Your Agency is Lying to You... Ask Me How I Know.
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The first time I realized an agency was lying to a client, it wasn’t dramatic.
There was no scam. No shady invoice. No villain twirling a mustache in a conference room. It was a weekly call. Slides on the screen. Green arrows. A lot of words like optimization, momentum, and early indicators. Everyone nodded. The client thanked us. We logged off.
And the moment the call ended, the internal conversation was completely different.
We knew the leads were weak. We knew follow-up was inconsistent. We knew the funnel was leaking in places no amount of creative testing would fix. But that wasn’t the conversation the client was having. They were being told to be patient. To trust the process. To give it a little more time.
I’ve been in digital marketing for over a decade. Agency side for most of it. I’ve sat in the rooms where performance is reframed. I’ve helped polish reports that technically weren’t wrong, but weren’t telling the whole truth either. Not because anyone was malicious. Because agencies are structured to sell activity, not accountability.
That’s how the lie usually shows up. Quietly. Professionally. Wrapped in just enough data to sound responsible.
And once you’ve seen it from the inside, it’s hard to unsee it.
After a while, you learn the rhythms.
You learn which metrics get highlighted when things are actually working and which ones get emphasized when they are not. You learn how language changes depending on performance. When results are strong, it is direct. When results are weak, it gets softer. More contextual. More future-focused. Always just one more iteration away.
What rarely changes is the recommendation. More time. More spend. More testing.
From the agency side, this makes sense. Agencies are not built to walk into a client’s operation and say, “This is not a marketing problem.” That conversation does not fit neatly into a scope of work. It does not plug into a retainer. It creates friction. And friction is the enemy of renewal.
So the focus stays upstream. Ads. Traffic. Creative. Optimization. All things the agency can control. All things that look like progress on a report. Or better put, "vanity metrics."
Meanwhile, what actually determines outcomes lives downstream. Response time. Follow-up consistency. Ownership. Decision-making delays. Hand-offs. None of those show up in an ad dashboard. None of them are easy to attribute. And none of them are convenient to talk about if you are being paid to run campaigns.
I have watched campaigns generate plenty of volume and still fail quietly. Not because the marketing was bad, but because the system it fed into was brittle. Leads came in and aged. Conversations stalled. Opportunities went half-finished. The business owner felt something was off but could not quite pinpoint where. So the assumption landed where it usually does. The marketing must not be working anymore.
That is the lie most owners never realize they are being told. Not that performance is good when it is bad, but that performance lives only at the top of the funnel. If clicks are coming in, the agency has done its job. Everything else becomes someone else’s problem, even though it directly determines whether the spend turns into revenue.
What makes this especially damaging is that it conditions owners to look in the wrong place. When things feel tight, they look for new campaigns instead of examining what happens after the lead shows up. When results stall, they change tactics instead of structure. Over time, they become dependent on constant motion just to keep things from slipping.
I am not writing this as an outsider throwing stones. I was inside those rooms. I helped make those calls sound reasonable. I understand why it happens. But understanding it does not make it less costly for the business owners on the other side of the screen who aren't seeing actual growth occurring despite shelling out the dough.
The truth most agencies will not say is this. Marketing can create attention. It cannot compensate for unclear ownership, fragile processes, or a system that only works when the owner is personally involved. When those cracks exist, no amount of traffic will solve them. It will only make them more visible, then quietly blamed on something else.
Once you see that, you stop asking why campaigns stop working and start asking a harder question. What is this business actually capable of handling without constant intervention?
And that question rarely lives in an ad report.
The Lies That Make Bad Performance Look Acceptable.
Most agencies never say these things bluntly. They do not need to. The language is polished. The explanations sound reasonable. The reports look busy. And taken individually, each excuse feels fair. Understandable, even. These are not statements meant to inform you. They are statements meant to soften uncertainty, delay hard conversations, and make stalled performance feel normal.
“This Is Normal. It Just Takes Time.”
Time is often used to blur accountability. When results stall, adding runway sounds responsible, but it avoids the real question. Is the system improving, or is everyone waiting to see if something changes on its own. More time does not fix structural issues. It just delays the moment they become undeniable.
“The Top of the Funnel Is Strong, So Things Are Working.”
Lead volume becomes the shield. If traffic is up and forms are being filled, performance looks healthy on paper. What gets ignored is what happens next. Response speed, follow-up quality, and ownership determine outcomes, but they sit outside the agency’s reporting. Strong volume does not mean strong results.
“We Just Need to Test More Variables.”
Testing sounds like diligence. In practice, it often becomes an excuse to keep moving without addressing why nothing is compounding. Creative tests cannot fix unclear messaging downstream. Landing page tweaks cannot repair broken follow-up. At some point, more tests stop being a strategy and start being avoidance.
“Your Market Just Slowed Down.”
Sometimes that is true. Often, it is a convenient explanation because it cannot be proven or disproven easily. Blaming the market shifts attention away from internal friction, delayed responses, confused prospects, and inconsistent execution. External forces are easier to point at than internal weaknesses.
“The Algorithm Needs to Settle.”
Algorithms become the modern scapegoat. When results dip, the platform is blamed. When results improve, it is credited to optimization. This framing removes agency accountability while sounding technical enough to seem legitimate. The algorithm did not decide whether a lead was called back.
“We Are Seeing Early Leading Indicators.”
This is one of the most dangerous phrases. It creates the feeling of progress without requiring outcomes. Engagement. Click-through rates. Cost per click. All useful metrics, none of them decisive. Leading indicators only matter if they consistently turn into revenue. Otherwise, they are comfort metrics.
“What Happens After the Lead Isn’t Our Responsibility.”
This one is rarely said out loud, but it is baked into almost every agency relationship. The moment a lead is handed off, the agency considers the job done. But if the entire system depends on that handoff working, performance cannot be evaluated in isolation. Ignoring what happens next is how poor results stay invisible.
When you PARTNER with me, If It’s Not Working, You’ll Know!
I am not here to sell you reassurance. I am not interested in dressing up numbers so they feel better on a slide or pointing at activity to avoid uncomfortable truths. If something is not working, I will tell you. If the issue is not marketing, I will say that too.
I do not optimize for vanity metrics or short-term optics. I focus on what actually holds up when you step away. Clear systems. Real ownership. Visibility that does not depend on interpretation. The goal is not to make performance look good on a call. It is to make the business operate better when no one is watching.
If you want honest conversations, even when they are uncomfortable, this is where we start.
Ready for an Honest Conversation?
