Post after post, LinkedIn experts are declaring the agency model “cooked.”
Between AI, in-housing, off-shoring and budget pressures, the consensus there is that agencies are legacy baggage.
As someone who has moved from brand-side at Google to the agency side, I have a different take. Agencies aren’t dead, but they are in an identity crisis.
And frankly? Most clients don’t get the value they could get from what they’re actually paying.
Let’s get the obvious out of the way.
It’s not all about high-level, long-term impact. Agencies will always serve as a way to balance workload, access talent, or deliver on defined projects.
Let’s get the other obvious out of the way.
On a technical level, there is also very little that an agency does that a smart internal team can’t learn to do today.
Marketing teams can prompt, pull, and execute just as well as many agencies.
Talent, skills or even taste are no longer an agency monopoly.
So why is it that the results brand teams and agency teams get to can feel so different?
Where the Agency-Client dynamic delivers more
- Incentives Rule agency teams are rewarded for fresh perspectives; they risk losing the account if they don’t deliver something the client couldn’t conceive.Internal teams, however, often report to leadership entangled in politics, with limited prior agency experience. Their incentive is to hedge bets and produce what they assume will please the CMO, not to be “out there.”Internally, bringing a proposal as “coming from the agency” is safer to do than bringing it in your own name. In an anxious period, this matters even more.
- You’re not a civilian anymore running a brand is a superpower and a curse. You can breathe and feel it intuitively, yet soak in internal discourse and corporate priorities in the process. Sheltered agency teams shock your system, preventing campaigns from smelling like your own org chart.
- Ageny talent is a lot Different people look for different cultures.Managing the kind of creative, strategic, or production talent who choose the agency life requires a different approach to motivation, inspiration and management than most corporate entities can provide.
How to Fix the Relationship
If you want more than a vendor, it’s worth questioning how your approach meets those 3 challenges:
- Is your senior engagement coming too late?
Magic dies when leadership approves a brief and then vanishes. One Q&A at the start, or regular and informal check-ins, set a tone of confidence that bigger budgets can’t buy – and get you more from your partner than a rigid response to a brief perceived by your teams and your agencies to be set in stone.
- Do you understand your partners’ economics and how they protect your value?
If you treat partners as replaceable costs, they become short-termist and stop investing in your growth. Consider automating low-value work, limiting agency input to critical work (or high-pressure runs). In doing so, it’s worth questioning whether your account’s team is sustainably funded to provide creative and strategic consistency over time. With the drop in production budgets and long-term prospects, they likely aren’t.
- Are you using trust as a strategy?
I have always found radical transparency to drive respect, better responses, and sharper ways to sell them in. While many feel safer keeping things to themselves, I have always found it pays more to share your real constraints (budgets included) and challenges. A partner showing you that trust is rare enough to be worth investing in. And trust me, you want to be invested in.
In the end, you get the agencies you deserve
Scale and production capacity are now ambient.
The heavy, costly network agency model may well be cooked.
But eventually, the job to be done remains the same, and what drives value in the agency-client relationship holds true.
My advice to you?
Be very picky.
Find the teams that bother to learn your business, not just your next campaign. Commit to them, visibly. Make them feel safe, invested, and respected.
Get back value that one-off briefs can’t cover.
And win.
Martin de Fleurian – House of Greenland founder
Martin de Fleurian is a creative leader operating at the intersection of platform scaling and agile strategy.
After managing major marketing portfolios at Google UK, the French native founded House of Greenland over a decade ago and has since scaled the agency into a trusted strategic partner for top-tier global brands.
With a sharp focus on business transformation, Martin approaches creativity not just as an execution, but as a powerful mechanism for solving complex business challenges beyond the constraints of traditional campaigns.
