Marketing agencies have long been a CMO’s best friend. In exchange for some (usually personal) perks, the CMO would fork over a percentage of their company’s budget to a firm that would essentially outsource much of the CMO’s responsibilities.
Sometimes using an agency made sense. If a company needed fractional help – with building an app or designing collateral – an agency would give the company an expensive way to scale up hourly work without needing to hire employees. That goes double if the company culture didn’t exist to hire this kinds of talent anyway. Of course using an agency means paying a significant premium over that contractor’s true hourly rate, and a responsible CEO should ask if the CMO is too lazy to source and manage independent contractors themselves. But for the sake of argument let’s pretend the CMO is doing such important things that their time is better spent elsewhere.
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