In one respect, good for him. He won capitalism. The limit on his credit card is about 0.9% of global GDP, a stat I saw somewhere and have not bothered to verify, because at that number who the fuck is even counting? But he seems like a deeply miserable guy, so I am not convinced this is the version of capitalism any of us should be gunning for.

And that is not even the loudest thing in my feed this week.

Anthropic and OpenAI are both about to go public and mint a fresh batch of capitalism winners. The President is running a for-profit celebration of violence on the White House lawn. There are, thank goodness, new UFO videos.

Then, in the same scroll, on the same flat little screen, at the exact same volume: today is the tenth anniversary of the Pulse nightclub massacre, and there was another mass shooting in Texas this morning.

Do you see the actual problem? It isn’t that a lot is happening, because a lot is always happening…the problem is that the feed gives a trillion-dollar net worth, a blood sport on the South Lawn, and a massacre anniversary the identical weight and the identical six inches of screen. Everything arrives at the same pitch - nothing gets to matter more than anything else.

I know that your feeds look exactly the same, but here's two questions that you really need to answer

You and they are facing the same fire hose of news - so everyone's attention is buffeted from tragedy to triumph and everywhere in between. The world is so noisy with extremes that it is difficult to carve out quiet spaces for the important parts of your business.

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In 2024, Wpromote and Ascend put out a report that smacked me in the face - a newsletter I read, Stacked Marketer, mentioned it for some reason this morning, and it made me re-read the report. They asked agencies how they thought their performance stacked up, and they asked brands the same question about those same agencies.

Agencies think they are crushing it.

Brands think it is fine, sometimes, mostly.

The gap it is partially caused by the amount of noise in the world - and that's what I was thinking about when I re-read the report this morning. But the gap, also, is the echoes of difficult conversations that were never opened. Inside the agency walls, nobody ever thought, “Wow, I wonder how the client thinks we are doing?”

Before you pin this on the Account Manager, it's not the Account Manager's job to go ask the client how they are performing. First of all, that puts the client in a terrible position, and it begs for the Account Manager to be defensive. This is a leadership call. This is you getting a look at your agency from the outside, and it's probably going to sting.

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Ask a roomful of agency owners what their clients care about most and you get one answer - PERFORMANCE. ( or maybe REVENUE, PIPELINE, PROFIT, ROAS or some other similar word.) Agencies are so sure that this is a truth that they have been leading themselves down the wrong path.

Here's what brands from this study actually value:

Roughly 21% more brands value creativity more than ROI. But the entire agency world is obsessing over ROI well, only 33% of brands think that you show it well.

Listen, ROI matters. Don't get twisted about that. But what this study is showing us is that ROI is not the most important metric, and nobody believes the ROI that you claim anyways. You are leaving so much of the relationship on the table. What this tells me is that you and we as an industry do not espouse the thing that we talk about all the time in this newsletter:

When you and your clients disagree this badly on how it is going and on what matters, I've got news for you - that's on you. You decided what they wanted and then sold it back to yourself. In order to be completely aligned with what your client experiences & values, you don't have to offer new services or do stuff you don’t know how to do. But it's your mandate to understand more about the client's business than your contracted services touch.

Here is where the the feed whiplash comes roaring back.

When everything is screaming at the same volume, the tempting move is to build one clean, narrow channel to your client and never leave it. Y

ou give them one metric, one dashboard, and one monthly call where you walk through the same eleven slides. It feels efficient. It means less signal to pull out of the noise, fewer messy human variables, less work for you.

It also makes you incredibly easy to fire.

The more narrow your relationship, the easier you are to replace.

A narrow relationship has exactly one thread holding it together, and when (not if) that thread starts to fray, the whole account is up for review. A narrow relationship can’t produce a creative idea, because creativity comes from knowing the business in three dimensions. A narrow relationship never gets handed the next project, because you trained the client to think of you as the vendor who does the one thing.

The more narrow your relationship, the easier you are to replace.

(Yeah - I said it twice…for emphasis.)

So have THE conversation that you should have had during the sales and onboarding process, where you understand what's strategically, emotionally, and financially important. The conversation that you should be having at least once a quarter to find out how your performance is being received.

“What’s working? What’s actually driving you nuts? What would make you think about leaving? What do you wish we did that we don’t? What do you think about my outfit?…” you know all the important questions…

You are going to get an earful, even if you are great at what you do, of things that probably don't feel awesome. That sting is kind of the whole freakin’ point. That sting is you buying back distance from the client that you didn’t know you have. That sting is you finding the roadmap to building a more-sustainable, relationship-driven enterprise.

That sustainability starts with multiple threads of information and discovery, running both directions. You need more than one person on the other side who would fight to keep you. Brands, by the way, we'll never do this first. Almost every one of them has been burned by an agency that took the money and never invested back, so they are not about to hand you the benefit of the doubt. You go first. You always go first.

In a noisy world where a trillionaire, a combat carnival in DC, UFOs & tragedy all get the same six inches of screen, the agency that survives is the one that asks hard questions, builds deep relationships, and leverages its return on understanding.

Elon and his paper trillions can go do whatever... you've got a more important job to do - build deep relationships and become impossible to replace.

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