What marketing agencies can learn from tech.

Two responses to the same pressure

The way agencies sell themselves hasn’t changed in 20 years, even though almost everything else about how marketing gets delivered has.

The holding companies are buying data platforms. Publicis acquired LiveRamp. WPP reorganized around an AI operating system. Omnicom merged with IPG for data scale. They are rebuilding an advantage they lost, because the tools that used to require agency access are now self-serve. Google Ads and Meta’s ad manager let a marketing director with a credit card launch a campaign in an afternoon. Clients noticed.

Mid-sized agencies face the same pressure without the same option. You can’t acquire a data platform. So the responses split. Some agencies are racing to automate execution: faster media workflows, AI-assisted production, templatized deliverables. They play with margin, and it works until the independent freelancer running custom AI agents delivers the same output at a fraction of the overhead. Other agencies are packaging their expertise instead: defined methodologies, diagnostic products, scoped engagements a buyer can evaluate before the first call. This article is about the second response, and about where that discipline came from.

Meanwhile, the industry conversation at Cannes and in trade associations is still organized around defending the value of creativity, debating whether AI will replace human judgment, and celebrating the work. These are fair questions for the industry at large. They don’t help a 40-person agency figure out what to sell, to whom, and how to make it evaluable to a buyer who has never heard of them.

Agency culture rewards craft, and rightly so. The website is built as a showcase for the work, which makes sense for the creative director evaluating your reel but less sense for the VP Marketing who needs to justify the spend to the CFO.

Technology companies approach the same problem differently. Their culture is shaped by engineering: systems thinking, documentation, modularity. If something works, make it repeatable. That discipline shaped how they package and sell themselves, not just how they build products. Both instincts are rational. But the packaging discipline that tech developed can travel without replacing the craft that agencies depend on.

Now go to your competitor’s website. Read the services page. Then read another competitor’s. By the third, you’ll notice you’re reading the same page with a different logo on it. Strategy. Creative. Digital marketing. Digital experience. Content. Analytics. Maybe the order changes. The substance doesn’t.

Solutions sell, features don’t

Tech companies learned this early. When a buyer evaluates three software tools and all of them have the same features, the decision defaults to price and, if one exists, a pre-established relationship. Features alone don’t give anyone a reason to choose. So they learned to stop leading with them.

Go to almost any established tech company’s site and you’ll find a Solutions menu next to the Product menu. Same software behind both. The Product menu lists what the tool does. The Solutions menu lists who it’s for and what job they’re trying to get done. Salesforce sells one platform. Its website presents Healthcare Cloud, Manufacturing Cloud, Financial Services Cloud, each with its own page, its own language, its own proof points. Nothing about the platform changed. What changed is that a buyer in manufacturing can find their situation on the page without reading through material designed for someone else.

And the website isn’t doing this alone. Behind each solutions page there are dedicated sales teams, product specialists, and account executives organized around that industry. The page reflects how the company actually sells. Solutions are packaging, which is one of the most fundamental concepts in marketing, and it is how buyers make decisions faster.

Agencies have the same problem. Three agencies that all list SEO, paid media, content strategy, and web development leave the buyer with nothing to differentiate on. The decision falls to who was referred, who felt right in the room, or who came in cheaper. Some agencies try to solve this with a point of view: we believe in creativity, we’re driven by effectiveness. These fall into a handful of archetypes every competitor shares. True to the agency. Doesn’t help the buyer buy.

The fix is the same one tech companies found: organize around scenarios the buyer recognizes. An agency that lists brand strategy, campaigns, content and digital could instead frame around situations. We help B2B companies launch into new markets. We help DTC brands that have outgrown their founder’s aesthetic. We build employer brands for companies hiring at scale. Same capabilities. The buyer finds themselves on the page, and that’s what starts a conversation.

Best-fit customers aren’t optional

Tech companies define a best-fit customer precisely enough that the right buyer recognizes themselves and the wrong one moves on. And then they build around that choice.

A project management tool that tries to serve every team spreads its development budget across dozens of different work styles. Each feature is adequate for everyone and deep for nobody. A project management tool that picks one audience, say engineering teams, builds everything around how those teams actually work. Those features become the reason engineering teams choose it over the generalist. More of the right customers means better feedback, which means better features for that group, which attracts more of them. The focus compounds.

Agencies spread the same way. Some brand work, some performance, some content, some web builds. The team never gets deep in any one area and the portfolio looks scattered. An agency that decides it works best with B2B SaaS companies in growth stage builds case studies in that world, hires people who understand that buyer, and develops processes tuned to that sales cycle. The work gets better because the reps accumulate. The portfolio tells a coherent story. Prospects recognize themselves and self-select in.

I’m simplifying. Every agency takes clients that don’t fit the mould. But knowing where your reps are deepest and leading with that is what makes an agency recognizable rather than interchangeable. The clients outside the best-fit can still hire you. What changes is that the ones inside it stop needing to be convinced.

Methodology is margin

Digital products don’t just offer capabilities. They’re built around a workflow. The product team studies how a specific job gets done, step by step, and builds the tool around that sequence. The software doesn’t ask what you want to do. It says here is how this should work, and guides the user through a defined path. That opinion about how the work should happen is what makes the product repeatable and scalable.

A signature methodology does the same thing for an agency. It tells the buyer: we’ve done this before, we’ve repeated it, and repetition means mastery. People buy a formula because a formula implies expertise. It says you’ve thought about the sequence, not just the deliverables.

It also changes the economics. A defined process means less reinvention on every engagement, which means better margins. It makes quality less dependent on which individual runs the project. And it’s where AI becomes most useful for agencies, not as a replacement for the thinking, but as a way to handle the parts of delivery that follow the formula, so the team spends its time on the parts that need judgment and creativity.

Usable beats correct

Good product teams don’t launch a feature because it passed an internal review. They put it in front of real users, watch how they use it, collect feedback, and adjust before it goes out broadly. The feature ships when it works in someone’s hands, not when it looks right on a screen.

Agencies and consultancies often skip this step with their own deliverables. They sell positioning frameworks, messaging documents, and brand strategies, and hand them over as a deck or a PDF. The strategy might be sound. The problem is that nobody tested whether the client can actually use it on a Tuesday morning.

A positioning framework that lives in a slide deck gets opened once and filed away. The same framework, delivered as a tested sales pitch the founder can use next week, a lexicon the team can pull language from, and a set of tools configured to apply the guidelines in daily work, is something that changes behaviour. One is a document. The other is a working system.

The gap between a correct deliverable and a usable one is where most strategy work quietly fails. Closing that gap is the same discipline product teams practice every cycle: put it in someone’s hands, watch what happens, and adjust before you call it done.

All of this is productization

The solution packaging, the best-fit customer, the methodology, the usable deliverable, are all a form of the same thing: productization. In tech, productization is the default. Every feature ships with a defined scope, a defined user, and a defined way of working. In services, it’s the exception. Most agencies sell time and access to people, and the shape of the engagement gets figured out after the contract is signed.

Productizing a service means making what you sell evaluable, repeatable, and improvable without starting from scratch every time. It doesn’t mean turning your agency into a software company. It means applying the same packaging discipline to your expertise that product companies apply to their code.

One midsized digital marketing agency I know sells a fixed-price diagnostic: defined scope, defined timeline, defined deliverable. The methodology is rigorous enough to be repeatable across clients. The diagnostic works as both a product and a sales mechanism, and it replaces the ambiguous let’s-have-a-call conversation with something a buyer can evaluate on its own terms. A leading Canadian recruitment firm I worked with took a different approach: they separated sourcing from full-cycle recruitment and sell it as a sprint with flat-rate pricing and a client-facing dashboard, made possible by rigorous internal process and the right technology infrastructure. The pattern isn’t limited to marketing, but the mechanics are identical.

Not everything should be productized. Custom, high-judgment work is often where agencies create the most value, and forcing a process onto it can flatten the thinking. The question is which parts of what you do are both repeatable and valuable enough to package.

A simple way to sort it is along two lines: how often you repeat the work, and how much the client values it. Work you repeat that clients value highly is where you productize first, because that is where packaging creates the most leverage. Work you repeat that doesn’t command a premium should be automated or dropped, since it is a cost center disguised as a service. Work that is different every time and highly valued is the judgment work that makes the agency worth hiring, so protect it rather than process it to death. Work that is different every time and isn’t valued much is worth questioning altogether.

Most agencies should look first at the work they repeat that clients pay well for. You probably already have a version of it: an engagement you keep repeating, a diagnostic you run at the start of every relationship, a deliverable your team has gotten efficient at producing. It has a shape. It has a rough price. What it doesn’t have, usually, is a name, a page on your website, and a story that helps a buyer say yes before the first call.

That’s where the next conversation starts. How far can you take productization, and what does the spectrum from a named offer to a fully independent product actually look like? That’s what we’ll cover next.