For those keeping score at home, the number of senior creative executives who have left large holding company agencies to start their own shops has grown sufficiently large that one might reasonably describe it as a trend, or at least a very long parade.
Craig Crawford, who spent years in senior creative roles at Leo Burnett working on the Cadillac account and at Team One on Lexus, is the latest to make the journey. In 2024, he departed the holding company world to establish a creative boutique called Black Noise, and he has begun a letter-writing campaign to chief marketing officers that borrows its rhetorical strategy from the advertising archives.
The letters carry titles lifted from some of the most celebrated campaigns in the industry's history: "Think Small," the Doyle Dane Bernbach work for Volkswagen that helped invent modern advertising; "We Try Harder," the DDB campaign for Avis; and "Where's the Beef," the 1984 Wendy's work from Dancer Fitzgerald Sample. Each letter addresses a different category — automotive, travel and quick-service restaurants, respectively — and each makes essentially the same argument: that large agencies have drifted from selling ideas to selling hours and headcount.
"Somewhere along the way, agencies stopped billing for ideas and started billing for bodies and hours," Mr. Crawford wrote in the Volkswagen-titled letter.
The campaign, he insisted, is not solely about Black Noise. "It's about the growing number of senior expert talent who walked away from holding company agencies because they wanted their names attached to outcomes, not headcount."
(One does not typically see a new-business pitch framed as an industry-wide consciousness-raising effort, but perhaps this, too, is part of the trend.)
Each letter concludes with an invitation to give a small shop a project with "real stakes" — not because such shops are cheaper, Mr. Crawford wrote, but because they are hungrier.
Whether chief marketing officers will find the argument persuasive remains to be seen. The headlines, at least, have aged well.
Original story published in MediaPost: "Think Small. (Agencies, that is)."