Why smaller accounts still need strategy even when nobody budgeted for it
Smaller accounts often get less strategy. From the agency's point of view, the logic is completely rational. The large client pays more, creates more revenue risk and usually has more political importance. If somebody has to receive the senior strategist this week, the big account wins. Rational decisions can still create stupid outcomes.
Look at the problem from the client's side
Advertising profitability is strongly influenced by brand size. Paul Dyson's work on the drivers of advertising profitability has repeatedly placed brand size at the top of the list, with creative quality as the largest controllable factor.
Larger brands benefit from advantages smaller brands simply do not have. They are better known. They are easier to buy. More people already have them in memory. A smaller brand cannot lean on those advantages to the same degree. That makes strategic precision more important, not less. The client with the smaller budget may have less room to waste money on the wrong audience, the wrong message or a piece of creative work solving the wrong problem. Yet that is often the client receiving less strategic attention from the agency.
The agency still has to protect the large account
None of this means an agency should neglect the client paying most of the bills. Lose a flagship account and the damage is obvious. The problem is the forced trade-off. What if protecting the large account did not require starving the smaller one? That is the more useful strategic-capacity question.
When budgets shrink and the brief does not
A budget cut reduces the money available before it reduces the complexity of the decision. Someone still has to choose the audience, the message and the channels that deserve the remaining weight. Leaving every ambition in the brief while cutting the strategy allocation transfers the choice downstream.
A client can take genuinely resolved strategy back in-house and ask the agency to execute against it. That is a smaller scope. If the brief remains open, name the decisions the agency is still being asked to make and agree which ones the fee covers. Record any additional work before it becomes invisible overservicing.
Take a revised scope to the client with explicit trade-offs: the priority to keep, the activities to stop and the uncertainty that will remain. This gives account management a concrete negotiation rather than another request for everyone to absorb the difference.
Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey reports marketing budgets at 7.7% of company revenue among 402 respondents, predominantly large enterprises. It supplies context for budget pressure, not evidence that every smaller agency client cut spending. Confirm the client’s actual constraints before reducing the service.
Record the intervention as senior strategy time, even when it is billed under another department.
Small losses create expensive replacement work
There is another agency-side cost. Lose a smaller account and the immediate revenue hit may be manageable. Now replace it. The pitch effort is rarely proportional to the size of the account. A smaller opportunity can still require senior people, strategic groundwork, creative routes, rehearsals and a significant amount of non-billable attention.
A series of neglected small accounts can therefore create a series of surprisingly expensive replacement pitches. The economics become less tidy than “big account good, small account less important”.
Somebody will fill the strategy vacuum
If the account does not get a strategist, strategy does not disappear. Usually one of two groups fills the gap. The client does it. Or the creative team does it. Clients can be excellent strategic thinkers. They do not always translate their business direction into a form creatives can reliably work from.
Creatives can also be excellent strategists. They still have another job to do. Asking the creative team to set its own strategic guardrails is a little like leaving an open packet of crisps on the table and telling yourself you will only eat three. Good luck. The guardrails are more useful when somebody else helps create and challenge them.
Equal allocation would be silly
This is not an argument for putting the same strategist hours on every account. Different clients need different amounts and different kinds of strategy. One account needs a major positioning project. Another needs annual planning. A third only needs campaign strategy and a strong brief. The objective is not equal allocation.
It is appropriate strategic attention. Every piece of work that genuinely needs strategy should get it, even when the client is not large enough to win an internal fight over five per cent of a strategist's FTE.
Mirel’s agency-wide approach is intended to make strategic support easier to reach on smaller assignments.