Advertising Age recently published pointless and useless content about White advertising agencies dodging responsibility for culturally clueless campaigns.
This is not a new topic—and the perspectives presented by Ad Age are common knowledge.
A core issue involves the collective ignorance of brands and agencies. That is, both parties are presumably vetting work throughout the creative process. The proceedings feature intentional components and shared responsibilities.
From polling the mailroom attendant to integrating ERGs, there have never been legitimate measures for assessing and implementing cultural competence.
Best practices involve best guesses—or no guessing games at all.
Per Google AI:
Cluelessness is the state of being unaware, uninformed, or lacking understanding, often leading to a feeling of bewilderment or confusion. It can be caused by ignorance or a lack of information, making someone seem foolish or foolishly unaware of a situation. It can also arise from a fixed mindset, where an individual is closed off to new ideas, which can lead to a failure to grasp consequences or act effectively.
Why agencies are taking less heat for brand controversies—and why that’s not a good thing
By Ewan Larkin
The chatter around Cracker Barrel and American Eagle’s recent controversies has focused squarely on the brands, while their agencies have largely drawn little notice. That may seem like a relief, but perhaps it’s not a problem agencies should want to dodge.
Previously, when a campaign missed the mark, a CEO or chief marketing officer easily shifted the blame onto the agency in the boardroom or in the press, said Morgan Carroll, a longtime executive at Publicis Groupe’s Digitas and Saatchi & Saatchi, who noted the relative silence around the aforementioned campaigns on LinkedIn.
While agencies have never had final say over campaigns and are inherently limited in how much blame they can shoulder, they nonetheless often took the heat for brand blunders. “Blame used to be part of the business model for agencies,” said Carroll, now a principal consultant at After-Hours Institute. “When you hired an agency, you weren’t only buying ads, you were outsourcing your anxiety.”
Experts say the landscape has changed. Marketing has become fragmented, with brands relying on various external partners. This diffusion of responsibility, combined with declining agency brand recognition, makes it harder to pin accountability on any single partner and leaves the companies themselves as the clear targets of scrutiny.
Below, Ad Age explores how agencies’ role in fallout is evolving, and whether that’s really good news for them. Blue Engine and Viral Nation, which work with Cracker Barrel, did not respond to requests for comment. Prophet, also tied to Cracker Barrel, declined to comment. Shadow and Acre, which work with American Eagle, also declined to comment.
‘Not being worth blaming’
There have been incidents beyond Cracker Barrel and American Eagle in which agencies came out fairly unscathed.
Thom Glover, founder of American Haiku and a longtime Droga5 executive, pointed to recent examples such as the panned Jaguar rebrand by Accenture Song, which managed to keep its role relatively under wraps until reports emerged in May that the automaker was conducting an agency review. Speaking about all the aforementioned cases, Glover said, “Knowing who the agency is is fair. There should be a certain sense of shared responsibility.”
On the surface, escaping blame may look like a win for agencies, with fewer lawsuits and bad press. But Carroll argues it’s the opposite—an indication that agencies, once seen as masterminds, have been reduced to middlemen. The “Don Draper” myth—that a single agency or creative genius could own a brand’s success or failure—is dead, he added.
Glover pushed back against the notion that agencies have been sidelined to middlemen roles. To him, the shift away from single-agency dominance doesn’t signal diminished value but a different kind of partnership.
Today, he said, marketers are smart to place bets across multiple partners and ideas, testing and backing what works rather than handing the entire brand over to one agency. “So yes, the death of the big AOR and handing everything over to a single network, sure,” Glover acknowledged. “But I don’t think that means people value agencies any less.”
Another factor is the sheer volume of potential flashpoints, said an executive who works closely with chief marketing officers, speaking on condition of anonymity. Today’s controversies span everything from ads to product choices, influencer campaigns or even a single executive’s behavior. That constant churn, the executive said, “waters down” both blame and credit.
Agencies aren’t consumer-facing
There are other limits to agencies’ exposure. When a brand controversy spills into the mainstream, many consumers and news outlets simply don’t know who the agencies are, nor are they particularly concerned with finding out.
“The public at large doesn’t know the agencies and does know the brands,” said Patti Williams, associate professor of marketing and vice dean of Wharton Executive Education. “We’re much more likely to try to sort out the motivations and the causality of actors we know versus actors we don’t. So, why would we be overly concerned with the agencies?”
Even still, there was a time when agencies weren’t so invisible, said Carroll, pointing to Saatchi & Saatchi’s controversial Just for Feet Super Bowl spot in 1999, which resulted in the client suing the agency, charging advertising malpractice. “Their name was bandied about,” Carroll said of Saatchi & Saatchi.
That consumers wouldn’t recognize the shops behind campaigns like American Eagle’s reflects a decline in agency brand equity, said Carroll. He added: “If you’re not relevant enough to be named, I don’t think that’s a good place to be.”
“The sad part is, they’re avoiding the crossfire here, but that’s because they’ve become irrelevant and their brands are disappearing,” said Allen Adamson, co-founder of brand and marketing consulting firm Metaforce.
Learning opportunities
But the CMO adviser argued that relationships between agencies and marketers are strengthening, which is one reason why the former escapes blame. Agencies are no longer simply handed a brief, they’re “in the room” with CMOs, business leaders and sometimes even boards, he said. That closeness, he added, makes it far harder for clients to scapegoat them when things go wrong.
Asked for comment on this story, American Eagle CMO Craig Brommers said in a statement, “At American Eagle, our agencies are not just partners, but true extensions of our teams.”
Cracker Barrel did not immediately return a request for comment.
For American Haiku’s Glover, strong client-agency relationships allow teams to take creative risks without pointing fingers, turning occasional misfires into learning opportunities rather than moments for blame.
“If the risks come off, you share the spoils, and if they go wrong, you share in any of the negativity that comes from that—and then you go again," he said.
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