How many companies exist that can hire a big name brand ad agency? Just in terms of sheer number – there must be a pretty finite amount of companies that can afford to spend that much money on advertising. Would you say there were 1,000? 10,000? There really can’t be that many. Just looking at the auto industry (historically the biggest spenders on advertising), there might be 20 big car companies that spend aggressively on advertising – that is, if you count the subsidiaries of Ford and GM separately.
What do you think the ratio would like look between the number of companies that are big enough to hire a big ad agency and the number of big ad agencies vying for their business? If you looked at each big advertiser as a big fish swimming in the ocean, do you think the number of fisherman would outnumber the fish?
Now think about the number of small to mid size businesses that exist. There are probably too many to count and new ones are popping up every day. It’s true that many of these small to midsize companies do not have much money to spend on advertising, but there are so many of them there must be nearly infinite opportunity.
It’s true that going after small businesses will never catch you a whale, but maybe it’s possible to catch enough minnows to make up for it? Just a thought for a cold rainy Sunday night.