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Not The Usual Suspects: 20 Small Agencies That Punch Above Their Weight

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The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is about to start this weekend.

As those of you who read this blog regularly are aware, I do understand that people want their work recognized. But award shows are totally out of control these days. What used to be the icing on the cake is now, more often than not, the entire cake. The ad industry is so obsessed with awards that it’s becoming a distraction.

Take the subjective nature of the award shows. The criteria for assembling a judging panel can vary wildly from competition to competition. The rules of competition vary as well. Some shows determine winners based on an entry alone; others, on entries and presentations and, yet others, on the assessments of results. And, if it is by written submission, are we judging the results, or the ability to write a convincing entry?

Some creative award shows are judged by peers, some by marketers, some by industry consultants, some by the media and journalists, or by a combination of all the above. Almost none of these are audited or independently validated and, because of the lack of common criteria, almost all are incredibly subjective and open to bias.

Determining how good an agency is by the number of awards it wins can be highly misleading. Because it is so prohibitively expensive to enter these contests, and because the big agency networks like Ogilvy or Saatchi or Y&R carpet bomb award shows with thousands of entries from a network of 300 or 400 international offices, the results are disproportionately biased toward these giants. Success in award shows is often a reflection of the depth of one’s pockets, and not an arbiter of an agency’s creative excellence.

So why do the usual suspects invest millions in order to win?

Contrary to common belief, all agencies have pretty much the same basic capabilities, and processes. Everybody claims to have proprietary tools, and they may have different names for what they do, but the approach is essentially the same. The big, legacy agencies are not brands. The commoditization of the agency business has led them to try and differentiate along the lines of accolades.

The big agencies would continue to win the bulk of awards in Cannes, but in recent years we have seen that clients hire more “small”, less famous, agencies that punch above their weight. They don’t measure the quality of their work through award competitions but through business results.

Most of these agencies are independent and,unlike the legacy agencies that are part of an ad conglomerate, they don’t have to put the interests of a holding company ahead of the interests of their clients. They are often still helmed by the founders, which means they have a well defined culture. And, with less bureaucracy and layers than in the big agencies, they can focus on solutions and creativity.

Unlike the big ad agencies that are still wedded to a TV-first model, the small agencies are often better integrated and highly versatile and assignments that may have gone to a digital agency or a shop that specializes in social media are now going to them.

Here are 20 such outstanding small agencies in alphabetical order:

180, LA. Bailey Lauerman, Omaha. Baldwin&, Raleigh, NC. Barton F. Graf 9000, NY. Creature. Seattle. Eleven, SF. Erwin-Penland, Greenville, SC. Johannes Leonardo, NY. Laird & Partners, NY. Made, Boulder, CO. McGarrah Jessee, Austin, TX. Mekanism, SF. Mono, Minneapolis. Muhtayzik Hoffer, SF. Omelet, LA. Pereira & O’Dell, SF. Pitch, LA. Red Tettemer O’Connell, Philadelphia. The Via Agency, Portland, Maine. Wexley School for Girls, Seattle.

Avi Dan is the CEO of Avidan Strategies, a leading marketing consultancy that helps clients manage agency search and compensation.