DIY or OUTSOURCE? (and the “Agency” Future): BODIES & BOTS #20

When I was in my early 30s, I hired a traffic manager who was in her 60s.

I ran a marketing services team responsible for 100s of campaigns. Joan had been running agency and corporate workflows long before Asana.

She was fast, organized, and had zero patience for nonsense. She smiled and remained calm when clients were freaking out. I was her boss, but she was my teacher. Neither of us found that strange.

It was the smartest hire I made in that decade. 

Through my career, I’ve figured out what I’m good at and found the right people to fill in the rest.

I’ve managed resource searches from “we need one project-based video editor” to full global agency reviews. I feel a little sorry for all the companies I put through the “RFP process.”

Today, I consider myself a “personal shopper” for businesses. And a hired marketing gun (no bullets) for companies that need a temporary brain and a pair of calloused hands.

The hard part is never finding the help. It’s knowing what you need first and learning to lead, inspire, and compensate.

The DIY Trap

Everyone thinks they’re a marketer now. Most of them are overwhelmed.

• In the US alone, 162 million people consider themselves content creators.
• 86% call themselves entrepreneurs. Feeling like one and operating like one are two very different things.
• The real reason people don’t ask for help has nothing to do with budget. It’s control. We overvalue what we’ve labored over ourselves, even when a professional could do it better in half the time. Psychologists call it the IKEA effect. Some company leaders like to feed their egos by talking about their team size. To me, margin is way more important than bragging rights.
• The mindset (“If I don’t do it, it won’t get done right”) is one of the hardest things to shake. Meanwhile, 64 million Americans are freelancing. 51% hold postgraduate degrees. 78% of CEOs say their top freelancers outperform full-time employees. The talent is out there. The hang-up is yours.
• Gen Z is being promoted into management faster than any previous generation. But many never learned to delegate. Their early careers happened entirely behind a screen.

You can’t think big if you’re buried in small.

Sound familiar? It took me a long time to shake it, too. But raising two kids, running a big team at work, commuting three hours a day sucked that need for control right out of me.

But in the AI era, understanding what you’re handing off matters more than ever. You can’t manage what you don’t understand.

A Short History of Who Did the Work

It used to be obvious.

In the Mad Men era, the agency was the brand’s partner. It handled strategy, campaign ideas, production, media, and the whole process. The client ran the business. The agency ran the marketing.

Then new media options blew the model apart. Agencies began specializing in direct marketing, websites, sponsorships and events, social media, SEO, and content marketing.

The holding companies got bloated. WPP, Omnicom, Publicis, IPG, Dentsu, and Havas now employ more than a million people between them. WPP now brags that its employees’ average age is under 30. Omnicom and Interpublic made over 10,000 layoffs in the past 12 months. They gobbled up independent agencies, who voted with their feet and started new agencies. They want to be in creative environments, not at big monolithic institutions.

Clients got smarter and didn’t want to pay for time…they started asking about RESULTS.

Before You Hire Anyone

• What do you REALLY  need? Not what looks good or what your competitor is doing. What specific thing is broken, slow, or producing work that doesn’t reflect what you can really do?
• What are you genuinely good at? Not willing to do or curious to learn. Good at.
• What is the gap costing you? Not just money. Time, credibility, headspace. The stuff that doesn’t show up on a spreadsheet until it’s too late.

The smartest people I’ve worked with over five decades could answer all three without blinking.

One More Thing Nobody Talks About

We sometimes have DEIB conversations. Ethnicity. Gender. Orientation. Disability. Real progress.

But often, age still doesn’t have a seat.

Agency, tech, and marketing jobs consistently rank among the most stressful in any industry. And the pressure to skew young has pushed out some of the most valuable people in the room. Younger managers are often quietly uncomfortable supervising someone with more experience than they have.

My 60-something traffic manager was not a threat. She was a resource. There’s a difference. I figured it out in about five minutes.

The conflicts between young and old,  suits and creatives, and technology and humanity are nothing new! The photo below is from a Mad Men episode where the agency invests in a giant computer.

If you want to go deeper on what AI is doing to the agency world right now, that’s exactly what I’m covering on Bodies & Bots on Substack. Come find me there.

Written with my AI collaborator (Beulah). The fire is entirely my own.