Advertising Against the Grain

There’s a reason people say bigger is better.

For businesses, that’s often the truth. More money. More of a platform. More brand recognition. These are all advantages large companies have over small businesses when it comes to marketing.

To a small business, the competition can seem intimidating, but there are still many areas where big businesses lose out against the little guys. Sometimes, large companies end up with a culture that stifles progress and they begin to look dangerously similar to a corporate titan. In that way, small businesses have the benefit of agility and a tighter, more focused team. 

Our founder Tom Geary knows a thing or two about this, because he’s worked at both extremes —going from working at a massive ad agency like McCann, to building a scrappy little startup you might’ve heard of called School of Thought.

Recently, on The Cost of Success Podcast with Anthony Gonzales, he had an opportunity to chat about the benefits companies of any size can get out of working with a smaller, more nimble outfit.

“When you’re working at a big agency, and working for a client for Microsoft, it’s very slow going. We’d work a year on a project, and maybe it would move forward or maybe the project would go sideways. It’s like, for all my career as a creative person in advertising … you become used to running sprints,” Geary said.

“Suddenly you’re in the belly of this supertanker, and you feel like ‘man, if I could just grab these seven people, and that client, and some opportunity, we could get more done in a month than probably I’ve done all year.’ 

At some of his old jobs, it might take two weeks for them to fill out a manila folder for a project to get started. Juxtapose that with the two weeks it would later take to launch a national campaign for eBay after he was outside the Big Agency structure.

Bureaucracy, committees, and layers upon layers of decision-makers can suck the life out of a concept, or prevent truly stand-out campaigns from seeing the light of day. When you’re trying to come up with a direction that pleases everyone, what you’re really doing is coming up with a campaign that takes no risks and speaks to nobody. 

“It’s the rare company that says to itself, how can we get some of these people out of the way so that we can get more done? As an example, when I was doing a lot of work with Microsoft, there were sixty-five hundred people in marketing at Microsoft. That’s a lot.”

While there, Geary helped spearhead a project called Ms. Dewey. In that moment, he said, the idea came together and everyone broke the rules and thought, “we’re gonna do something crazy, and if it works great, and if it doesn’t, then I guess we’re all out of work.” 

“Luckily it worked out, Geary said. “The head of marketing and a bunch of people grabbed those of us who worked on it (there were about five or six of us) and said, “okay, we’re all going to have a retreat and study how this thing happened.”

Ultimately, it was a case of the group breaking the rules. 

When the most successful campaigns and decisions come from a handful of people going against the grain, it’s a sign that the company’s decision-making structure is hampering decisions. For true flexibility, even giants need to think like a startup.

Big companies need to really look at how they’re doing business and constantly be assessing how their marketing stacks up. Zoom is a great example of that. Zoom was started by a guy who worked on WebEx, and didn’t like how it was being run.

“He started Zoom, and away it went,” Geary said. “If you’re Cisco, you either start operating like a startup, or wave goodbye to market share. You’ve got to start thinking like a small company and try to get more things done, and that takes some risks.”

Wondering how a large corporation can move with that kind of speed and free thought? One example comes from Geary’s past experience at Microsoft. Here’s one answer:

“They had a program where they would say ‘okay, 3% of our marketing dollars are going to go towards experiments, and we’re just going to try a lot of new things.’ And I thought that was really a great idea, and we had some amazing successes with some of those things.“ 

Three percent ultimately isn’t a lot. In fact, if you think of the marketing end of your projects as risky endeavors, you’d be mistaken. There are many risks inherent to business, but marketing expenditures categorically receive a skeptical side eye.

If you think about a car company like Audi or VW, the costs to come up with a new model are probably somewhere in the billions. If a company goes all-in on an idea like that, there’s a huge amount of risk. Coming up with an ad campaign, on the other hand, is relatively low risk.

Taking risks on bold new creative ideas sounds scary, but ultimately, it’s at the core of every runaway success story. If you don’t commit to going against the grain, you’re going to wind up looking like every other campaign in your space.

“One of the things that is a driving force for the work we do, is we always say, we wanna make people care about whatever it is we’re trying to communicate. But in order to do that, you have to look around, you’ve gotta look at the category and you have to be distinctive,” Geary said.

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Editor’s Note: Listen to the entire episode on The Cost of Success podcast, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.