Who are your clients really calling?

When your most important client faces a genuinely terrifying problem, are you the first call they make? Not the second. Not the third. The first.

There is a question every agency leader should ask themselves, probably once a quarter, and almost certainly never does. When your most important client faces a genuinely terrifying problem — not a campaign brief, not a media plan, but a real, career-on-the-line, board-is-watching business problem — are you the first call they make?

Not the second. Not the third. The first.

If you hesitated, you already know the answer.

SenseMaker recently conducted a series of candid interviews with senior marketers at major Canadian organizations. The findings were not surprising, exactly. But they were clarifying in the way that a cold shower is clarifying. A dominant theme emerged across conversations: CMOs are quietly building what we've started calling an "advisor network" — a trusted inner circle of counsellors, mentors, and sounding boards. And their agencies are largely absent from it.

"I just haven't found those people lately. But just generally, I would say agencies feel less in the loop."

"There are marketing challenges I'm dealing with," said one senior marketer. "I need a sounding board. I don't need people to be pitching to me all the time." Another was more direct: "I just haven't found those people lately. But just generally, I would say agencies feel less in the loop."

Less in the loop. That phrase should keep agency leaders up at night.

The Cost of Becoming a Vendor

The consulting industry figured this out years ago. McKinsey doesn't sell "services." It sells judgment. Deloitte doesn't lead with a capabilities deck. It leads with a point of view on your industry. The result? When a CEO faces a crisis, the consultant gets the call. When a CMO faces a crisis, they call their research partner, their finance lead, a trusted peer — and then, eventually, maybe, their agency. To execute the brief that was written without them.

This is the cost of commoditization. When agencies compete on services — digital, social, content, strategy, creative — they are competing on a list of things that every other agency also does. They are, in the most literal sense, interchangeable. And interchangeable things don't get called in a crisis. They get put out to tender.

Our analysis of 122 Canadian agencies found that nearly 80% score low or medium on differentiation. When you ask an LLM to describe what makes a given agency distinct, you get back language that could apply to any of them. "We create work that matters." "We reimagine creativity for the modern era." "We tell human stories." These are not brand positions. They are corporate wallpaper.

The Advisor Standard

What does it look like when an agency actually earns the first call? It looks like a relationship built on something other than the last campaign. It looks like proactive thinking — showing up with ideas the client didn't ask for, about problems the client hasn't yet articulated. It looks like an agency that has a genuine point of view on the client's business, not just their communications.

One CMO described it precisely: "I used to call the most senior person who would take my call. I don't think clients do that anymore." The implication is clear. The senior person used to be at the agency. Now they're somewhere else.

The agencies that do earn this status — and they exist, even if they're rare — share a common trait. They have a perspective. They have opinions. They are willing to tell a client something uncomfortable. They are, in the old-fashioned sense of the word, advisors.

What This Means

If your agency's value proposition is a list of services, you have a price list, not a brand. If your most senior people are not known by name to your clients' boards, you are invisible where it matters. If your agency's website looks like every other agency's website — and it almost certainly does — you are not differentiated. You are a commodity.

The chair at the table is empty. The question is whether you want to sit in it.