You don't have an agency problem. You have an input problem.

A large retail brand I know fired three paid marketing agencies in 2 years.

Their CMO told me, with real frustration, that you just can't find a good paid agency anymore.

But when I looked closer, it didn't look like three agencies had failed in three different ways. It looked like all three had inherited the same auction and were being asked to create an edge from levers they no longer controlled.

Over the last five years, a lot of what good agencies used to win on has moved inside the platform. Bidding is mostly automated. Channel mix has been compressed into products like Performance Max. Search queries, product matching, placements, and budget allocation are increasingly decided by the system, not by someone manually shaping the account.

That does not make agencies useless. It means the old agency edge has been commoditized.

The setup a good agency used to build by hand is now much closer to the market default. Competitors can switch on the same machinery, use the same bidding models, and reach the same inventory.

So the real question is no longer just, “Who is managing the account?”

It is, “What are we giving the system to work with?”

That is where the leverage has moved: product feed, merchandising, pricing, margins, hero SKUs, promo calendar, landing pages, creative, measurement, and the ability to define which customers and outcomes actually matter.

The auction was not failing because three agencies in a row forgot how to do paid media. It was failing because the real edge had moved closer to the product, the catalog, and the economics of the business.

So the CMO was asking the wrong question.

“Who do we hire next?” might help at the margins, but it will not change the ceiling if the inputs stay the same.

The thing capping the account no longer sits only in the agency's hands. It sits upstream with the brand itself.