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Why do Advertising Agencies Suck?
Posted by on February 16, 2021 at 12:54 amNo offense to the Advertising Agencies out there. I am CEO of one. And I invite people to vent their frustrations about Advertising/Marketing Agencies.
I have read many posts in this subreddit of those expressing frustration but I want specifics. Tell me what sucks and what would be AWESOME.
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25 Replies
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Advertising Agencies don’t hire or understand social scientists enough. They don’t invest in user research. They don’t understand audiences and their incentive structures ensure they lean into “churn and burn” client tactics.
No offence, but they suck because they are run (mostly) by greedy people with no vested interest in the success of their clients. Their clients (for the most part) sell pointless trash that would be better left unsold.
Good products tend to sell themselves.
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from the limited input i can give ( only 23 and been in an agency for 6 months) it seems like simply being a matter of having a bunch of clients and not enough time to really dig in to something.
I know personally, i would love to have 40 hours a month with a client but it just isn’t feasible
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This is your sem specialist Tom. Three months later, this is your sem specialist carol.
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I’ve hired three before. The biggest reason they sucked? I hired them to run & test. They just look at the account maybe 2 times a week and don’t do nothing.
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Ad agencies work with businesses who want to make money. In PPC you can’t really create demand, so when there are natural fluctuations in the market agencies are blamed despite a potentially perfect strategy. To mitigate this they make longer contracts with less leeway for customers to come and go. I think those are some of the main problems. Oh and like someone else said too many accounts per manager to do ones due diligence. Makes much more sense to do internally or hire a consultant who works diligently on your account if you require a more dynamic strategy.
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One size fits all approach.
Propensity to ignore what’s worked in the past.
Assuming that because they are approached by the client that means nothing is working.
Audits are overly simplistic. (Start charging for actual analysis)
Creative is often one dimensional focusing on thumbstops or CTAs rather than product differentiation or audience alignment.
Over-reliance on best practices.
As another user mentioned a lack of focus on individual clients
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Your post history references owning an IT shop. IT / PPC / performance agencies are very different than ad agencies. If you’re looking for feedback on the latter (such as those owned by the 5 big holdco’s) head over to r/advertising where there are far more agency folk.
If you’re looking for issues why performance and PPC folks/independent agencies hate ad agencies, you’ll find most people here will likely cite:
– Misaligned agency / client comp
– Lack of deep skills in PPC / ad tech and/or with high turnover (which is true for some big agencies and not true for others)
– capabilities gaps – but these are going to be skewed based on whatever capabilities the respondent has vs what they perceive agencies not havingFact is: most holdco agencies have challenges around employee compensation & development(hence higher turnover & higher burn out), are focused on specific areas where they can scale (so intentionally won’t staff certain skills or roles — since only way to profit on that is to ensure it is in high utilization) and yes — many have challenges with compensation between agency & client but often that stems from procurement-led agency searches, global assignments or legacy. That doesn’t make them suck — usually what makes an agency suck is the clients, leadership, culture or a combination thereof.
Source: 30 years agency, mostly leadership roles, mostly holdco.
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I think there’s two sides to this – companies having unrealistic expectations of what paid marketing can achieve, as well as agencies over-promising and under-delivering.
In the last couple years I’ve worked on both sides of the fence. Unless you have an agency that is fully integrated, and has input on things like landing pages etc, the agency can only do so much to drive growth.
On the company side – a company I’m working for now hasn’t found product market fit, for an overpriced product. I initially ran the paid marketing and even with complete control of landing pages and add to cart behaviour, could only get so far with it. Now that paid marketing has been outsourced to an agency, surprise surprise, they’re really struggling with the accounts too.
A refusal to admit the product is shit means the company will always lay blame with the agencies because they couldn’t scale growth well enough.
On the agency side – a combination of having to compete on price and too many clients means people managing accounts are never going to dedicate enough time to each account to fully maximise performance. Add to that agencies having no emotional buy-in to the product or service, there’s no incentive to go above and beyond.
I’m speaking in very general terms obviously, but that’s been largely my experience so far.
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When they don’t actually provide any insights. I can log into the platform and see CPC’s are down or up XX%, what I’m paying for is understanding why they’ve changed and what I should do about it. It’s crazy I need to spell it out to them most of the time
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I think it’s because most clients can’t tell the difference between a great job and a lacklustre one. So there isn’t much motivation to do a great job. The winners are mostly the companies with the great salespeople as opposed to thorough account management.
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From what I’ve seen in my career, agencies care about making themselves money than they do their clients.
If only they realised that if they focus on making their clients money, money for themselves follows.
I recently left a head of digital role at an agency, and I’ve gone to a head of digital role in house. Previously an external agency had been running our PPC. I’ve been absolutely horrified at what I found; $550+ CPA, dodgy contracts & management fees, 0 reporting, 0 actual active campaign management, refusal to provide access to accounts, I could go on.
And this was from an agency that our COO said had come highly recommended, and their website suggests they work with the biggest blue chip companies in the country.
I ended their services, turned off all of the channels, and created a fresh account with on one single channel, using a small budget in a hastily put together campaign, and by the 15th of this month we had beaten their January results across all channels by 20% using less than 1/5th of the budget.
The mind boggles.
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It’s the business model for ppc (and marketing) agencies. The larger you want to become, the more you have to grow on volume. You sacrifice service for the sake of volume. Who cares if you lose one client if you have a distribution system that can generate 3 new ones. Quality service alone will not help with growth.
Does McDonald’s sell the best burger? Definitely not. But they’re the largest burger chain because they have a distribution system.
Lots of McAgencies out there.
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Lots of reasons obviously, but there’s a big one nobody talks about. It’s a broken feedback loop that breeds incompetence. If you look at some of the best affiliate marketers out there, they crush it. If they don’t make numbers work today, they don’t eat tomorrow. Makes sense.
If I’m an average Joe at an average (small) agency with average (small) clients, I’m so pulled every which way, that it’s going to take at least a couple of months to notice the numbers. But that’s ok, because it’s going to take the client a few more months to notice them, then we’re going to unsuccessfully test some ideas for a few months. Then a few months later, maybe the agency gets canned. But everyone blames the client and we all go back to work on all the other projects, just slightly less sure about our job security.
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My biggest issue with ad agencies is when they do not allocate enough resources to do the job properly. Usually this results in surface level analysis that doesn’t add anything meaningful, or just blindly executing without taking any time to think through what they’re doing, or check out the customer experience.
Things like a mistyped UTM parameter breaking the caching rules and resulting in a 404 page, or turning on promotion copy without checking to make sure the site has been updated, or not expiring ads at the right time are fairly common.
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this is true, my limited experience is in a smaller agency where I touch ~15 clients a week. With that, you never can go deep enough.
For those larger accounts where someone can be on one account, I have no experience so I can’t really comment on that. But you are completely correct
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