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Someone on the client side who can judge it, which many businesses no longer have. Agencies are slick and their numbers plausible: one national agency proposed display advertising at a 1.23% click-through rate where 0.06% was more usual, a difference that moved the cost per sale between £54 and £280, and the client had no benchmark to spot it. Where that judgement is missing in-house, an independent third party should audit, plan, brief suppliers, benchmark proposals and act as judge rather than advocate.
Because outsourced work still has to be specified, judged and implemented. Companies outsource accounting, HR, delivery, hosting and advertising for flexibility, specialist skills and lower employment costs, and digital, from web builds and search to email and content, is among the most outsourced of all. The agencies can be very slick: plausible presentations, extensive data, thorough-looking technical solutions and wonderful case studies. The question is whether anyone in the client organisation can tell whether the brief was right, the analysis done and the numbers in a proposal benchmarked.
The client pays for a proposal it cannot evaluate. A national agency sent an 8-page outline for targeted display advertising based on profiling: clicks estimated at 28k, a CPM of £1.38, a click-through rate of 1.23%, 4 ad formats aimed at 4 types of customer, and 10 million impressions. The numbers looked great. But 0.06% was a more usual click-through rate for that kind of advertising, and the difference changed the cost per sale by a factor of 5: in this example, between £54 a sale and £280. The client had no benchmark for click-through rate, did not work out the cost per sale, and did not notice that the quoted metrics were not in the 4 page contract.
Agencies largely do what clients tell them, so the brilliant case studies had good managers on the client side. When that manager has limited knowledge, the pattern runs like this:
Cuts after the 2008 crash. Many businesses made middle managers redundant and kept cheaper juniors, and the skills and knowledge went with them. Senior management then trusted its teams less, hired agencies to fill the gap, and left juniors, or a director with little grasp of digital, to manage them, which in practice put the agencies in charge. Investment in training fell after 2008 as well, while technology and digital marketing moved fast and schools and colleges struggled to keep up; as Andy Burnham MP put it, "there are real skill gaps in the digital sector... the pipeline just isn't delivering enough young people". The result is a kind of systemic denial: managers who will not admit poor preparation, directors without the knowledge to challenge plausible arguments, and agencies that fit briefs to their own skills and rarely turn down work on anything but price.
Bridge the gap between the agency's skills and the business's needs. That means auditing, identifying needs and setting objectives; planning around those needs, resources and infrastructure; briefing suppliers, auditing their responses and tailoring the project; managing the project and measuring it; and benchmarking, questioning proposals and pushing for the best result. Above all, act as the judge rather than the prosecution or the defence: give the client the facts so the decision rests on knowledge, and if a decision is driven by ignorance, vanity or hope, say so.
I have played that role for clients in online retail, finance, construction and the agency sector, and in one case coordinated a strategy delivered by 5 different suppliers alongside in-house project teams. One project, for a housebuilder, began with an audit of its digital activity and lead generation, led to managing the launch of a new website and a new suite of online marketing, and three years later had multiple technical projects under way, lead generation that had diversified and was growing steadily, a much more knowledgeable internal team and an expanding digital function. The role only works if everyone accepts that every proposal will be judged on worth and quality, whether it comes from inside or outside. Sometimes that has meant hard truths, such as dropping a project that would have earned my own firm more, or telling a client to stop employing us if it did not want to act on the advice.
Related evidence: A Yorkshire housebuilder: nine years on the client's side of the table. Earlier in this journey: Why AI multiplies judgement rather than replacing it.
Benchmark the figures and work them through to cost per sale. A proposal quoting a 1.23% click-through rate, where 0.06% was usual, implied a cost per sale of £54 against £280 at the usual rate.
Many cut middle managers and training after the 2008 crash, leaving juniors, or directors with little digital knowledge, to manage agencies, so in practice the agency ends up in charge.
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