Your agency hangs its hat on providing strategic martech guidance and implementation services to clients like you. They’ve got certifications, partner badges, and case studies showing successful engagements. Whether they evolved from traditional media buying and creative, grew from system integration roots, or launched as a boutique digital shop claiming to do it better, they all make the same promise: trust us with your marketing technology decisions.

Six months after the implementation of that new martech solution, something feels off. The tools don’t integrate properly, your team struggles with workflows that don’t match how work gets done, they use only 20% of the features and functionality you’re paying for, and nobody can explain why this specific platform was the right choice for your business.

The gap between agency promise and client outcome is all too common, though the causes can  differ.

The impossible complexity all agencies face

The martech landscape exploded to 15,384 solutions in 2025, representing a 9,304% growth since 2011, with solutions added at a compound annual growth rate of 41.8%. This explosion happened over more than a decade as the industry matured, creating an increasingly complex ecosystem where nobody can maintain deep expertise across thousands of tools.

Agencies specialize because building deep expertise in a few platforms is faster to revenue than staying generalists. Focus on a few core platforms lets agencies build repeatable processes, train teams efficiently, and develop case studies that attract similar clients. Yet research shows clients consistently complain that agencies lack the deep martech knowledge needed for technology selection and implementation.

Each agency type specializes differently based on its origins and economics. Those differences shape client outcomes.

How each agency type specializes and where it breaks

The agency landscape includes dozens of variations: creative boutiques, performance marketing shops, full-service networks, regional independents, and hybrid models that blur traditional categories. The three types examined here represent the dominant patterns in how agencies evolved into martech services and where those evolution paths created constraints. Your experience may vary, but these examples illustrate the structural challenges that affect agencies regardless of their specific configuration.

Traditional agencies: From creative legacy to vendor lock-in

Traditional agencies built their reputations on media buying, brand strategy, and creative work. When digital disruption devastated their core business, they needed new revenue streams. Technology services looked like salvation.

They moved into martech through acquisition. Imagine this scenario: A holding company acquires a boutique martech consultancy specializing in specific enterprise platforms. That boutique spent years building vendor relationships, earning certifications, and developing repeatable processes around those platforms. The acquisition brings those partnerships into the holding company.

The boutique’s founder rises through the organization, eventually becoming chief technology officer. The vendor relationships they built become the holding company’s technology strategy. A $300 million annual investment across 110,000 employees gets built around the partnerships one small consultancy established years earlier. The holding company launches this as its operating system and mandates it across agencies.

Martech partner programs offer agencies commissions ranging from 5% to 30% on client subscriptions, plus revenue share, rebates, and co-sell incentives. Research reveals revenue sharing agreements between major platforms and large adtech companies that accounted for 25-31% of platform provider revenues. These financial incentives reinforce the specialization.

Research on advertising found that sunk costs constitute entry barriers because organizations that invested in established systems face lower ongoing risks than those evaluating alternatives. When your agency invests heavily in one platform and maintains a lucrative partner relationship, that platform becomes the answer to most questions, regardless of fit.

What breaks: Financial incentives and sunk costs cloud recommendations. Clients inherit the technology stack the agency acquired through desperate acquisitions during digital disruption, not the optimal solution for their specific needs.

System integrators: Process excellence without marketing wisdom

Global professional services firms and BPO companies built their businesses on process optimization and technical implementation. They run thousands of business processes for Fortune 500 companies. They understand data flows, system architecture, and enterprise integration.

When customer experience and digital transformation became table stakes, these firms acquired design consultancies, experience agencies, and marketing platform boutiques, rolling them into unified practices. They added customer experience, commerce capabilities, and platform expertise to their technical implementation skills, becoming top-tier platform partners through big-ticket engagements and volume.

The integration makes business sense. Connect customer experience design to process optimization and operational excellence. Deliver end-to-end transformation from front office to back office.

Marketing operations wisdom gets lost in translation. System integrators diagram technically perfect architectures. They build integration layers that connect every system. They might even deliver projects on time and on budget from a technical standpoint.

Integration challenges slow or hamper digital transformation in 80% of organizations. Marketing teams can’t access capabilities when they need them. Workflows don’t match how marketing work gets done. The technology works beautifully from an IT perspective, but fails from a marketing operations perspective.

System integrators understand what needs to be integrated, but miss how marketers need to work daily.

Born digital boutiques: Specialization as business model

Digital agencies launched in the mid-1990s and 2000s built their businesses around specific platform partnerships from day one. They became platinum partners, earning every available specialization badge and certification and achieving elite standing with major enterprise platforms. They positioned themselves as platform experts, better than traditional agencies fumbling through digital transformation.

The specialization makes excellent business sense. Deep platform expertise lets them build repeatable processes, train teams efficiently, win partnership awards, and earn referral commissions. Clients want certified experts who know their chosen platform inside and out. Platform vendors want partners who can sell and implement at scale.

A boutique might claim “platform agnostic” while holding every available certification and specialization badge for a single vendor. Their website showcases the platform partnership prominently. Case studies feature that platform exclusively. Team rosters list platform-specific certifications. The entire business model is built around that specialization.

Industry research found that 57% of respondents agreed the market lacks people with martech and marketing operations expertise. These boutiques offer genuine expertise in their chosen platforms.

However, specialization becomes a constraint. Clients’ needs fall outside their platform specialty; they either force-fit their platform or decline the work. “We specialize in Platform X” sounds like expertise, but it means “Platform X is what we recommend because it’s what we built our business around.” Different mechanism than traditional agency partnerships, same outcome.

The measurable consequences

These structural problems contribute to measurable patterns across martech implementations. Nearly one-third of martech implementations fail or deliver neutral results. Research shows up to 60% of martech initiatives fail to deliver expected ROI.

Not all martech failures trace to agency recommendations. But when agencies prioritize their partnerships, specializations, or technical capabilities over client-specific needs, they contribute to these outcomes. Research shows 66% of major multinationals now operate in-house agencies, with many specifically citing the need for better control over data and technology decisions. Client frustration with agency-driven implementations drives this measurable behavior change.

For organizations not ready to in-house martech capabilities, better evaluation criteria can identify agencies that navigate their constraints honestly.

How to evaluate any agency type

The same questions work regardless of agency type. They reveal whether the agency prioritizes your outcomes over its constraints.

Demand complete transparency

Ask for complete disclosure of vendor partnerships, commission structures, and revenue-sharing agreements. Traditional agencies should disclose all financial relationships. Boutique shops should explain their specialization boundaries and what happens when your needs fall outside them. System integrators should demonstrate marketing operations experience, not just technical credentials.

Require multiple options

Require agencies to present three to five vendor options, ensuring decision criteria are tied to your specific business needs and constraints, not just feature checklists. If an agency says “we’re a Platform X shop” or “we specialize in Platform Y,” ask what they recommend when those platforms don’t fit client needs.

Insist on proof

Demand proof through time-boxed evaluations using your data rather than accepting pitch decks. Request detailed enablement plans targeting above 60% capability utilization with named owners and clear success metrics. Have agencies diagram how recommended tools integrate with your existing systems and identify what might break if you need to change vendors later.

With 72% of CMOs preferring best-of-breed approaches but 59% still selecting agencies primarily on price, the disconnect between what clients want and how they evaluate agencies perpetuates these problems.

Same patterns, better questions

The structural challenges are real. Nobody can maintain expertise across 15,000 growing solutions. Agencies must specialize. Specialization creates constraints. These patterns won’t disappear.

Some agencies navigate these constraints through transparency about their limitations, presentation of multiple viable options, clear boundaries around their specializations, and processes that prioritize client needs despite structural pressures, while others pretend these constraints don’t exist.

Partnership commissions, revenue-sharing agreements, and sunk costs in platform investments won’t disappear. What’s next? Perhaps “AI-native” agencies positioning themselves as better equipped than their traditional, system integrator, or digital predecessors. They’ll face the same structural impossibilities. AI platforms will proliferate just as martech platforms did. Specialization will remain the rational business response. Financial incentives and sunk costs will shape recommendations. The cycle continues with new terminology. 

Your evaluation criteria can distinguish between agencies selling their constraints and agencies managing them transparently. When you know what questions to ask, you can identify agencies that put your outcomes ahead of their investments.

About the Author

Digital Mindshare LLC (Digital Mindshare), sponsor of How Marketing Technology Works®, is led by Gene De Libero, a Martech Healer with over three decades of experience helping organizations and leaders ‘Ride the Crest of Change.’ Digital Mindshare is a New York-based Marketing Technology Transformation® consultancy that helps clients optimize their martech investments, ensuring maximum returns and strategic alignment.