs to the nimble, the hungry, the small. The ones who can turn a brief into brilliance without a dozen layers of “alignment.”
The ones who still care.
