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.

After the P&G team bought an initial campaign idea, the agency returned the next day to argue against it, believing a different, riskier concept was stronger. This demonstrates the profound conviction required from creative partners to achieve breakthrough work.

The primary barrier to properly valuing creativity in advertising is the industry's reliance on a service-based, billable-hour model. This is a fundamental flaw that prevents creative work from being valued on its impact and outcome, unlike in the tech industry.

An agency's stability is determined by how difficult it is for clients to leave. High-stakes services like accounting create sticky relationships and are great businesses. Volatile, project-based creative work suffers from a feast-or-famine cycle because clients can switch providers with little friction.

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.

Many large agencies are not truly consumer-centric. Their business model incentivizes focusing on winning industry awards (like Cannes Lions), pleasing internal stakeholders, and navigating corporate politics. This creates a fundamental disconnect from where consumer attention actually is, leading to ineffective marketing spend.

A creative director explains his failure at an agency where account directors were incentivized solely on account profitability. His high billable rate meant they actively prevented him from working on their accounts to protect their margins, making it impossible for him to do his job.

The traditional client service model is flawed because it forces ambitious creatives to seek approval from clients who often have lower creative standards and care less about the outcome. This dynamic inherently limits the potential of the work.