It is a curious phenomenon of the modern marketing department. We are surrounded by specialists for everything – programmatic traders who speak in riddles, data scientists who treat spreadsheets like sacred texts, specialists obsessed with the customer journey, AI prompt engineers and my favourite – the Fractional CMO – the marketing equivalent of a friend with benefits.
Yet, when it comes to the most pivotal decision a CMO can make – selecting a new agency partner there is a sudden, inexplicable urge to keep it in-house.
Let’s be brutally honest: Deciding to run your own agency search while maintaining a full-time job isn’t just ambitious; it’s frankly a bit daft. It’s the professional equivalent of deciding to perform your own root canal because you’ve watched a few episodes of Grey’s Anatomy and quite like the look of a scalpel.
The Myth of the Spare Time Search
I’ve spent my career navigating the boardrooms in London, glass towers in Toronto, surprisingly competitive coffee shops in Seoul and endless flat whites in Sydney. If there is one universal truth, it’s that a marketer’s calendar is already a disaster zone – yeah, just tell me it isn’t.
If you’re a marketer, when exactly do you plan to vet half a dozen eighty page RFP documents? Between the 2:00 PM Brand Alignment workshop) and the 4:00 PM crisis meeting about why the TikTok influencer accidentally insulted a minor deity?
You get the picture.
The reality is, the DIY search usually follows a predictable, tragic arc:
- The Honeymoon: You ask your LinkedIn network for recommendations. You receive 50 messages from hungry business development directors who suddenly claim to be the only solution you should ever consider.
- The Deluge: Your inbox becomes a graveyard of 80-page creds deck – each one contains a slide of logos and the mandatory photo of the agency dog, ‘Barnaby’.
- The Fatigue: You realise you haven’t actually looked at the work because you’re too busy trying to find a time when your key stakeholders are all available at the same time because they’re too busy managing their own objectives
- The Panic: Exhausted and weeping into your lukewarm oat milk latte, you pick the agency with the nicest office or the one whose CEO went to the same university as your boss.
Your Reputation is on the Line
In the US, they call it betting the farm. In the UK, we’d say you’re putting your head in the noose and asking someone to kick the stool. In Korea, they refer to it as ‘pure show-ship’ – that you know something has a 0% chance of working, but just make sure you look good. And the best description I heard in Australia was… ‘it’s like a fire sale in a fireworks factory…’
If you run a DIY search and the agency fails six months later – which they often do when the vetting has the depth of a puddle -the blame doesn’t go to the agency. It lands squarely on you.
Selection is a skill set, not a hobby. When you DIY a search, you aren’t just risking the budget – you are mortgaging your professional reputation.
By bypassing a structured, third-party management process, you lose the critical distance required to see through the new business theatre. Agencies are remarkably good at smelling an amateur search from a mile away – they know which bells to whistle and which skeletons to hide when there isn’t a consultant there to poke the closets and check the references that aren’t on the list. (Trust me – I know!)
An external search consultant acts as the “grown-up in the room.” We provide the rigorous framework that protects you from your own biases and, more importantly, from your own desperate desire to just “get it over with” so you can go home.
The Hard Truth
A marketer’s job is to build a brand, drive revenue, and perhaps occasionally enjoy a weekend without checking your email. A marketer’s job is not to be a procurement specialist, a contract negotiator, and a creative talent scout all at once.
If you value your reputation (and your sanity) stop trying to DIY the most expensive relationship your company will likely create. Hire a professional to find the professionals.
Otherwise, don’t be surprised when the perfect agency you found during your lunch break turns out to be a total shambles by Christmas – leaving you explaining to your C-Suite why the disruptive new campaign consists entirely of Barnaby the dog in a tutu.
Cheers to that.
Stephan Argent
Stephan Argent is Founder and Principal at Listenmore Inc, Canada’s leading confidential advisory consultancy that specializes in Agency Search Management. Read more like this on our blog Marketing Unscrewed / follow me @StephanArgent