Every Agency is Just One Man in a Trench Coat.
The people who make the work aren't actually on staff.
Contractors have always made up a huge portion of marketing teams. There’s a Slack workspace, a brand identity deck, and a rotating cast of freelancers who get assembled when a brief drops and quickly disbanded when the client invoice gets sent.
The pitch deck says “our team,” but the org chart is actually three dudes in a basement (and they somehow all report into each other).
This isn’t new. Agencies have always used freelancers. But there did used to be a core. A bench of full-time people who held some kind of institutional knowledge, who knew the client’s brand guidelines front to back, who had worked together for years. In some shops, that’s gone. Maybe there’s a producer, an account lead, and a creative director, but their jobs are more about assembling the right team of freelancers fast enough to hit the timeline.
The client rarely knows the difference. They signed up for the agency. They got the agency's logo on the cover of the deck. But the people doing the work are independent contractors who also did work for two other agencies this month. The strategy your brand is paying for was developed by someone who was developing a different strategy for a competitor last Tuesday. Nobody is lying about this. Let’s be clear about that part.
Adweek called this the "creative freelance boom" and asked who the winners and losers are. The winners are senior freelancers with reputations and full calendars. The losers are junior creatives who can't get hired because there's nothing to get hired into. The entry-level job used to be the entry point. Now the entry point is a freelance gig that pays a flat rate and doesn't lead anywhere, because the agency that hired you for it doesn't have a career ladder. They have a budget…for this one project.
This is the part that should bother people more than it does. The agency model was never just about making ads. It was a system that trained people. Juniors sat next to seniors. They learned by being there. They absorbed taste, timing, client management, the thousand small things that make someone good at this job. That system required full-time employment. It required people being on the same team for longer than one campaign cycle.
The freelance model doesn't train anyone. It extracts. It takes what you already know and rents it by the day. You don't leave with a mentor, or a network that invested in your growth, or the knowledge that comes from watching the same client relationship evolve over two years.
The agency of the future has fewer employees, more contractors, and a cool-looking website that says something like "we believe in the power of ideas." The "we" just changes every quarter.
If you're building a career in this industry, understand what you're walking into. The job listing might say "agency." The reality might be a holding company, a project manager, and a Google Drive full of freelancer NDAs. That doesn't mean it's bad work. It might be great work. But the thing people used to get from agencies (the mentorship, the community, the slow accumulation of craft through years of collaboration) that's not part of the deal anymore.
You have to find that mentorship somewhere else. LinkedIn, Substack, even TikTok can all be great places to start.
Xx, Caitlin.
If you’re new here, I write a monthly serialized novel called Everything is Advertising, about a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.
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