I mean, really. There are SO many marketing agencies out there and a high percentage of them are full of shit.

What do I mean when I say “full of shit”? I think in terms of several criteria that don’t necessarily involve lying or explicitly breaking contracts (but often can). In the essay “On Bullshit”, author Harry Frankfurt makes a fundamental distinction between a liar and a bullshitter. Liars make statements that they believe to be objectively false, whereas bullshitters make statements that might be factually true, while misrepresenting their intent or their reasons for stating said facts.

The Problem With (Some) Marketing Agencies

I’ve heard marketing agencies spew a lot of bullshit by Frankfurt’s definition: ideas that are technically true (or subjective statements of opinion) on the surface but that don’t actually matter and are designed to mislead a potential client as to the agency’s intent.

Here are a few examples of good marketing bullshit. You really can’t argue with these on the surface.

• “Customers need to have a way to find you online.”
• “Your message needs to speak to your target audience.”
• “Your web site isn’t doing anything for you unless you are driving traffic to it.”
• “Hold events in your local area so that people find out about your business!”
• “You are invisible to the search engines if you aren’t targeting the right keywords.”
• “A large number of online reviews helps your business to establish credibility.”
• “You need to grow your email list.”
• “You should be commenting on LinkedIn posts 3-4 times a week to show your expertise.”
• “Your content needs to be distinctive to avoid sounding the same as everyone else.”
• “You need to differentiate yourself from your competition.”

The above statements are all true. You can’t call someone a liar for saying any or all of them. A good marketing agency will helps its clients solve these problems.

Then, there are the other marketing agencies, who will just harp on the above talking points as a means of dodging responsibility for failing (or let’s be honest, not even trying) to deliver anything of real value.

For instance, a BS marketing agency might sell its clients the service of writing blog posts, sending out email blasts, and updating social media pages. A client might begin to feel some doubt after a year or more of paying for the service with no clear idea of whether they’ve generated any new sales as a result.

The response may sound something like the additional bullshit as follows:

• “Your social media pages are getting 4000% more engagement than before you worked with us!”
• “Here’s a list of 20 search keywords that you are now ranked in the top 10 for!”
• “Your email campaigns are averaging a 41% open rate and a 17% click rate!”

Or in some cases, a BS agency might deliver a lengthy and confusing “report” or “live dashboard” stuffed with misleading numbers, pie-charts, and vague word salad about “engagement”, “impressions”, “brand awareness”, etc. Not a word about anything to do with sales or customers, revenue, cash flow… or anything that actually matters to a business at all.

Sooner or later, clients begin to press the real question: “How are you helping us get new customers?” The question meets with an initial uncomfortable silence, followed by a few standard smokescreen answers, such as:

• “Everything we do is designed to drive traffic back to your web site, which ultimately gets you more customers.”
• “It’s really hard to measure that.”
• “Getting customers is more of a sales issue.”
• Pull out the old classic Jon Wanamaker quote: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
• (Attempt to redirect back to the shiny dashboards and fluff statistics that don’t mean anything.)

Failing the above, some agencies will try the next avenue: blame the client, but disguise the tactic as advice (usually by employing a spin on the earlier talking points):

• “We told you in the beginning that you should really try to focus more of your talking points on your unique selling proposition.”
• “Can you try to get us more email addresses to add to your email list?”
• “You need to personally engage on social media more often.” (A ridiculous idea for a busy professional with no social media savvy.)
• “What about speaking at local events and taking pictures?”
• “Maybe you could write blog posts about subjects relevant to your target market.”

Ideas such as the above are good ones, if one ignores the obvious. The type of advice above is true but usually irrelevant and useless. Business owners are busy people. They hire agencies because they don’t have time to sit down and think about marketing, let alone execute marketing on any sort of consistent basis.

Companies waste money paying full-of-shit marketing agencies often. The sad reality: these same companies are trying to do what they’re not ready to do. People try to throw marketing at a problem that marketing won’t fix. The best marketing in the world will not make any difference for a broken business model or a dwindling market for a product that’s headed for obsolesence. Good marketing agencies understand that marketing is not magic. Bad marketing agencies will happily tell you what you want to hear, take your money, and then try to baffle you with bullshit.

Good Agencies

There are good agencies out there. They are not cheap, and they won’t work with just anyone. They can spot a pain-in-the-ass client a mile away. They aren’t willing to put their own reputation at risk by working with a client who is unwilling or unable to put the effort into a serious marketing. Good agencies don’t want to work with clients who think marketing is a silver bullet to cure all ills. They don’t want the kind of clients who fall for bullshit. They’re happy to let the predatory agencies have those clients.

For a bootstrap business, marketing is mostly an in-house job. A fledgling enterprise can’t outsource all of its marketing to a third party, but business owners often want to believe they can. There’s no shortcut for trial and error. You just have to get resourceful, get creative, and do what you can with the best free and low-cost resources you can find.

A lot of small businesses can’t afford a marketing agency, especially the micro-fledgling startup variety. Good marketing agencies will tell you the truth and tell you to hold onto your money. Real marketing takes a humongous amount of effort no matter how large a check you can afford to write to an agency.

I worked in marketing for a decade and finally decided I couldn’t stomach it any longer. I felt too ethically conflicted about what was required to keep people paying for marketing.

The sad part is, marketing really is a great service when done ethically. This world just contains too many people who aren’t interested in being ethical.