-
Why do Advertising Agencies Suck?
-
They don’t ever have any real knowledge of the industry (any industry), they don’t pay attention to what you tell them because they’re usually using someone “playbook” that tells them what to do, and if it’s a bigger agency they think they know it all because they have a couple meaningless inside awards.
-
My company has worked with a bunch of agencies and really the issue is that they, no matter how much they try to convince you otherwise, don’t know/understand enough about your business, consumer psychology, or how to execute anything outside of their basic templates to make any real difference to revenue or sales targets.
All agencies I’ve worked with have gotten so caught up in vanity or irrelevant metrics to make it seem like they’re doing a good job, so that you don’t push back on things like why aren’t our orders increasing.
I’ve got about 8 years digital marketing experience, all client side, and when I finally convinced the board to bring this in house again we saw an increase in sales of up to 200% some months – same budgets, and only one me vs a team at an agency. -
Letting the amount of attention, care, and creativity decline will lead clients to believe that they aren’t as important as they were before, which will lead to discontent with the product they are paying for, and eventually they will move to another agency.
-
Agencies have a lot of problems [I work in one] but clients also don’t understand basic things such as landing page conversions or product market fit.
Clients still believe that
“my eshop doesn’t sell so I will go to the best agency and they will solve that problem for me”
And of course. sales people exploit that to the fullest.
​
Ps I have built accounts to 60 ROAS but also handled accounts that couldn’t get a simple sale. : )
-
The myth about agencies is that there is a full team working on your account, when usually it’s actually just 1 person who if you hired in house could do a lot more for you, but you’re too cheap for that.
-
I personally like the big names like Dexmedia, Thrive, etc.. they bring me a lot of business by screwing up so many of their clients accounts.
You wouldn’t believe the astronomical CPAs, they are completely unacceptable, I would fire one of my guys if they produced the results they do.
-
I was running paid ads (Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, insta) for around twenty clients while also writing some content and all of the ads.
I had one person under me and ended up getting a demotion because every time is try and talk about any issues it was my fault because I wasn’t managing expectations.
Well, it’s kinda hard to do that when the owner is over promising everything and telling them ridiculous turn around times. I ended up making more as an hourly employee because I was only working a forty hour work week.
Also, he refused to pay for anything so everything was done by hand.
-
After working in an agency for years and knowing lots of people who have worked in big and small agencies:
*Too many clients, too little time
*Large agencies are great at attracting new clients but the time the agency spends on them could be questionable
*agency doesn’t understand product/services well enough. This is a two-way thing, the agency must put in the effort but the client should be collaborative and be prepared to educate the agency
*unrealistic expectations from client. Could be the fault of both sides, sales team massaged the truth or the client doesn’t really understand the channels and bases their expectations off Chris in accounts who’s brother had an agency get a CPA of XYZ
*Client doesn’t have a specific goal, whether it be CPA or lead numbers. Hard for the agency to perform without this. Agency should push to get some goals agreed though
*Clients who shout the loudest tend to get the most work done on them
*If someone working on the account isn’t naturally engaged with your product or service, they may not pay as much attention to the account. Shouldn’t happen but does
*Client is a nightmare even though results are good. Normally due to unrealstic expectations, sometimes no reasoning with such people, best to go separate ways with the agency
*Client puts all their hopes on one channel or the activity an agency is doing and doesn’t work on things like CRO, CRM, other channels, in order to support paid strategy. Again goes back to the agency setting expectations
*Not a good collaboration between agency and client. Agency needs to not just optimise base off higher funnel metrics but dig into the client data to optimise more effectively. Client needs to be prepared to work with the agency and get the data to help them
​
Not all ‘why an agency’ is bad points but from my experience over the years. I do think sometimes the client would get better results in-house if its a complicated product or funnel but its like anything, you could have a great person in the agency working on your account or a shit person in-house and vise versa
​
I’ve also find that the more transparent agencies who don’t promise things but can provide a sound strategy can find it harder to get new clients, which is sad, as no one can guarantee any results
-
I’m also the CEO of an agency and have also been a VP on the client side for 5 years before at a large e-commerce outfit so I can see both sides of the coin.
I see a lot of great feedback about why agencies suck. Here’s a few about the times they are awesome (which is admittedly not a lot of the time):
a) Super deep product knowledge – I know a lot about SEO but when I hired an actual rockstar SEO firm filled with great SEOs their knowledge was faster/better than mine by miles
b) Working on core strengths – previously my in-house team had core strengths in paid marketing but not in things like affiliate mgmt. It was easier to outsource that to an agency than to try to train/hire in-house
c) Avoidance of “blind leading the blind” – if I’m weak at a certain arena, I’m not going to be able to effectively lead in that arena if I also had to manage 20 direct reports on a day to day basis
d) Third party eyeballs can keep you honest. There are can be “groupthink” in-house and sometimes it was helpful to have fresh eyes looking at the accounts
-
1. Culture – A lot of agencies are owned by shit attitude owners with no class or desire to deliver genuine value. They’re in the business of churn and burn. Which is also an uncomfortable situation for employees who are also churning and burning as they are the front liners that are unprepared and not supported to support clients.
2. Expertise – Runaway from an agency that claims to do everything. Jack of all trades and masters of none. They only care about maximizing the revenue from each client and do not have the expertise to deliver. They are either outsourcing to people overseas or white-labeling from another agency.
3. Communication – this is the breakdown of all relationships and this isn’t always just on the agency’s end. If expectations are not communicated well, it will fail from day one. If clients do not communicate sufficient and with quality and context, it will fail. An agency should not be a place that just executes marketing. They should onboard the problems and have a strong level of communication between the two parties.
Often an agency will report that the Leads are great, CPL is great. But client will say that they’re all junk leads. Agency will default and say it’s a sales team problem and not get involved because they did their part. Churn and burn.I run my own marketing agency [Kaliber.asia](https://Kaliber.asia) on the back of working at Dentsu, Publicis, some medium sized agencies and working at Google servicing the top agencies in the US East as well as small agencies across Australia & New Zealand. For the last 8 years, i’ve been able to understand what makes a good agency and what are the characteristics of bad ones. Feel free to ask me any questions on this topic
Log in to reply.