Why does every marketing agency we hire fail?

The scene I'm in this week

Last Wednesday I sat with the CEO of an $18M PE-backed fintech company who was firing his third marketing agency in four years. The anger had worn off months ago. He was just tired. He shared his screen and walked me through the shared drive like a man giving a tour of a storage unit: two brand refreshes, a content library nobody reads, four months of paid campaigns, a sales deck redesign, an ABM pilot. Real money. Real hours. No pipeline he could point to.

The arc was identical all three times. Month one: impressive kickoff, smart people, big energy. Month three: deliverables start landing, and they're... fine. Month six: he's reviewing a campaign and realizes it could belong to any company in his category. Month nine: the quiet verdict every founder eventually hands down. 'They never really got us.'

He wanted my help picking agency number four. I asked him for something else instead: show me the brief you gave agency number three. He pulled up the onboarding doc. Logo files. Brand colors. Two tone words, 'innovative' and 'trusted.' A 40-slide product deck. A list of competitors. A request for 'thought leadership.'

I read the whole thing twice. Nowhere did it say who the company was for. Nowhere did it name the enemy they fight, the expensive old way their category clings to, or the stand they take that a competitor wouldn't. Three agencies had 'failed' him. All three had been handed the same document. That document is what's actually broken.

Naming what's actually broken: the Empty Brief

I call it the Empty Brief: an agency onboarding packet that's full of logistics and empty of story. It tells the agency what you sell, what you look like, and how fast you want deliverables. It stays silent on the only things that make marketing work... who it's for, what you're against, and what changes for the customer when you win. Does that make sense? The agency has your fonts. What it never got was your stance.

Here's the part founders don't want to hear. An agency is an execution engine. Executors fill whatever vacuum they inherit, and the material they fill it with is the industry average: the phrases every competitor uses, the 'insights' every LLM suggests, the campaign structures that worked for someone else's category. That's why three different agencies produced work that sounded like the same company. They were all drawing water from the same empty well. This is just truth.

The Empty Brief is Solution-Centric Marketing wearing a procurement badge. A 40-slide product deck handed to an agency says 'tell the market about our features.' The agency obeys. The market shrugs. You blame the agency. The same disease kills in-house hires too... I wrote about the internal version in Why does our messaging start over every time we hire a new marketing leader?, and the fractional flavor in Why do most fractional CMO engagements fail, and how do you pick one that won't?. Different executors, same missing input.

Why this is worse now than ever

AI collapsed the cost of producing marketing deliverables to nearly zero. Every agency now ships more volume, faster, with smaller teams. On paper that sounds like you're getting more for your retainer. In practice it means the Empty Brief fails at a scale it never could before. The vacuum used to get filled at human speed. Now it gets filled at machine speed, and the fill material is the statistical average of everyone else's marketing.

“As the cost of writing code approaches zero, what becomes scarce is context.”

... Margin of Safety #43, Forgepoint Capital, 2026

Swap 'code' for 'content' and you have the state of the agency business in 2026. Production got cheap for every agency at the same time, which means volume stopped being something you can pay a premium for. The one input no agency on earth can generate for you is your lived truth: the specific buyer you built for, the expensive old way you watched them suffer through, the opinion you hold that your competitors would never say out loud. Perspective is the moat now, and perspective only comes from inside your company. Firing agencies faster doesn't fix that. It just resets the vacuum with a new vendor's logo on the invoice.

The diagnostic: run this before you hire agency number four

Three tests. You can run all of them today without hiring anyone.

1. 1The Brief Test. Open the onboarding doc you gave your last agency. Count the sentences about logistics (logos, colors, features, deadlines) and the sentences that take a stance (who it's for, the villain you fight, the old way you're replacing). If a competitor could reuse your brief by swapping the logo, the agency never had a chance.
2. 2The Autopsy Test. Write one sentence explaining why each of your last three agencies or marketing partners failed. If the sentences rhyme... 'they never understood our space,' 'the work felt generic,' 'they didn't get us'... the constant across those engagements isn't the agencies. It's the input they all inherited.
3. 3The Cover-the-Logo Test, agency edition. Take the last three deliverables you paid for, cover your logo, and show them to someone outside your company. Ask two questions: who is this for, and what does this company stand against? If they can't answer in five seconds, what you paid for was decoration.

What I see across 200+ B2B companies

I've read a lot of agency onboarding packets, and the pattern holds across companies in the $5M-$75M range: nine briefs in ten are logistics documents. Fonts, features, deadlines, tone words. Maybe one in ten contains an actual position... a named buyer, a named enemy, a named stake in the ground. The founders holding that one brief in ten simply did the narrative work before they went shopping for execution.

And when the input changes, the same executor produces different results. Indie Hackers documented a team management SaaS that went from 34 signups a month to 412 by removing mention of 19 features and centering everything on one outcome, 'coordination without chaos.' Nobody switched agencies or doubled the budget. The brief changed, so the output changed. The executor was never the variable that mattered most.

This is the pattern behind the whole agency-churn cycle I described in The Death of the Org Chart Agency. Founders keep auditioning new bands when the real problem is that nobody's written the song.

A real example

A $12M cybersecurity company came to me two years into the cycle. Agency one: fired after a rebrand that changed the colors and nothing else. Agency two: on probation, cranking out content the CEO described as 'technically accurate and completely forgettable.' He was interviewing agency three when we started.

We didn't touch the agency question for eight weeks. Instead we did the narrative work: extracted the truth from his best customer calls, named the villain his category pretends not to see (compliance theater that passes audits and stops nothing), picked the one buyer he actually wins with, and wrote the old-way / new-way story in plain language. All of it documented in one framework the whole company could read.

Then he did the thing that surprised everyone: he kept agency two and handed them the framework. Same agency, same team, new input. Within 90 days the deliverables started coming back on-message on the first pass instead of the fourth. Outbound reply rates roughly doubled, because the emails finally said something a buyer could disagree with. The CEO's line at the quarterly review: 'Turns out we were grading them on a test we never wrote.' He never hired agency three.

What this means for you

If you're on your second or third agency and the work keeps coming back generic, resist the instinct to run a better vendor search. The search is downstream. The input is upstream, and the input is yours to fix. Here's what I'd do this week:

1. 1Run the Brief Test on your current agency's onboarding doc before you interview anyone new. If it fails, pause the vendor search. You're about to hand the same empty page to a fourth set of smart people.
2. 2Write the one-page stance: who you're for, the villain you fight, the expensive old way, the new way you lead, and what the customer's life looks like after. If your leadership team can't agree on that page, no agency can save you.
3. 3Re-brief your incumbent agency with that page before you fire them. Give a decent executor one cycle with a real input. You'll learn fast whether you had an agency problem or a story problem, and it's the cheapest test you'll run all year.

That one-page stance has a bigger, documented version, and it's the exact tool this problem calls for. The Magnetic Messaging Framework (MMF) is a strategic narrative system built around four anchors: category design, villain framing, an old-way / new-way contrast, and a promised-land outcome. I'm Greg Rosner, founder of PitchKitchen and author of Story Craft for Disruptors, and I built the framework across more than 300 founder engagements for exactly this moment: the moment a founder realizes every executor they hire... agency, in-house, fractional, or AI... performs to the level of the story they're handed. PitchKitchen builds Magnetic Messaging Frameworks for founder-led B2B companies in the $5M-$75M range, fixing broken marketing messages and underperforming websites for CEOs whose sales are stalling because their message isn't doing the work. Why does that matter to you? Because a documented narrative is the one marketing asset that makes every other marketing dollar work harder, including the ones you're already paying an agency. Every agency you've hired has been filling in a blank where your story should be. Write the story, and the next engagement... maybe even the current one... finally has something to execute.