Small is a position, not a waiting room

Twice in a row, against the big names

Lucky Hustle took Small Agency of the Year at the 14th Wesbank New Generation Awards for the second year running, which Darren Morris believes nobody has managed before. Their Xiaomi Titan Tough campaign scored the highest mark of the night at 93%, in a field that included Ogilvy, VML and Clockwork. The agency is five years old and runs at about 25 people.

His reading of what that means for clients is the part worth arguing with. "Traditionally big brands would always think, I need a big agency, I need a big global name. It's not the case anymore." What decides the work, he says, is "who is that handful of people that's working on your brand" — and in a small shop the client knows all of them, from the ops manager to the graphic designer.

What the big agencies still own

He is careful not to oversell it, which makes the rest more credible. Large agencies carry heritage and relationships measured in decades: FCB had Toyota for about 60 years, Penquin has had Suzuki for around 20. They also carry the balance sheet. Big corporates pay on terms as long as 95 days, and somebody has to fund a national campaign in the meantime. "Small agencies simply cannot do that."

So when we asked whether the tools have changed what a 25-person agency can pitch for, he said yes and then drew the line himself. If a bank the size of Absa invited Lucky Hustle to pitch for its whole business, "we would absolutely fail." He has watched other agencies take account after account "until the house of cards just fell."

The more monster

The strongest idea in the conversation is the one he admits he is not immune to. He calls the industry's appetite the more monster: bigger account, more revenue, bigger account. "It's never enough." Then he applies it to his own plan and comes out somewhere unfashionable. Ask where Lucky Hustle will be in five years and the answer is not bigger: "It's about sustaining what you have." Keep the clients. Keep the staff. Keep the lights on.

He also names where agency burnout actually comes from, and it is not the client work. The late nights are the pitching and the award entries. Which makes his advice to other agency heads a subtraction rather than an addition: pause, look at what you have, and stop entering everything.

The churn costs the client too

Darren's sharpest line is about the reviews that marketers run as routine housekeeping. The trade press describes a brand leaving "a long healthy three years" with an agency, and he does not accept the adjective. "You've just started to understand the brand. That's just when you start to do the good work."

Musa Kalenga of the Brave Group puts a cost on the same churn from the inside: when an account moves, the team usually moves with it, so "there was never any deliberate development of the next layer." Both are describing an industry that keeps restarting relationships at the exact point they become productive.

Try this week: if you run an agency, work out how much of last quarter's overtime came from pitching rather than client work, and decide which of the next three pitches you are not entering. If you are the client, look at your incumbent relationship and ask whether it is underperforming or simply young.

Sourced from recorded, on-the-record interviews on the South African Digital Marketing Podcast. Every practitioner quoted above is named in the text.