If you’re starting to feel uneasy about your marketing agency relationship, you’re probably not imagining it.
Things feel less stable than they used to. Reporting takes longer to interpret. Conversations feel more careful. There’s more explanation, and less shared confidence. Not because anyone has failed outright, but because clarity feels harder to hold onto.
This is showing up across the system.
Founders feel exposed.
Finance teams feel unconvinced.
Senior marketers feel caught in the middle.
Agencies feel the ground shifting beneath work that hasn’t fundamentally changed.
Often there’s no dramatic drop-off. No obvious mistake. Just a awful sense that what used to feel solid now feels fragile.
The easy explanation internally becomes that the agency work isn’t strong enough anymore.
Or that the relationship has run its course.
Or that a different partner might bring fresh answers and better results.
That explanation can feel comforting internally.
It’s also often incomplete.
What’s really changed beneath the surface
I can almost guarantee it isn’t the quality of thinking or the standard of delivery from the agency.
What’s changed is the system those decisions are being judged inside.
For years, marketing was understood through relatively linear models (funnels). Attention moved in. Interest progressed. Results emerged. Funnels gave everyone a shared way to explain cause and effect, even when reality was messier.
That model no longer reflects how people actually buy.
Today, influence doesn’t arrive in a single journey. It accumulates across moments.
A customer notices something when a problem/desire is still vague.
A message resonates because it mirrors a frustration/need they haven’t fully named.
A brand becomes familiar without feeling memorable.
Later, a different moment lands.
A problem/desire emerges.
Urgency appears.
Something stops working.
Or a change makes the status quo feel riskier than doing nothing.
That’s the moment a decision sharpens.
At that point, the customer doesn’t start researching from scratch. They recall what already feels known, credible, or safe. The options that surface aren’t always the loudest or the most recent. They’re the ones that quietly attached themselves to earlier moments of relevance.
From the outside, this looks like nothing happened… and then they bought.
When marketing is still expected to demonstrate progress through linear stages, but customers are moving through dispersed buying moments, interpretation breaks down.
The work hasn’t failed.
The way it’s being judged no longer matches how customers decide.
This isn’t just anecdotal
This shift isn’t based on instinct or opinion.
Independent research across search behaviour, media consumption, and buying patterns consistently shows that traditional performance signals now capture a shrinking portion of how demand forms.
It matters, because everyone involved is being asked to make and defend decisions using indicators that were designed for the simpler funnel system. The data hasn’t disappeared.
It’s just become less decisive.
That ambiguity doesn’t belong to any one role.
It’s structural.
Why this creates pressure inside organisations and agencies
This doesn’t just affect dashboards or reports.
It affects trust.
Senior marketers are expected to justify marketing decisions to leadership, while protecting their teams and partners from the fallout. Finance leaders want decisions they can stand behind, not stories that shift month to month. Founders want confidence that marketing investment is compounding, not leaking.
Agencies sit in the middle of this. Asked to provide clarity where the system itself doesn’t offer clean answers. Work that is strategically sound can suddenly feel difficult to defend. Not because it’s wrong, but because the reference points (and measurement) around it have changed.
In my work, I see this most clearly when capable teams on both sides start communicating more, but understanding less.
That’s not a performance failure.
It’s a confidence gap.
The response this usually triggers
The instinct, on all sides, is to create movement and activity.
For organisations, that often looks like changing agencies.
For agencies, it can look like reworking strategy, refreshing frameworks, or tightening reporting in the hope that certainty will return.
These responses are completely understandable. They’re attempts to restore confidence.
But when the problem is how results are being read, not how the work is being done, moving faster usually makes things worse. New agencies inherit the same expectations. New strategies are judged through the same outdated models. New reporting still struggles to answer the same unresolved questions.
Change happens.
Clarity doesn’t.
This is not a marketing agency problem
This generally isn’t a creativity problem.
It also isn’t a commitment problem.
And very often, it isn’t a delivery problem.
It’s a decision problem.
It’s the challenge of making important decisions in a system that no longer delivers quick, clean answers.
Until that reality is acknowledged, agencies will continue to be hired and replaced as a way of managing uncertainty, rather than resolving it.
The value of a deliberate pause
This is usually a good point for teams choose to pause together, rather than reset separately.
Not to optimise.
Not to defend.
But to understand.
That’s where a PRES Audit fits. It exists to create shared decision clarity before change, not to assign blame after the fact. It helps founders, finance teams, senior marketers, and agencies see how influence is building over time, and where interpretation is breaking down.
Sometimes that process confirms that a change in agency is the right move. Often, it restores enough shared understanding to prevent an unnecessary reset altogether (and the associated costs).
A steadier truth to end on
Marketing hasn’t become less effective.
It has become harder to explain using models that were built for a different system.
Changing agencies won’t fix that on its own. Shared clarity will. And clarity, not constant resets, is what allows organisations and their partners to build momentum rather than start again every year.
Caroline Thomas helps leadership teams understand why marketing looks busy but underperforms, and how to tell whether it’s learning and compounding to be as efficient as possible.
