For most of his career, Craig Crawford has served in senior creative roles at holding company agencies like Leo Burnett, where he worked on the Cadillac account and Team one (Lexus).   

In 2024 he left the holding company world and set up his creative boutique called Black Noise.  

This week, Crawford took out paid ads in trade books and LinkedIn in the form of “Open Letters” to CMOs.  

The message: Think about the value you’re getting from your big agency and consider using a smaller shop where big ideas are easier to bring to life.  

“Somewhere along the way, agencies stopped billing for ideas and started billing for bodies and hours,” he wrote in one letter, titled “Think Small,” after the iconic title of an ad campaign for Volkswagen created in the 1950’s by Doyle Dane & Bernbach.   

The letter campaign isn’t just about Black Noise, Crawford insists. “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.”  

Three different letters address CMO cohorts in the auto, travel and quick service restaurant sectors. The travel letter is titled “We Try Harder,” after the iconic ad campaign from yesteryear for Avis (also from DDB) and the QSR letter is titled “Where’s The Beef,” the ad campaign for Wendy’s (Dancer Fitzgerald Sample, 1984). All three are thematically relevant to the point he’s making about the differences between big and small agencies today.   

“We Try Harder” isn’t just a line, he writes. “It’s a belief system. It’s shared by underdogs who left holding companies to build small, agile, instantly scalable independent studios and collectives.... Like you, they’re accountable to outcomes, not quarterly calls.”  

In the “Where’s The Beef” letter, Crawford writes, “I’m borrowing those three same words to challenge you to reconsider whether you’re getting everything you’re paying for from you supersized agency.”  

Each letter ends with the pitch to give a small shop a project with “real stakes.” Not because they’re cheaper. But because they are hungrier, try harder and eliminate the bloat.