Agencies often pitch exciting, ambitious "North Star" campaigns that get one department excited. However, these ideas frequently fail because the client's internal teams (e.g., digital, PR, comms) are siloed and not aligned. The agency sells a vision that other departments ultimately block, leading to an inability to deliver.

Brands often separate trade marketing and retail media budgets, creating strategic gaps. This mirrors the early days of programmatic advertising, where direct sales and automated ad teams were siloed. The solution requires a holistic approach to workflows and relationships, not just reallocating funds between competing P&Ls.

Marketers obsess over maintaining a cohesive 'matching luggage' brand across channels. However, this focus is misplaced if the underlying creative was never validated by real data. The priority should be testing ideas with organic content before scaling them, regardless of cross-channel strategy.

A brand's biggest vulnerability is often the internal failure to execute a central strategy consistently across local dealers or franchisees. Brilliant campaigns get diluted or 'bastardized' when adapted by non-creatives at the frontline, wasting resources and creating inconsistent customer experiences.

The modern marketing flywheel requires testing creative organically, then amplifying winners with paid media. An agency that only handles one part of this process cannot be fully accountable for results. To prove ROI, agencies must offer both creative development and media buying as an integrated service.

Agencies are optimized for efficiency, stifling the creative experimentation needed for platforms like Meta. Top-performing brands employ an in-house strategist whose sole job is generating a high volume of diverse, "wacky" ad concepts—a function that can't be effectively outsourced.

Don't blame the agency for underperforming creative. The root cause is often internal: outdated processes and organizational issues that "roll downhill." The creative is merely the most visible scapegoat for a deeper, strategic or operational failure.

Marketing teams often mistake demand programs for campaign strategy. A true campaign strategy is a higher-level "canvas" that orchestrates all efforts—reputation, demand creation, and enablement—against a specific audience, ensuring a consistent customer experience rather than disjointed tactical execution.

Paying an agency just to brainstorm ideas in slide decks is inefficient and disconnected from modern marketing needs. To be effective, agencies must integrate creative ideation with in-house production capabilities to execute at the volume and speed required by digital channels.