One of my biggest gripes about the development of marketing is the increasing trend towards the outsourcing of thinking and execution to third party agencies.
It's not that the work done by those agencies is necessarily bad - indeed as a result of writing this blog I've had the pleasue of meeting innumerable practitoners who are smart, funny and conscientious (though rarely glamorous).
The problem is that they cannot be as invested in your company as you are and they shouldn't know your customers better than you do. But, all too often, marketing directors run the risk of becoming administrators of these third-party relationships rather than poduct/service champions.
Their career development is predicated on the budgets they manage rather than the results they achieve. They become the "client" and develop a client mindset. They forget that the true client is, in fact, the customer. And from there, it's all downhill.
