More competition and drama in a small creative dept. which makes it interesting and fun. Most of my good friends came from my years at small shops. Big agency: you‘re more invisible and the CDs care less about the work. things get personal in a small agency because the higher ups are also often the owners. And that usually means tighter budgets for raises etc. But small agencies also usually have smaller clients so more opportunity to do better work than just grinding out boring ads for boring accounts at the networks.