In the agency world, especially in larger agencies, it’s important to brag about your big accounts.
As a smaller agency serving small to midsized clients, and a few larger ones (but no Toyota or Netflix account over here!), we don’t play that game.
Running huge accounts for already established brands is a skill in itself, but those skills usually involve more politics, more budget, and already successful clients. The skill set doesn’t include street smarts, risk tolerance, innovation, or stretching a buck.
If I had to boil this scrappy world down to one word, I’d call it “performance.”
Life Among the Mega-Clients
I’ll skip past long stories about some of our (generally the positives outweigh the negatives) tours of duty with mega-clients. In one instance, the story is highly entertaining, but also top secret. Because of the size mismatch, this particular gigantic client (in the financial sector) didn’t stick. At one point, they hired a third party to winnow down the 60+ agencies they were working with at the time, to no more than 25(!).
We were asked to make a video over a weekend about “what their brand meant to us.” The handwriting was on the wall.
Our failure to submit a video, produced over a weekend, about “what their brand meant to us,” didn’t help. We had made some good friends there. Our campaign performance had been laudable. We parted ways.
In parting, one particular person on that client side sounded like she almost felt like coming with us. Failing that, referring to corporate meetings and layers, she hoped that “someday, we would feel her pain.”
But no. We’ve deliberately dedicated our professional lives to less painful pursuits, generally in the service of what our typical clients ask of us: measurable performance and so forth.
Performance Over Politics
In this realm, efficient workflows are paramount. It’s a bit dated now, but I’d recommend you take a look at Rework by Jason Fried and DHH. A lot of it reinforced what we already felt.
Performance sometimes leads to hyper-growth. Other times, it leads to sustained growth. We don’t take all the credit, of course, but we’re fiercely proud of our role.
When people see some recognizable names on our client list, they might assume that we’re lucky. Lucky to find that “big client.”
The thing is: some of those “big companies” got that way under our watch!
Not Lucky, Just Early
Here are a few examples of companies we began serving in our role as paid media (mostly Google) account managers from the time they were very small, through 1,000s of % of revenue growth:
- One of Canada’s largest e-commerce retailers, now owned by private equity and a sister company of Canada’s second-largest drugstore giant;
- One of the largest snack, food, and supplement online retailers in the US;
- A player in the legal vertical that began from near-zero and came to dominate its niche, competing with companies like LegalZoom
And also several successful startups that we helped out not too long after their launch (these ones, I’ll name, as we’ve mentioned them before):
- Wave Financial
- Clio
- SuccessFactors
You don’t have to be “big” to move the needle and foster growth. We’re not the world’s biggest agency. But after all these years, even as the “novelty has worn off” in the world of digital advertising, we’re still passionate about performance. Opportunity is just around the corner, and we’re here for it.