merit
2023
New York
Full Service/Creative
3
Underdog
We break the biggest rule in advertising: pretending size matters. We don’t stockpile junior staff to justify retainers. We don’t call 100 slides “thinking.” We don’t believe in culture decks, “agency of record” titles, or fake award entries shot in Uruguay. We have one rule at TiNY: three partners touch every business. And two votes is always a yes. Which means we move faster than a squirrel on Adderall running across power lines.
That’s why we’re proudly small. Tiny even.
We don’t have investors. We don’t have a board. We don’t have an office. We don’t have a barista. We are just three very seasoned pros who know how to go from brief to insight to idea to execution faster than bigger agencies can fill out the RFP. Oh, and we have more cash in our reserves than most agencies 100x our size. For real.
We each have our own unique role as partners, but when it comes time to make work, we all roll our sleeves up and get messy. If we need more firepower or expertise on a project, we call the very best in the business to give us a fraction of their time. And most of the time, they do.
Speaking of fractional, TiNY isn’t all we do. In fact, one of us has a whole other full-time job! Tom Christmann is both TiNY CMO and Found Content Evangelist at Catch+Release. It’s a symbiotic relationship and both companies are learning from each other. Meanwhile, Rovner and Stoopack just started teaching in the BIC graduate program at City College in Manhattan.
Finally, we don’t work weekends if we can help it. Is that still weird?
Our code is simple: fun beats fear. Big shops run on fear—fear of losing the client, fear of losing Cannes points, fear of their own CFO. We run on fun. Not fake “beer cart” fun, but the real kind: when the idea makes you laugh out loud, when you can’t wait to present it, when the client says “can we actually do that?” and you say “we already did.” That vibe only exists when you’re indie and nobody’s breathing down your neck.
Our philosophy is simple: make great work with great people and have a great time doing it. If we’re not having fun, we’re out. No matter how much money we’re offered. Which brings us to…
The 2/3 rule. If 2 of us want to do something, we do it. This includes firing clients (we’ve already done it), taking on pro bono work, and starting the 3 TiNY Questions podcast.
Giving Back. While the big agencies cut their internship programs to spend on artificial intelligence, TiNY is helping to pass the knowledge to a new generation through Adhouse and CCNY.
We also pay our lawyer in omakase. True story. He won’t take real money… just unagi. If you don’t believe us, and need great legal advice for just a 15-piece sushi surprise, contact Marc S. Gottlieb at 917-848-8152.
Independence let us turn dog breath into cologne and sell it at Walmart. It let us put Bigfoot and Hansel & Gretel in a financial spot on ABC. It let us make an award-show campaign with nothing but ears and an empty purse. Try pulling any of that through twelve rounds of procurement and see how fast the lights get shut off. Also, that award show sold out in record time, Bigfoot made a huge impression at the Celebrity Golf Tournament, and we’re about to suggest men slap on some SLBR (that’s “slobber” in fragrance speak) for Father’s Day next year.
OH! And there's the one that got away, but we have to show it because everybody - and we mean everybody - loved it. We had a GUARANTEE from Adweek that we'd earn a front cover during the week of Cannes, we had She Runs It hosting the launch event, all we needed was one more partner to make the impossible possible - Marketing Barbie. The deck that shows what almost was is attached as a pdf.
TiNY started when three veterans—one account sage, one copy nut, and one guy who won’t shut up on podcasts—looked at the industry and said, “Remember when this was fun?” So we built the agency we wished still existed: no parents, no politics, no patience for PowerPoint (we’re a Google Slides fam).
Just a bunch of people who like making stuff that makes people feel something. In fact, our agency motto if we had one would be: We make great work with great people and have a great time doing it. Take that, Omnivablucis!
Our fight was convincing clients that small isn’t risky—it’s smarter. We didn’t pitch it, we proved it. We deliver campaigns that work harder than their budgets, ideas that outpunch their media buys, and results CMOs can actually brag about upstairs. Suddenly small wasn’t the gamble. Staying big was. Unless you like bloat.
Here's one concrete example: We won a pitch and began working with a client who just wasn’t getting it. This happened to be a famous person. But she and her team were not nice. It was putting stress on our production relationships. It was straining our freelancer relationships. We put up with it for a while, but then we decided to fire them and send all of their money back. We’re proud of that.
The future isn’t networks with 9,000 creatives who can’t name the client. Or 18,000 account people who fill conference rooms. The future is indie shops with just enough weirdos to make magic. Independence means we keep saying yes to ideas and no to nonsense. TiNY’s role? To prove that the best advertising will always be a little reckless, a little stupid, and a lot of fun. And it alway, always, always starts with a tiny team of adnerds (even at the big shops… they know it too).
In the end, we believe ad agencies will behave like bands. Hopefully we’ll still be touring in 2040.
Hey, if the Rolling Stones can go 60 years, why not us?
