Why marketing agencies don't seem to work (for you)

He came to that meeting expecting me to point at one of the two invoices. It would have been easy, and it would have been wrong.

Nobody wrote down what success meant

The Facebook campaign and the Google campaign were running in the same month, in the same market, funded from the same account, and the two people running them had never spoken. Neither knew what the other was bidding on. Neither knew what the other had promised.

That is not sabotage. It is what happens by default. A supplier hired to run paid social will run paid social well, because that is the brief and that is the only thing it can be held to. So it optimises reach and cost per click, because those are the levers it owns, and it reports reach and cost per click, because those are the numbers it controls. The search supplier does the same with impression share and cost per conversion. Both reports are true. Both are also silent on the only question the owner cared about, which was whether the phone rang and who was on the other end of it.

Then there is everything neither supplier was hired to touch. His website scored badly enough on a technical audit that the traffic both campaigns were buying was landing somewhere that leaked.

The message had the same problem. Every ad, every headline, every line on the site was pitched at anyone with a home loan, which is a market of roughly everybody and therefore a market of nobody. His actual best clients were property investors. Repeat borrowers, larger books, more complex structures, and far more inclined to refer someone like themselves. Nothing he was paying to publish said so, because nobody had told the suppliers that this was the client worth having.

No one defined success, so everyone optimised what they owned.

What each supplier can see, and what it cannot

It helps to be specific about the blindness, because it is structural rather than dishonest. Every row below describes a supplier doing exactly what it was engaged to do.

That last row is the whole problem. The owner is the only person in the arrangement who can see the money, and the only person with no instrument for attributing it.

Which is also why the fight everyone wants to have, about which channel deserves the credit, is the wrong fight. Nobody buys a mortgage from one post. They search, they read, they come back a fortnight later, they see something on social, they follow, they ask a friend who bought a house last year, they meet you at an industry night, and then they decide. It is a dozen touches or more. You will never isolate the one that did it, because there wasn't one. So a supplier who insists their channel drove the result and a supplier who insists it didn't are both making an argument that cannot be settled, and the owner pays for the disagreement.

I should be clear that I am not against agencies, and I am not writing this to sell a replacement for one. A good deal of my value, when I am useful at all, is improving the relationship between a client and the agency they already have. The failure runs in both directions. Clients frequently cannot brief a supplier properly, cannot supply the brand assets the work needs, cannot free up the founder for the hour of input that would make the campaign specific rather than generic, and then judge the output that comes back. Garbage in, garbage out. Sitting between the two parties fixes more than replacing either of them.

And since this is the paragraph where I start pointing at buyers, I should point at myself. I have started engagements without an agreed definition of success. A client is keen, the diary is short, everyone wants to get moving, and the question of what we would all agree counted as working gets deferred to the next meeting, then the one after. Every consultant who has let that happen, and I have, owns a share of the outcome this piece describes. Measure twice, cut once is easy advice to publish and harder to obey when someone is ready to sign.

What an agency costs, and the number nobody can source

Before the test, the money. Part of it I can give you. Part of it nobody can.

The one I can give you is vendor-published and should be read as such. WME Group, an Australian agency publishing its own figures in 2026, puts the realistic range for Australian small and medium businesses at $3,500 to $10,000 per month, inside a market that spans roughly $800 per month for a narrow local campaign to $80,000 or more at enterprise scale. Lucky Boy Agency, a Melbourne agency also publishing its own figures in 2026, puts the Melbourne entry bracket at $1,500 to $3,500 per month for freelance social and content. Both numbers come from businesses that sell the thing being priced. There is no independent Australian survey to check them against, so treat them as a shape rather than a benchmark, and note that they overlap rather than agree.

The one I cannot give you is lock-in. No credible Australian survey of agency contract terms, notice periods, client churn or average tenure exists. I went looking for it, because the piece would be stronger with it, and every figure in circulation traces back to a supplier describing its own contract or a commentator repeating one. So when someone tells you twelve months is standard, or that three months' notice is what the industry does, that is their preference, not a norm. It may still be reasonable. It is simply not evidence, and you are entitled to negotiate it like any other clause.

The useful question is not how long the term is. It is what happens at the review point if the thing you were both expecting does not happen.

The test you can run this week

Here is the thing I would do first, and you do not need me to do it.

What replaces a guarantee is a stated hypothesis. Nobody managing your money can promise you a return, and anyone who does should worry you. What they can do is tell you where they are putting it and why, and what they expect to see by when. Marketing is the same. A hypothesis is the difference between a plan and a promise, and unlike a promise it is something a supplier can actually be held to.

For a large share of people who send that email, the result will be flat and slightly disappointing. Your supplier will turn out to be competent, working diligently on a channel, and never once asked the question. That is not a satisfying outcome if you came here looking for a villain, and it is the one I see most often.

I will say plainly what I get from this. rambert.co makes money when a business decides it needs a strategy written, and writing down the definition of success is the first thing I do in any paid engagement. I have just given that away in an email you can send tonight. I would rather you sent it. If the answers come back well, you have suppliers worth keeping and a question you now know how to ask every quarter, and you do not need me at all.

There is a limit to what I can claim here, and it is worth stating before you act on any of it. I do not know how often a missing definition is the real cause, because the businesses that ring me are, by construction, the ones where something went wrong, and I never see the ones where it went right. Nobody has counted this properly in Australia. If someone does the work and the answer comes back different, the work should win.

There is a blunter limit too. Some agencies are simply not good at the work, and nothing above will identify one for you. A stated hypothesis will not rescue a supplier who cannot execute. What it will do is show you inside forty-five days rather than inside a year, which is the difference between an expensive quarter and an expensive era.

If you send that email and the replies leave you uneasy, or make no sense at all, forward them to me. I will tell you which of them is a genuine problem and which is a supplier doing precisely the job you gave them. If it turns out the gap is bigger than an email can close, that is what a Strategy Sprint is for, and if you are weighing that against keeping the agency, the comparison between a fractional CMO and a marketing agency and what fractional marketing leadership costs in Australia cover the money side.