Small ad agencies go over big

When the Minneapolis shop of Barrie D'Rozario Murphy (BDM) was named "Best Small Agency" by an advertising trade group last month, it underscored the growing role that smaller agencies are playing in the revitalized Twin Cities advertising community.

Almost concurrently, another Minneapolis agency, Pocket Hercules, which has just 12 employees, was named "Midwestern Small Agency of the Year" by Advertising Age, another suggestion that small is the new big.

"This is clearly a trend," said Dean Buresh, a former big agency executive from Minneapolis who now is a communications consultant. "The old, large agencies will always be around but this is a pretty exciting time for smaller agencies."

Buresh said the Internet and other social marketing functions make it easier for small agencies to pitch their wares to clients. At the same time, he said, clients are becoming pickier about the advertising services they buy, primarily for budgetary reasons, and smaller agencies frequently carry smaller price tags.

Indeed, BDM poked fun at its larger competitors in a full-page ad in the New York Times after it was honored by the American Association of Advertising Agencies. In the ad BDM said, "Honestly, we'd rather be a medium or large agency. For a start, they get to charge three times what we do for the same work ...."

The three founding partners of BDM came from sizable agencies to form their 25-person shop 2 1/2 years ago.

David Murphy was the president of the Los Angeles office of Saatchi & Saatchi and moved to Minneapolis to join with two veterans from Minneapolis-based Fallon, Bob Barrie and Stuart D'Rozario.

"Without a doubt, that put us on the map," Murphy said. "It sent a message to other marketers and agencies."

Pocket Hercules got its start in 2005 when Jason Smith and Tom Camp left Carmichael Lynch to set up their own shop. Chief creative officer and Carmichael Lynch veteran Jack Supple followed a year later.

Supple and his partners share an office in the Minneapolis Warehouse District that is adorned with an original neon sign of the whale that stood outside Moby Dick's, a long-gone but not forgotten Hennepin Avenue watering hole.

"The upside of being smaller is that you're closer to the work, and the clients feel that too. They enjoy the attention," said Supple. "The downside is that you can get real busy. But when you're in the small agency world, that's what you feed on -- energy."

The clients of Pocket Hercules include fishing lure giant Rapala USA, Carl Zeiss sports optics (binoculars, scopes), Pearl Izumi (high-tech apparel and shoes for runners and cyclists) and the Prairie Club, a designer-destination golf facility in the famous Sandhills region of Nebraska that is set to open next year.

"You have more direct contact with the people you work with. You get a lot of personal attention," said Mackin. Smaller agencies have the added benefit of costing less, he said, because fewer hands on an account means fewer billable hours.

Geoff Bremner, CEO of Modern Climate, which counts Best Buy and St. Jude Medical as clients, said smaller agencies are more adept at spotting marketing opportunities because the agency principals are on the front lines. "Clients are looking for material that is new and fresh," Bremner said.

BDM, for example, created a street marketing campaign to promote electronic bikes being test-marketed by Best Buy. "We had folks ride those e-bikes through the streets and in the Best Buy parking lot," said BDM's Murphy.

But small agencies have some of the same headaches as large ones.

The economy is one of those headaches. There's also overhead.

"I don't think that small is the new big. I think small is the new better," Murphy quipped.