Your Agency is Ripping You Off. Change Our Mind.
This statement gets reactions. That is the point.
You might have seen it on a shirt, borrowed from a familiar meme, or heard it said half jokingly at a trade event. Let us be clear upfront. This is not an attack on agencies. It is an argument about how brands use them, and where money quietly leaks out of modern marketing operations.
If you disagree, that is fine. But before you do, it’s worth understanding where the real cost actually sits.
This Is Not an Attack on Agencies
Good agencies are valuable. Great agencies are rare. They bring strategy, creative thinking, storytelling, and perspective that internal teams often cannot generate alone. Campaign ideas, hero concepts, brand platforms, and bold creative leaps are where agencies earn their keep.
Most brands still need this and many always will.
The issue is not that agencies charge for creative work. The issue is that agencies are routinely paid to do work that is not creative at all. They’re paid for creative reproductions. Endless iterations, minor changes, feedback loops. Agencies don’t want to be stuck in these cycles, and neither do you, their clients.
Where Brands Actually Lose Money
The biggest agency cost problem is rarely the big campaign idea. It’s everything that comes after it.
- A banner resized for eight different channels.
- A retail variation for a last minute new price or promotion.
- Three minor but important regional variations with different TLCs and disclaimers.
- A social asset tweaked for three different platforms.
- Last minute changes that trigger full creative workflows and reviews.
Each task seems small. Collectively? They add up. To a large and recurring spend that hides in plain sight. This pattern is especially common in multi-location and franchise organisations, where central teams struggle to balance control and speed across markets.
Creative Production vs Creative Reproduction
This distinction isn’t one discussed often enough, but it matters more than most marketing teams are comfortable discussing.
Creative production is the work agencies are built for. Concept development. Visual language. Copywriting. Campaign ideas. Hero assets. It requires thinking, taste, and judgement.
Creative reproduction is something else entirely. It’s resizing, versioning, and localising. It’s channel adaptations and compliance edits. This work is necessary and it requires accuracy, speed, and guardrails.
Treating these as the same thing is where costs spiral.
The differences between Creative Production and Creative Reproduction.
The Hidden Cost of Reproduction Through Agencies
Agencies don’t take on reproduction work because they love it. They do it because brands ask them to and there is no alternative.
Many organisations still lack a central place to store approved assets, brand guidelines live in documents, not systems, and local teams need changes but have no safe way to make them. Compliance rules are manual and fragile.
In that vacuum, agencies become the operational engine by default. Not because it is efficient, but because it is the only option available.
This eats up budgets. But the cost isn’t just financial.
Entire campaigns can slow to a crawl because every small change queues behind revision and reproduction timelines. Local teams feel blocked and work around the system. Inconsistencies creep in because assets are recreated instead of reused. Compliance risk increases as pressure builds. People on the ground pull overtime trying to get the last minute changes approved and rolled out.
Most damaging of all, agency relationships suffer. Creative partners are dragged into low value work, high-stress overtime, and brands quietly resent the inevitable invoices.
No one wins this way.
How DAM and Creative Automation Change the Equation
Agencies do their best work when they are focused on ideas, and not admin.
When you remove reproduction work from their scope, something interesting happens. Creative time increases. Campaign quality improves. Relationships become healthier. Agencies and their clients stop fighting fires and start planning properly.
The trick isn’t to cut agencies out. It is about letting them focus on what they are actually good at.
This is where a proper **digital asset management system** becomes critical, giving brands a single governed source of truth for approved creative that can be reused, discovered, and delivered without risk.
When creative automation is layered on top of that foundation, resizing, localisation, and compliance driven changes can happen instantly without risk of going off-brand. Local teams can adapt assets safely, without agencies recreating work from scratch, and without breaking brand rules.
Change Our Mind
Do you believe your agency spend is working as hard as it can? Take a closer look.
How much of your agency budget goes to original creative production? How much goes to reproduction, resizing, and minor variations? How much of your campaigns' time does? How often does a small change trigger a full workflow?
If the answers make you uncomfortable, it might not be your agency that is the problem, but it might be the system you are asking them to operate within.
If you would like to explore how creative automation fits within your content production workflow, book a short demo with the team.