Your Agency Isn’t the Problem. The Incentives Are.

Let me say the thing most consultants won’t: your agency is probably making your job harder, not easier. Not because they’re bad at it. Because the way they get paid rewards complexity over clarity.

Most destination agencies bill one of two ways. A monthly retainer tied to scope, or project fees for deliverables. Both have the same flaw built in. They make more money when you do more.

New seasonal campaign? Scope expansion. New channel? Higher retainer. New microsite? Project fee on top. Every addition is revenue. Now run it the other way. Kill an underperforming campaign and the scope shrinks. Consolidate three campaigns into one and the retainer drops. Reuse content you already own instead of commissioning more and the billable hours disappear.

So your agency is built to help you start things and quietly built to avoid helping you stop them. Nobody’s plotting against you in a planning meeting. But when the model rewards addition and punishes subtraction, everything accumulates. More campaigns, more channels, more coordination. And you’re left managing the pile while your numbers stay flat.

The bigger cost: you stop owning the room

Here’s what I worry about more than the wasted budget. When an agency runs your strategy, they run your board meeting too. They build the deck. They frame the wins. They present the results. And slowly, the person who’s supposed to own the marketing vision becomes the person who manages the vendors who own it.

That’s the real damage. Not the retainer. The fact that your credibility in front of leadership is now borrowed from a partner whose interests aren’t the same as yours.

Reporting theater

Pull out the last report your agency sent you. I’d bet it leads with impressions, reach, engagement rates, and a long list of everything they produced. Look how busy we were.

Now ask the only question that matters: can you connect any of it to the KPI your board cares about? Visitation. Shoulder season. Economic impact. Bookings. If the answer is no, what you’re getting isn’t reporting. It’s theater. Activity metrics protect the agency. Outcome metrics protect you. Most agencies know which one keeps the retainer alive.

What good actually looks like

I’m not anti-agency. I built one. The great ones share three habits, and they’re rarer than they should be.

They tell you what to stop. The best agency relationship I ever saw involved a partner walking in six months into a retainer and saying, “Campaign A is working. B is marginal. C isn’t moving anything. Kill B and C, put the budget behind A, and let us make one thing great instead of three things average.” That agency volunteered to shrink its own scope. Almost nobody does that.

They build scope around your number, not their contract. A good partner asks what metric you’re personally on the hook for this year, then reverse-engineers the work from it. A weak one delivers what the SOW says and checks the box.

They bring constraint, not just ideas. Ideas are cheap. Any agency can pitch a fall campaign, a couples activation, and a new TikTok channel. A strong one tells you which of those won’t move your number and talks you out of them before they become line items.

Why you can’t fix this from the inside

You can’t evaluate your own agency relationships clearly while you’re standing in the middle of them. You’ve got history, contracts, internal politics, people on your team who championed each partner. Saying “this isn’t working” out loud costs something.

Most marketing leaders I talk to already know they have too many agencies. They know which relationship to consolidate and which work to cut. What stops them isn’t insight. It’s that pulling the trigger from the inside means burning a bridge and owning the fallout alone.

That’s the part an outside voice solves. Not by replacing your agencies, but by looking at the whole picture with no stake in keeping any of it alive, and giving you the cover to make the call you already wanted to make.

The most valuable question in destination marketing right now isn’t “what should we add?” It’s “what should we stop, so the work that matters can finally win?” Your agency is never going to ask it for you.