There is a peculiar anxiety that arrives when a campaign matters. Everyone discovers one more point that simply must be included. The policy person wants a caveat. The lawyer wants a qualifier. The executive has a favorite statistic. Soon the advertisement resembles an airport departures board, except every flight is leaving at once. Think Big, a public-affairs and strategic-communications firm founded in 2022, has a name that sounds expansive and a working habit that is almost comically severe: before work ships, the team makes a final pass devoted to removing things.
The firm calls it the subtraction pass. One message, not five. One ask, not three. The strongest proof point, not all of them. That little ritual explains more about Think Big than the usual catalogue of agency services. Yes, the company does polling, coalition building, crisis communications, websites, advertising, video and media buying. The interesting part is that those capabilities sit around one table, where a strategy can become an ad, meet real audience data and be revised before the moment disappears.
“One message, not five. One ask, not three. The strongest proof point, not every proof point.”Think Big's subtraction pass
The audience was tiny. The hesitation was enormous.
Consider the Georgia Promise Scholarship. The American Federation for Children Growth Fund needed to reach parents in the state's 50 lowest-performing school districts. Eligible families could receive $6,500 for alternatives such as private school. But eligibility did not equal enthusiasm. Moving a child is personal, the application window was short, and the addressable audience was narrow enough that two years of consecutive campaigning could easily become wallpaper.
Think Big did not search for a single miraculous ad. It constructed a sequence. Connected television and streaming placements created an initial audience. Search caught parents already looking for answers. Peer-to-peer text messages put the offer on the device most likely to be nearby. Website visitors, ad engagers and people who began but did not finish forms entered retargeting pools. Automated emails handled reminders and practical questions. The campaign behaved less like a megaphone than a set of stepping-stones.
The result was 7,926 leads, 65,466 clicks and more than 7.1 million impressions. Search click-through rates reached 7.9 to 9 percent. A texting round produced more than 6,700 unique clicks. Most revealingly, cost per lead fell 49 percent from 2024 to 2025. The total media bill is not the useful lesson here. The useful lesson is how the team treated each expense: as guilty until performance proved it innocent.
What failed first became an asset
Connected TV and over-the-top video were expensive. Once those channels had seeded a useful retargeting audience, Think Big moved money away from them and into more efficient platforms. Lower-performing creative was paused at the first signs of lag. Illustrations competed with photography. Urgency competed with reassurance. Nothing enjoyed tenure.
That is a subtle change of mind worth noticing. An agency can fall in love with the artifact it has made: the polished film, the handsome illustration, the clever line. Think Big's published method makes the artifact provisional. Its value is not how proudly it can be presented in a meeting; its value is whether the next person clicks, applies, joins or changes a view. A costly channel was not a mistake because it was later cut. It had completed a temporary assignment.
The campaign sequence
Seed: use broad video to create a relevant audience pool.
Catch: meet high-intent parents through search and text.
Nurture: retarget visitors and answer practical questions by email.
Prune: pause lagging creative and reallocate spend quickly.
Public affairs is the business of borrowed permission
Think Big's market sits between several familiar trades. A PR firm may shape reputation. A lobbyist may work a legislature. A creative shop makes the spot. A media agency buys its distribution. A research firm identifies the persuadable audience. Think Big attempts to collapse those handoffs. Its customers are companies, trade associations, coalitions and nonprofits whose plans depend on people outside the organization - regulators, elected officials, communities, workers, customers or parents.
The firm's own advisory language is unusually clear: almost everything a company wants to do at scale requires permission from people who do not work for it. That thought turns public affairs from vague networking into a design problem. Who can block the plan? Whom do they trust? What evidence gives them cover? What is the smallest useful action the audience can take?
The CALIBRATE campaign shows the larger version of the system. California's zero-emission vehicle rules called for 35 percent of new-car sales to be ZEVs by 2026 and 100 percent by 2035. Think Big commissioned opinion research, developed a consumer-facing identity, built a campaign hub, assembled more than 50 partners and ran targeted video and digital ads. The coalition reported that it reached its entire custom regulator audience across connected TV, social and programmatic channels, while Meta ad recall ran at three times the industry benchmark. Enforcement was paused in May 2025 amid federal action and broader pressure.
The coalition is not merely a distribution list. It is social proof assembled at institutional scale. A car dealer arguing about a car rule is predictable. Chambers of commerce, civil-justice advocates and other groups repeating a calibrated case make the issue harder to dismiss as one industry's complaint. Think Big's work is to build the outside case, then put it where decision-makers cannot comfortably ignore it.
A factory for urgent moments
Speed is the firm's most repeated sales claim, and its origin helps explain why. CEO and co-founder Lewis Muller spent years at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and consumer-intelligence company Resonate before managing Go BIG Media's public-affairs practice. That practice became Think Big. Founding partners Phillip Stutts and Dean Petrone brought the political-media lineage with it. The resulting company retained a campaign temperament: deadlines are real, an opponent does not wait, and a holiday weekend can be three usable days.
In one account, a lobbyist called during a three-day holiday weekend with a client late to a state legislative fight. The assignment required targeted ads featuring the people who would be affected. The scarce resource was not merely money; it was elapsed time. In-house editors, designers and strategists reduced the coordination tax. That is the firm's credible point of difference. Integration is not automatically better, but when a narrative must become footage, cutdowns, landing pages and paid placements in hours, every external handoff is a small customs checkpoint.
The company has since stretched beyond campaign execution. Strategic communications covers crisis response, executive positioning and reputation. Senior advisory practices, launched in 2026, focus on fights in which the identity of the messenger matters as much as the argument. The first practices address labor and national infrastructure, and national security and crisis preparedness. It is a move up the value chain - from producing persuasive material to helping decide who has standing to make the case.
The useful part to steal
Most readers will never run a statewide advocacy coalition. The method still travels. Start with the decision, not the content. Give every channel a job with an expiration condition. Let broad media create a pool, let intent channels harvest it, and let follow-up systems answer friction. Test distinct ideas rather than microscopic variations. Then schedule subtraction as a formal stage, because optional editing is the first thing urgency deletes.
A five-line brief worth copying
- Name the one audience whose action changes the outcome.
- Write one message, one ask and one decisive proof point.
- Assign each channel a temporary, measurable job.
- Pause weak creative before sentiment turns into sunk cost.
- Remove anything that makes the next action harder to see.
There are boundaries. This approach works when an audience can be identified, a behavior can be measured and the campaign has enough traffic to distinguish signal from noise. It is weaker where legitimacy requires slow trust-building, the audience is too small for meaningful testing, or the outcome is controlled by one opaque decision-maker. Speed can compress coordination; it cannot manufacture consent. Retargeting can remind a hesitant parent; it cannot repair a bad policy or an untrustworthy sponsor.
Still, there is something pleasing about a company named Think Big making its best argument for less. Public affairs is full of incentives to add: another stakeholder, another claim, another channel, another logo across the bottom. Think Big's sharper contribution is to separate breadth of capability from clutter of message. The operation can be large. The thing a person has to remember should be small.