14 Oct 2025
4-minute read
Green Truffle’s Managing Director, Tim Handy, shares his take on why relying on a one-stop shop often means paying too much for too little.
As someone who runs a marketing agency with a broad scope, it might sound odd that I’m calling the idea of a full-service agency a myth. But having been a client of, consultant to, and leader of marketing agencies, I’m convinced that no single agency can give you everything you need. Let me explain.
Many agencies call themselves ‘full-service’ because they want to claim as much of your budget as possible. They package up traditional marketing disciplines like PR, advertising, social media, and add in some design and copywriting to try to cover all of your needs. The bigger players might also throw in SEO, event planning, or video production too. There are even self-proclaimed specialists in digital or lead-generation marketing that use the label of ‘full service’, implying they can cover all bases for all organisations, all of the time. But is this even possible? I think not.
A lot depends on what you think marketing is. If you see it simply as pushing out messages, then maybe ‘full service’ looks complete. But for me, marketing should be much broader, deeper and more valuable. After all, marketing’s purpose is to attract audiences to your organisation and what you offer, and that means understanding the markets you serve, how they’re segmented, who the decision-makers are, and what matters to them. It means shaping your portfolio: what you include, how you price and position it, and how you understand and present its value. Only once you’ve done that can you decide what content to create, which channels to use, and what tools to build into the customer experience.
Another big factor is where your organisation is in its lifecycle. A start-up, or a business reinventing itself needs very different thinking to an established market leader with a strong reputation to maintain and protect. And market context matters too: a stable, regulated sector throws up different challenges to one where customer needs and products are constantly shifting. How is your competitive landscape evolving? How are technologies developing? How are buying behaviours and routes to market changing? If you’re not asking these questions and shaping strategy around the answers, how can any marketing activity be truly targeted?
To be clear, I’m not saying ‘full-service’ agencies are no good. Some deliver well within their chosen scope. My challenge is this: how can you be sure that their scope is your scope? The danger is that you limit your marketing approach by what your agency is capable of delivering rather than what brings you most value. What’s worse is that to sustain their promise of breadth they have to keep a variety of skills on the payroll, and that creates a cost burden. Agencies try to mitigate this by hiring juniors on lower wages, while billing clients at premium rates. The result? You end up paying more for a ‘full-service’ that doesn’t actually serve all your needs, delivered by people without the experience to make a real impact.
So what’s the alternative? You could build more capability in-house, but risk the same overhead problem as the agencies. You could use freelancers and specialists, but then face the time-consuming challenge of aligning and managing them all.
It’s not as bleak as it sounds – there is a third way. I created Green Truffle as an alternative to these models. Here’s how it works:
We start with your market and ambition, not our services. We listen first, then propose what’s right for you based on genuine insight.
We’ve been in your shoes. Having sat on the client side, we understand your pressures and priorities and work with you to accommodate them.
We bring in the right people when they’re needed. We don’t carry a big payroll; instead, we match the right specialists to the right challenges under our expert stewardship.
Does that make Green Truffle the true full-service agency? No, we still don’t believe such a thing exists. What we do is provide the strategic direction most agencies can’t through our core team, then manage and deliver what’s needed, happily collaborating with others inside and outside your organisation as necessary to make sure you get the best possible outcomes. If that means signposting you to a specialist rather than taking it on through our network, we’ll do it. Why wouldn’t we?
Whoever you’re working with now may well be good at what they do. But in today’s climate with pressure to get costs down and performance up, are you sure they’re giving you what you really need? The only way to know is through proper strategic engagement. Do it yourself, bring in consultants, or work with a strategic marketing agency like Green Truffle – just don’t assume that because you pay for a ‘full-service’ agency you have everything you need. Get back to basics with your market, build your strategy outside-in, and the right marketing approach will follow.
You can follow Tim on LinkedIn here.