Why Agencies Make Companies Worse

I’ve spent a lot of my career working with agencies.

Some were good. Some were not. I’ve worked with talented agency people, and I’ve seen agencies produce great work.

But I’ve come to believe something that is probably unpopular in marketing:

For too many companies, agencies actually make the organization worse at marketing.

The problem isn't that agencies don't know marketing. The problem is what happens inside your company when you outsource the work that actually creates the expertise.

You stop learning the craft.

And over time, that becomes a competitive disadvantage.

You Rarely Get the A-Players

Here is one of the realities of the agency model.

You hire the agency because of the people who pitch you. They understand the platforms. They speak intelligently about your business. They show you case studies and tell you what they are going to unlock.

Then the contract gets signed.

And the people actually working in your accounts are often relatively junior, managing multiple clients at the same time.

That's not necessarily a criticism of those people. It's the economics of the model.

An agency needs leverage. Senior talent is expensive. Accounts have to be staffed in a way that makes the agency profitable. Your account manager has other clients, other meetings, other reports, and other priorities.

Meanwhile, you have one business.

No one is going to obsess about your business the way you will.

That difference matters more than most companies realize.

The Platforms Have Made Mediocrity Easier

There was a time when operating digital campaigns required a significant amount of technical knowledge just to get them running.

That barrier is disappearing.

Google, Meta, and the other platforms increasingly tell marketers exactly what they should do. Recommendations are everywhere. Turn this feature on. Expand this audience. Increase this budget. Automate this campaign. Let the algorithm find more customers.

Click here to improve your optimization score.

It has never been easier for an account manager to walk into a client meeting with a platform recommendation and make it sound like strategy.

"Google recommends we activate this."

Great. But does it actually improve the economics of your business?

I've found plenty of those recommendations don't.

Google Performance Max, anyone?

There is a reason the platforms continue making automated features easier to adopt and, in some cases, harder to avoid. The platform has its own objectives. Those objectives may overlap with yours, but they are not the same.

The platform wants you to spend money efficiently enough that you continue spending money.

You want to build a profitable business.

Those are different optimization problems.

That means somebody on your side needs to understand the machinery well enough to know the difference.

You Have to Know Where Performance Can Bleed

Great digital marketing happens in the details.

Campaign structure matters. Attribution matters. Pixels matter. Conversion definitions matter. Landing pages matter. Match types matter. Audiences matter. Creative matters. Tracking matters. Budget allocation matters.

A seemingly insignificant configuration change can quietly bleed performance for weeks.

You aren't going to understand that from a change log.

You aren't going to understand it from a weekly agency call where someone walks through a deck of KPIs.

You need people inside the business who know how the machine actually works.

They should be able to get into the account and understand what they're looking at. They should know what changed, why it changed, what they expected to happen, and whether the data supports the decision.

That knowledge compounds.

Outsource it and the learning compounds somewhere else.

The Agency Manager Might Be the Worst Version of This

I've seen another model frequently, particularly in financial services companies around Delaware.

The company hires internal channel managers whose primary responsibility is managing agencies.

On paper, this seems sensible.

You have someone internally setting strategy and holding the agency accountable while the specialists handle execution.

In practice, I think this can be the worst of both worlds.

The internal marketer learns how to manage the agency instead of learning how to do the work.

They know how to run the weekly call. They know how to review the report. They know how to ask why CPA increased.

But can they install the pixel?

Can they create the custom conversion?

Can they diagnose why attribution suddenly changed?

Can they open the account and identify something that doesn't look right?

Can they rebuild the campaign themselves?

If the answer is no, you're building management layers around expertise your company doesn't actually own.

That's dangerous.

Roll Up Your Sleeves

If you really want to become dangerous as a marketer, learn the craft.

That's what I did at Nitro.

There wasn't some grand plan behind it. It was grit and learning.

I got into the platforms. I figured things out. I made decisions. Some worked. Some didn't. I experienced the wins, the losses, and everything in between.

And every cycle taught me something.

Eventually, something interesting happened.

I could bridge conversations that normally happened separately.

I could talk about the business strategy and then get technical. I could understand the executive conversation and the execution conversation. I could challenge an assumption because I understood what was actually happening underneath it.

Years later, even after I hadn't personally touched certain accounts for a long time, people were sometimes surprised by how quickly I could get into the details and understand what was happening.

I wasn't.

Once you've actually learned the craft, you recognize the patterns.

That experience made me a much better marketer.

I'd Rather Bet on the Hungry Kid

If I were building a marketing organization today, I would make a different bet.

Find the data-hungry, curious, go-getter college student who desperately wants to break into digital marketing.

Give them access.

Teach them the discipline.

Teach them the art.

Show them how to read the data, but also how to question it. Teach them how the platforms work. Let them build campaigns. Let them break things in controlled environments. Make them explain why they made a change before they make it.

Teach them that the recommendation coming from Google isn't automatically the recommendation that's right for the business.

Give them real responsibility and surround them with experienced people who can accelerate their judgment.

Then invest in them.

Will they make mistakes?

Absolutely.

So did I.

That's part of how you develop expertise.

I'd rather have someone early in their career spending hours obsessing over my business, learning from every campaign and accumulating institutional knowledge than rent a fraction of someone else's attention.

The Best Agency People Eventually Figure It Out

There is another uncomfortable reality about agencies.

The truly exceptional people often figure out that they're exceptional.

And many of them eventually leave.

They go in-house. They start their own firm. They consult independently. They build something.

Which creates a structural problem for the agency model: retaining genuinely exceptional talent is hard.

The agency may have a great brand and a great methodology, but ultimately your performance depends on the actual human beings inside your account.

When that great person leaves, the expertise leaves with them.

When you build internally, the expertise becomes part of the organization.

Building In-House Is Hard

None of this means building an internal team is easy.

It's hard.

Finding talent is hard. Training people is hard. Creating processes is hard. Keeping up with platforms is hard. Building enough redundancy so the organization isn't dependent on one person is hard.

Agencies exist because they solve real problems.

There will also always be situations where outside specialists make sense. Sometimes you need expertise you don't have. Sometimes you need additional capacity. Sometimes an outside perspective is exactly what the organization needs.

But there is a difference between using outside expertise and outsourcing your ability to understand how growth actually works.

I wouldn't outsource the latter.

Because when you build that capability internally, something much bigger happens.

Your campaigns get better, but so do your marketers.

They understand data differently. They ask better questions. They communicate better with engineers and analytics teams. They understand how strategy translates into execution. They recognize problems earlier because they've seen them before.

Eventually, marketing stops being something the company manages through a vendor.

It becomes something the company knows how to do.

Building that talent pool is hard. But hard things are often where the competitive advantage comes from.

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