Is Your Agency the Problem?

In the marketing world, it’s a company that provides marketing, branding, and/or design products. Consulting companies are similar but, instead of delivering products, they provide services.

An agency should be an extension of a company. It should start with the goals of its client and then act as a branch of that company to provide products that support those goals. The big question is: Does this approach make sense anymore?

The Fundamental Problems with Agency Structure
Agencies, in their truest forms, have a certain structure. This structure lends itself to an adversarial relationship with the client. How is that? Most agencies purport a “partner” model with their clients, but, behind closed doors, there is a very different scenario. The client is set up as an “account” to be managed, rather than a “relationship” to be nurtured. More and more revenue must be extracted from the client.

Since an agency is strictly execution-focused and narrowly competent, it’s in the agency’s best interest to continually sell, as much as possible, whatever it is that the agency offers. It is this approach that leads to the agency looking out for its own interests at the expense of its clients’ interests—literally and figuratively.

What Can Be Done?
It is almost always a mistake for an agency to specialize in a particular execution media (e.g. Web, print, etc.) if they want to be seen as anything more than a marketing product factory. The more execution-focused they are, the more they will tend to recommend bad solutions to their clients, if only because they need to generate some work product in a particular area. Agencies need to develop a better grasp of strategy and a broader base of execution that prevents a bias towards any particular media.

Will agencies ever be obsolete? No. They just need to change to stay relevant.