Before Big was an agency with strategists, developers, media analysts and an AI offering, it was an adjective attached to one person. John Montgomery founded the Birmingham company in 1995 with a laptop, a loft and a mobile phone remembered mostly for its girth. Calling a one-person public-relations operation “Big” was an efficient piece of publicity in itself: cheeky enough to invite a question, confident enough to suggest an answer. Montgomery knew the joke. More importantly, he understood the promise hidden inside it.
The name rejected the polite agency convention of partners’ surnames. It also announced a temperament: energetic, optimistic and willing to be slightly disruptive before “disruption” became conference wallpaper. Montgomery was 27. He had worked in Birmingham agencies and wanted a place where public relations could mix freely with advertising. The shop would be hybrid by design, not because a client deck demanded the word “integrated.”
There is a neat origin story here, almost suspiciously neat. Yet the more revealing beginning came earlier. As a teenager, Montgomery worked promotions for the Birmingham Bulls hockey team. A rink is a lively classroom for anyone interested in attention. The event has a fixed time, the crowd has other options, and enthusiasm cannot be stored for later. You learn that promotion is less about broadcasting facts than giving people a reason to show up.
The hometown as a working brief
Plenty of founders praise their cities. Montgomery made Birmingham part of the operating model. The Greater Birmingham Convention and Visitors Bureau was Big’s first client, beginning a relationship between agency work and civic identity that kept recurring. Over time, Big supported the city’s tourism brand, the Birmingham Business Alliance’s Blueprint Birmingham rollout and a refresh of The Birmingham News brand. Its community work reached Vulcan Park, Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham Promise and Sidewalk Film Festival.
This is where Montgomery’s favorite sentence earns its keep: “Make a difference while making a living.” It has the brevity of a slogan and the inconvenience of a standard. One half insists that a business must remain a business. The other asks what remains after the invoice is paid. Neither clause gets to dismiss the other.
“Make a difference while making a living.”John Montgomery’s long-running agency motto
The work made the philosophy visible. After the Deepwater Horizon oil spill damaged perceptions of the Gulf, Montgomery launched Serve the Gulf as a pro-bono effort to challenge misinformation. Big also worked on Go Build, a campaign addressing skilled-trade recruitment, and later on Alabama tourism, economic development, education and seafood. The assignments differ, but the structure repeats: understand a public perception, find the useful truth inside it, and give that truth enough energy to travel.
Montgomery’s civic commitments have extended beyond campaigns. His public record lists board work with REV Birmingham, Birmingham Museum of Art, Sidewalk Film, Kiwanis and Howard Finster’s Paradise Gardens Foundation, along with an advisory role connected to Jacksonville State University’s Canyon Center. He joined Leadership Birmingham in 2010 and was selected for Leadership Alabama’s Class XXXI in 2021. The résumé reads like somebody who considers community involvement a verb.
Growing into the adjective
A witty name can open a door. It cannot do the work on the other side. Big’s growth came through people and expanded disciplines. In 2007, Montgomery partnered with Ford Wiles, whose creative-agency experience complemented the founder’s public-relations instincts. Mark Ervin joined the leadership mix. The company developed capabilities across strategy, creative, digital, media and analytics while taking on regional and national brands.
Montgomery describes his role with the language of a working teammate, not a distant proprietor. In one agency profile, he was characterized as both chief cheerleader and lead blocker, involved in strategy and execution. When asked in 2020 what made him proud, he pointed to Big’s collaborative evolution and then landed on the people and the work. It is a modest answer in structure, though not in ambition.
Recognition accumulated. Montgomery made the Birmingham Business Journal’s Top 40 Under 40 in 1998. AAF Birmingham awarded him its Silver Medal in 2011, honoring professional contribution and social responsibility. In 2013, Big received Ad Age’s Small Agency of the Year, Gold, Southeast. A Birmingham Business Journal CEO award followed in 2020. The awards are useful coordinates, but the more interesting line connects them: local credibility became regional confidence without requiring Big to pretend it came from somewhere else.
The Big operating mix
A culture built in the plural
Agency founders are often tempted to make culture a synonym for their own preferences. Big chose a more participatory device. By 2018, employees had created a “Culture Club,” a cross-section of the company that met monthly to organize activities and improve the working environment. The name is playful. The mechanism is practical. People shape the place they inhabit, and the task of belonging is distributed.
That collaborative instinct appears in Montgomery’s public comments about colleagues. When longtime Big employee Shannon Harris became executive creative director in 2023, he emphasized her role in both the agency’s fabric and Birmingham’s creative community. It was the first time a woman had held the position in Big’s history. The appointment also revealed the value of patience: Harris had joined in 2010 and moved through four promotions before taking the role.
The same year, Big became Alabama’s first agency partner in the national BLAC internship program, which creates paid opportunities and support for young Black talent entering advertising. Montgomery framed the decision around learning as well as mentorship: the agency wanted to support a new generation and be inspired by it. For an industry that sells fresh perspective by the hour, widening the route into the room is sensible infrastructure.
Can the company’s taste improve when the founder is not holding every pencil? Big’s story suggests that collaboration is how a strong point of view survives growth.
Old instincts, new instruments
Big’s present-day menu would have looked exotic beside that 1995 cell phone. The agency now lists full-stack development, UX and UI design, 3D animation, real-time reporting, audience analysis and AI integration alongside public affairs, media relations and creative development. The instruments changed dramatically. The underlying questions did not: what problem matters, who needs to care, and what will make them act?
Montgomery has consistently argued for strategy as the backbone. When Big expanded its strategy team in 2021, he connected the hires to growth in technology, automotive, energy and other industry work around the country. When Jack’s Family Restaurants selected Big as agency of record in 2022, he described the job in similarly plain terms: thinking that affects the present and shapes the future.
His ambition also kept its Birmingham accent. During the disruptions of 2020, Montgomery said he wanted to support the city while expanding beyond the market, bringing more national brands back to the Magic City. It is a revealing direction of travel. The point was not to escape the regional label. The point was to make the region a reason to come.
“I want to bring more national brands back to the Magic City and show the world what our agency is made of.”John Montgomery, 2020
Perpetual motion, with a soundtrack
Montgomery’s public X biography calls him a happy husband, father of two and a person living in “perpetual motion.” His feed makes the phrase plausible. There are agency wins and Alabama initiatives, but also live music, college sports, weather near Little River Canyon and the occasional roadside alert. One post delights in a bald eagle in a pasture near Mentone. Another chooses sides in an argument about Birmingham sports logos. The executive voice and the neighbor voice share the same account.
Music is a recurring accent. For one agency holiday playlist, surrounded by safer seasonal standards, Montgomery picked Joan Jett and the Blackhearts performing “Little Drummer Boy.” It is a tiny choice, but an apt one: familiar material, louder treatment. Big itself has often worked that way, taking an established category or civic story and looking for the voltage inside it.
After three decades, Montgomery’s career offers no mystical founder secret. It offers a set of repeatable choices. Begin close to an audience. Mix disciplines around the problem. Add partners whose strengths alter the company. Let civic work count as real work. Keep the commercial discipline. Notice the place that gave you a start, then keep returning value to it.
The oversized name eventually became accurate, at least compared with the loft. Yet scale is not the most interesting achievement. Big endured while its toolkit expanded from publicity and event promotion to data, code and artificial intelligence. Through those changes, the compact promise survived. Make the work pay. Make the work matter. And if you can make Birmingham look more like the city its residents already suspect it could be, that is a campaign worth keeping open.