None of the good agencies do this.

Isn't that basically a "no true Scotsman" fallacy, though?

I can completely believe both sides of this: the original Fishkin article, and this rebuttal which claims that "actually, marketers are competent and knowledgeable".

One way to look at this, mindful of [Sturgeon's Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law) stating that ninety percent of everything is crap, is that good marketing agencies will rise above, but if I own a store selling scented candles and Google "online advertising" and hire one of the random agencies listed, maybe, just maybe, I'll get one of the 90% of bad ones that will try to hoodwink me into believing unsupported incremental conversion numbers.

Personally I have never found a good agency for these type of things, and I have worked with a bunch. Some in the gaming space were decent enough.

From my experience agencies around 200 employees that specialize seem to be the best. “Full service” means shitty at everything. Too small of an agency and you don’t get experts (or the experts leave), too big and you’re stuck in bureaucracy, huge margins, occasion very under skilled employees who go unnoticed, etc.

I’m also starting to see more often the game brands play if switching vendors constantly so that each vendor operates at a loss to try and win the clients business. But the client always leaves by design.

The truth is that with performance marketing the know-how stays in-house. Agencies can't compete with r&d and dedicated analytical and engineering resources big brands have. The services offered are "for the rest of us".

Well if you can give us a list of "good" agencies we will all be better of I guess. Thanks in advance.

Wouldn't this apply to any external services out there? Agencies, software houses, etc. I'm not defending agencies (not glorifying them either), but it's hard to expect from the business model which scales costs proportionally to people hired and not the output, to be lean.

In the end of the day, they need to keep the lights on and it's not their money anyway.

In the end we all do and we can decide if we do it with fraud or not.