Where Did It All Go Wrong For Agencies?

13 July 2026

These are not happy times for agencies, or indeed for the ad industry as a whole. Wherever you look you fall over issues: agencies not trusted, META et al offering to handle all activities, in-housing on the rise, creative slop, fraud (both consumer and advertiser), local CEOs being thrown in prison. It’s hardly a laugh a minute in adland at the moment.

It may be useful to look back at the mistakes of the past in the hope that at least we might avoid them in the future.

You’ll note that I think there is a future. Not everyone agrees, but let’s assume for the purposes of this that I’m right and we at least have a chance.

When media agencies (or media independents as they were then called) emerged from the old full-service agencies the pitch was simple. First, reduce overheads (no flash offices) so we can keep our fees low. Second, focus entirely on trading, a single-mindedness that leads to cheaper media that can be audited. Planning can always stay with the creative agency. Third (related to the second) this is all we’ve got; we have to be good to survive.  

This was a genius sell; and of course advertisers lapped it up.

But life’s never simple. Separating planning from trading made no sense. It also made little sense to separate planning from creative but it was a matter of the lesser of two evils. So in by far the majority of cases planning moved. With planning came a new layer of service for the new media agencies; and with too many sellers and not enough buyers the battle was on to keep prices (fees and media costs) low.

Mistake number one: don’t add services for free.

It’s not that agencies didn’t try charging for planning, it’s just they weren’t great at explaining the client benefits. Easier to keep fees low and make money from vendors.

Mistake number two: don’t make money from anyone except clients, unless of course the client agrees. Eventually you’ll get found out and it will all get messy.

Then there was the matter of media research. This had always been a Cinderella discipline within full-service agencies. It was where I started my career, so I speak from personal experience when I say that nobody outside the magic circle of specialists was terribly interested. Everyone knew that measuring audiences was important, after all we had to trade on something, it was the ‘how’ that was to so many so very tedious.

Further, clients really didn’t care about the how (‘I leave all that to my agency’), and the agencies saw no reason to try to convince them. Could they charge for it? Could they make the case? No, and no.

Mistake number three: if you want to be serious about any business you need to understand how every aspect of it works. Otherwise, how are you to know when certain actors start to break the conventions? How to assess the consequences before it’s too late?

Finally, just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it’s right. It’s easy to confuse effectiveness with efficiency, especially when you have a ready-made metric to evaluate one, and the other is oh-so-complicated.

Mistake number four: don’t give the client what he thinks he wants, give him what your experience and expertise tell you he needs.

I believe agencies are well-placed to provide clients with the advice they need.

I agree with Goodstuff’s Simeon Adams when he argues in The Media Leader: “We experiment across dozens of categories, channels and audiences. We see hundreds of marketing problems every year. We build technology, test new workflows, learn quickly and transfer that knowledge from one client to another. That accumulated experience is precisely why agencies remain valuable.”

I would go further. What clients want is successful brands; the most successful brands have something valuable: fame. With fame comes irrational loyalty, premium pricing, a buffer against adversity. These things can be built in many ways, including outstanding customer service, a consumer interface that works smoothly, a product that delivers consistently, and, yes great advertising.

Great advertising as I hope (but sometimes doubt) we all know comes from rigour, from questioning everything, from looking at the problem from every direction, from collaboration between specialists, from open-mindedness.

The process is helped immeasurably by AI but process is one thing, creative genius focussed on solving problems is something else.

In 1982, John Hegarty saw ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’ (it was an old ad slogan from the 1970s, long discarded) on a faded poster on the wall of an Audi factory.

Today I suppose he might have come across it via LLMs and AI, but that misses the point. He was a creative guy in an Audi factory, interrogating the product. I imagine he was meeting engineers, technicians, the people who made the thing he was charged with promoting. He was asking questions, he was exploring avenues.

I have no idea if anyone has ever worked out what Vorsprung durch Technik has been worth to that brand, but I do know that selling the worth of what we do is something we’ve been hopeless at over the years.

With the huge number of SME’s operating without any understanding of marketing, and without any agency relationship the opportunity for agencies is colossal.

Don’t let’s mess it up. Again.