Why the 'one agency for everything' model usually underperforms

Full-service agencies are often chosen for simplicity: one point of contact, one invoice, one relationship to manage. That simplicity is real, but it frequently comes with a quieter cost — a single team spread across six disciplines rarely has deep, current specialism in all six at once.

The alternative isn't necessarily six separate vendors either, which reintroduces the coordination problem from a different direction. The model we'd argue for is a single accountable strategy with named specialists per discipline working from one plan — simplicity of accountability without the depth trade-off of a single generalist team.

This is, unsurprisingly, close to how we've structured our own growth operating system. We'd make the same argument even if we didn't run our business this way: the coordination cost of multiple vendors is real, but it's usually smaller than the depth cost of forcing one team to be expert in paid search, programmatic, social, content, analytics, and conversion optimisation simultaneously.