Why Agencies Are Terrible at Marketing Themselves (And What to Do About It)

The cobbler’s children have no shoes. The accountant can’t do their own books. And most marketing agencies? They’re quietly terrible at marketing themselves.

There is a particular kind of irony that the industry built on telling other people’s stories often struggles to tell its own. Marketing agencies spend their days crafting positioning, building campaigns, and advising clients on how to show up with consistency and conviction. Then they go back to their own website, which hasn’t been updated in two years, and wonder why the pipeline has dried up.

This is the world Kathleen Gunther lives in. She runs Gunther Consulting, and her entire practice is built on one premise: agencies are bad at marketing themselves, and they need someone external to hold the mirror up. In Episode 34 of Canned the Marketing Podcast, Kathleen joins Ben and Steph to talk through why this problem exists, what strong positioning actually looks like in 2026, and what any agency owner, indie or otherwise, can do about it right now.

The Cobbler’s Children Problem

Ask any agency founder why they don’t invest in their own marketing and you’ll hear a familiar rotation of answers. There’s no time. The budget always goes to client work first. We know what we should be doing, we just never prioritise it. Someone internally could probably handle it.

Kathleen’s diagnosis goes deeper than busyness. The real issue, she argues, is a kind of analysis paralysis that sets in the moment an agency turns the lens on itself. Suddenly, a team that spends its whole working life making strategic decisions for clients finds itself unable to land on a direction for their own brand. The expertise doesn’t disappear. The objectivity does.

“I hold the mirror up and I interrogate,” she explains. That’s the core of what she does. And when Ben and Steph push her on whether agencies genuinely don’t see the gap, or whether they’re just not prioritising it, her answer is both. They often can’t see it. And even when they can, time and resource pressures mean it gets buried.

There’s also a third reason, and Steph raises it early: a lot of agencies quietly believe that winning awards is their marketing strategy. It’s not entirely wrong. Awards carry credibility, create conversation, and signal quality to prospective clients. But they’re a single channel, and a passive one at that. They don’t build a pipeline. They don’t nurture cold audiences into warm ones. And they certainly don’t substitute for a consistent, deliberate presence in market.

Ben adds another layer from his own experience at Human Digital. The instinct for growing indie agencies is to try to do everything in-house, including their own marketing. The logic is understandable: you’re a marketing agency, surely you can manage. But the skills required to deliver strong B2B campaigns, earned media, content strategy, and CRM nurture for your own business are the same skills that are fully deployed on client work. Bringing in someone external isn’t a sign that you can’t handle it. It’s the exact same logic you pitch to your own clients every day.

What Good Positioning Looks Like in 2026

Kathleen’s definition of strong agency positioning is refreshingly simple: one that can back up its claim.

Not one with the most sophisticated manifesto. Not one with the most beautifully written mission statement. One that says what it does, delivers what it promises, and can point to evidence. In a market where every agency website reads like it was generated from the same set of adjectives (strategic, results-driven, innovative, passionate), the agencies that stand out are the ones that can show the receipts.

She’s direct about the opposite tendency, the “wankonomics” approach, where positioning becomes so laden with jargon and abstraction that it stops communicating anything at all. The test is simple: can you say what you do in a sentence that both a bot and a human can process clearly? If the answer is no, you’ve overcomplicated it.

The process she uses with agencies isn’t a heavy-duty brand strategy exercise. It’s two focused workshops designed to land on three to four content pillars, each tied to what the agency genuinely stands for and can consistently show up around. Those pillars are usually some combination of the work itself, the culture of the team, and how the agency shows up in the broader community, whether that’s the industry, a cause, or a particular market. Keep it simple. Keep it consistent. Show up the same way, repeatedly, until people recognise you before they even read the copy.

Understanding who you’re talking to is a critical part of this. Kathleen is candid that many agencies haven’t done the foundational work on their customer data. Pre-COVID, most agencies ran largely on referrals. Someone vouched for you, you got the meeting, you won the work. That environment allowed a lot of agencies to build successful businesses without ever building a proper audience. That environment is gone. The fragmentation of channels, the rise of the creator economy, and the shift in how buyers research agencies before they ever make contact means that referrals alone aren’t enough. You need to be discoverable. You need to be recognisable. And that requires data, at minimum an email list that you’re actually nurturing, even if only quarterly.

The Earned Media Gap

One of the more pointed conversations in the episode is around earned media, and why so many agencies under-invest in it.

Kathleen’s view is that most agencies simply don’t understand what it is. If you haven’t worked inside a PR agency, it’s easy to assume that any media coverage must involve buying ad space somehow. The idea that you could place a story, build a journalist relationship, or write a reactive opinion piece that gets picked up by industry trade press, without paying for placement, feels abstract. So it gets deprioritised in favour of paid channels that feel more controllable.

What good earned media actually looks like, Kathleen explains, is multiple placements over time across a mix of reactive and proactive content. A new staff hire announcement keeps the wheels turning. An opinion piece responding to the week’s industry news builds credibility. A commentary on a campaign that’s getting attention positions your agency’s voice in the conversation. None of this happens without investment in the craft: good writing, genuine journalist relationships, and the editorial judgment to know when to pitch and what angle will land.

The agencies that do this well, she notes, tend to be PR agencies. PR agencies understand the mechanics because it’s their core service. Other types of agencies, digital, creative, media, often haven’t built those muscles. The answer isn’t necessarily to hire a full PR function. It’s to partner with people who have those relationships, or to bring in a specialist who does.

People Are the Differentiator

By the midpoint of the conversation, a theme has emerged clearly: in agency new business, people buy people. The work matters. The case studies matter. But what makes an agency genuinely distinctive, especially an indie, is the humans behind it.

Kathleen is direct about the importance of the founder's personal brand in 2026. The agency leader who is out in the industry, attending events, joining conversations, making themselves available, and contributing ideas back to the community is not just doing good PR. They’re doing the most important business development work available to them. Not in a sales-heavy, card-swapping sense. In the sense of being a recognisable, trusted presence that people want to do business with.

She praises Ben for doing this well, which he accepts with appropriate humility and probably excellent hair. But the point is serious: as an indie, your name and your reputation are the brand. When your personal brand disappears because you’ve retreated into operational or financial tasks, the agency’s pipeline tends to follow it.

She also raises diversity with real force, and it’s worth engaging with properly. She describes what she calls the “big dick swinging strategist” dynamic in agency settings: the senior person who arrives, deploys impressive-sounding language, and leaves the room feeling smaller than it was when they walked in. She’s not here for it, and she argues that clients shouldn’t be either. The question she’d ask any agency she was evaluating is not just “who will I be working with day to day?” but whether the most junior person in the room is encouraged to have a voice.

Diversity, Kathleen and Steph both note, remains uneven across the industry. Gender representation at senior levels is improving, with names like Nikki Grafton at Omnicom NZ cited as examples. But multicultural representation, and specifically indigenous voices in Australia and New Zealand, remains a genuine gap. Steph raises Aotearoa, a New Zealand cultural design and advertising agency specialising in indigenous marketing, as a powerful example of what clear, purposeful positioning anchored in cultural expertise looks like in practice.

The Partnership Advantage

One of the more practical threads in the episode is about how indie agencies can offer genuine breadth without the overhead of a full-service model: partnerships.

No indie agency in 2026 can credibly claim expertise in every area a client might need. If one tells you they can, Ben and Steph both suggest that’s a red flag worth taking seriously. The agencies that thrive as independents tend to be the ones who know their lane precisely, and who have built trusted relationships with complementary specialists to fill the gaps. PR, design, analytics, indigenous marketing, AI implementation: all of these are areas where a smart indie can provide genuine value through curation and coordination rather than trying to own every competency.

Kathleen makes the point neatly: it takes a village. Campaigns take a village. Client relationships take a village. The 2026 marketing ecosystem is too fragmented for any single agency to credibly own all of it.

When You’re Doing Everything Right and Still Not Growing

The most grounded question in the episode comes from Ben. You’ve got your strategy. You’ve niched down. You’ve got PR support. You’re showing up consistently. You’re still not growing. What then?

Kathleen’s answer is deceptively simple: you have to back up your marketing with sales.

This is the part that many agency founders would rather not think about. Marketing creates visibility and credibility. It builds the conditions for a conversation. But it doesn’t close deals. At some point, someone has to pick up the phone, send the email, and have the actual human conversation: how are you going, what’s coming up, where’s the gap, how can we help? If the thing you’ve been doing for 12 months isn’t working, pivot. Don’t wait another 12 months hoping the strategy eventually lands. Change what isn’t working.

Steph adds an important note here about patience alongside proactivity. B2B agency sales cycles are long. Trust-building takes time. A well-executed content strategy might not generate an inbound brief for 12 months, but in that time it’s doing the quiet work of making your name familiar, your thinking credible, and your agency a natural part of any shortlist consideration. The pipeline you’re building now is a slow burn. The phone call you make this week is what moves things today.

AI: Use It or Get Left Behind

The conversation ends, as most marketing conversations do in 2026, with AI. Kathleen’s take is refreshingly undramatic.

Use it. If you’re not using it, you’re behind. Use it for ideation, for pressure-testing frameworks, for checking direction. But don’t confuse using AI tools with having a strategy. The thinking still has to come from you. The frameworks, the positioning, the content pillars: those are built from experience and human judgment. AI accelerates execution. It doesn’t replace the strategic foundation underneath it.

She does name one real concern with genuine candour: the impact on junior roles. The tasks that used to be entry-level work, the research, the first drafts, the scheduling, are increasingly being absorbed by AI. She doesn’t think it’s all bad. She points to the historical pattern: print to digital, photography to digital, every major technological shift has eventually created new roles and new demand. But she’s honest that the transition is disruptive, and that the junior pipeline into the industry deserves serious attention from agency leaders right now.

Her practical approach: use AI to build out frameworks and test ideas, treat it as a collaborator rather than an oracle, and build your own system from your own thinking rather than trying to wrestle a generic tool into producing something that feels like you.

What In-House Marketers Should Look for in an Agency

The episode closes with a flip Ben introduces deliberately. Most of the conversation has been directed at agency owners. But plenty of the Canned listeners are in-house marketers evaluating agencies. So what should they actually be looking for?

Kathleen’s checklist is worth running through properly.

Start with research. How is the agency showing up in public? How does the founder present themselves? Do the case studies reflect the kind of work you need? Have they worked with your competitors, and if so, what can you learn from that?

Look for value alignment. Not in a vague, corporate mission statement way. In a practical sense: do they show up in the same spaces you do? Do they care about the same things?

When you get to the pitch, run chemistry hard. Creative agencies call their pitches “chemistry sessions” for a reason. The quality of the ideas matters, but the quality of the relationship matters just as much. You’re going to be in rooms together when things aren’t going well. Do you want these people in those rooms with you?

Ask who you’ll be working with every day. Not just who’s presenting. Who’s actually doing the work, and what’s the expectation of founder or senior involvement once the honeymoon period is over?

And watch how people treat each other in the room. Kathleen has a specific heuristic she returns to: she judges people by how they treat the wait staff. The agency that makes everyone in the room feel heard is the one worth working with. The one where the senior strategist talks over the junior account manager is telling you exactly how your relationship will go.

The Part Nobody Wants to Do Is the Part That Works

The marketing industry spends a lot of time talking about authenticity and a surprisingly small amount of time applying it to itself. Agencies that are willing to do the same work for their own brand that they do for their clients, the strategic thinking, the consistent positioning, the long-term community building, are the ones that compound over time.

Kathleen’s work is a direct response to the gap between what agencies know and what they actually do. And the conversation in Episode 34 is a useful challenge to any agency leader who has been quietly telling themselves that the awards shelf, the referral network, or the someday-we’ll-get-around-to-it content plan is enough.

It isn’t. But the fix isn’t complicated. Start with strategy. Know your pillars. Back it up with the work. Show up consistently. And when the marketing is doing its job, pick up the phone.

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Watch or listen to the full episode with Kathleen Gunther at cannedmarketing.com. New episodes drop weekly.

Connect with Ben van Rooy at linkedin.com/in/benvanrooy/

Connect with Steph Quantrill at linkedin.com/in/stephanie-quantrill/

Subscribe to Canned the Marketing Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.