18/06/2026
The agency pitch is always impressive.
Senior people in the room. Sharp thinking. A deck that makes the problem feel solvable and the solution feel sophisticated. You sign the contract feeling like you’ve made a good decision.
Then the account gets handed to the junior team. The senior strategist who sold you the work appears quarterly. The day-to-day is managed by someone two years into their career who is also running four other accounts and has approximately forty-five minutes a week to think about yours.
This isn’t cynicism. It’s the business model.
Agencies make money by selling senior thinking and delivering junior ex*****on at scale. The margin lives in the gap between those two things. The client pays for what’s in the room at the pitch and gets what’s economical to produce at delivery.
And when results are mediocre the answer is always more time, more budget, or both.
The problem isn’t the people. Some of the sharpest marketers I know work in agencies. The problem is the structure — a model designed to bill complexity rather than deliver clarity, that has been sold so successfully for so long that most businesses have accepted it as just how marketing works.
It isn’t. It’s just how agencies work.
One person who understands your business deeply, thinks strategically, and is close enough to the work to make good decisions quickly — is worth more than a team of specialists who’ve never met each other’s work and report to an account manager who reports to a director who hasn’t looked at your brand in three months.
Full piece is live on WYND — link in bio.
