Tata Varela, CEO of Humo Rojo and former president of Agencias Argentinas, breaks down the “malpractice” of agencies that diagnose sales problems based on their own specialty, prioritizing billable execution over a cross-functional analysis.
This Vol. 1 focuses on integrated teams that discard solutions by discipline (message, channel, audience, product, or price), reminding us: “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
Agency malpractice starts when agencies don’t diagnose the client’s problem; they diagnose the problem they already know how to solve.
“When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” The phrase has circulated for decades without a clear author. That alone shows how long this issue has existed without being solved.
A social media agency sees a sales problem and recommends more organic content.
A performance agency sees the same problem and recommends increasing media spend.
Meanwhile, a creative agency concludes the brand needs a new campaign.
All three diagnoses are different. However, the problem is identical. What changes is the specialization of who is looking at it.
This is not anecdotal. It is structural.
Most agencies generate margin in execution, not in diagnosis. As a result, the time spent understanding the real problem is not billable. In practice, proposals arrive before the diagnosis is complete. In many cases, they replace it.
This creates a perverse dynamic. The agency that arrives faster with a proposal appears more competent. However, the one that asks for time to understand the problem appears indecisive. The client chooses the first. As a result, the system rewards the behavior that produces worse outcomes.
This pattern repeats across almost all types of agencies. It is not limited to small or specialized firms. Large networks replicate it at scale. They operate with separate business units, each with their own targets and incentives.
“Full service” agencies don’t solve this problem. They simply centralize it. One provider. One invoice. The same fragmentation inside.
What matters is not the range of services. It is the quality of the diagnosis.
This is only possible when the team analyzing the problem has real competence across multiple disciplines. Only then can the right question be asked: Is this a problem of message, channel, audience, product, price—or all of them at once?
A specialized agency cannot fully answer this. Not because it lacks honesty, but because it lacks the necessary perspective. It sees what it knows.
A creative agency identifies messaging issues.
A performance agency identifies media inefficiencies.
Everything outside that scope becomes invisible.
However, real problems rarely exist in isolation. Instead, they emerge from the interaction between variables. Audience saturation. Funnel leaks. Pricing misalignment. If those factors are not visible, they cannot be diagnosed.
Cross-functional capability changes the diagnostic process. It allows elimination.
A strong performance team can confirm that media is working.
A strong creative team can confirm that messaging is not the issue.
In other words, they can discard false causes.
This process—systematic elimination across disciplines—is what produces a reliable diagnosis.
The industry often debates specialized versus integrated agencies. However, the discussion usually focuses on efficiency or management.
That misses the point.
The real question is simple:
Who can see the full problem before proposing a solution?
This capability is not built by adding services. It is built by developing teams that think across systems.
Teams that understand that performance, content, and pricing are not separate problems. They are part of the same system.
Brands that understand this stop evaluating agencies by their specialization. Instead, they evaluate them by the quality of their thinking.
Because the right question—before any proposal—is the only reliable indicator of real capability. It shows whether the agency can see beyond its own hammer.
