That's all going to depend on what areas of practice. Specialized agencies run most of the large programs these days.

What would you think if I told the same story from the agencies perspective?

"We used to work with this medium sized company and were hired by someone who quickly left their position and moved into another role. Our brief was nothing more than 'oversee the marketing'. We had little direction, no idea of their goals, and were kind of ignored ever since we started working with them. Our account management team tried a number of times to talk to someone senior, but they're always busy.

They asked us to "look after SEO", because they had no idea how to do it themselves, but expected miracles for $700 per month. In fact, price was the only thing they gave us direction on. We had to outsource copywriting just to turn a profit.

They wanted a subject matter expert trained on their business, writing 2 highly targeted, SEO optimised, heavily promoted posts, for $800 per month. When we explained that to achieve that we'd need to find a journalist with an engineering degree and they'd cost a lot more, they ignored us. We delivered 2 posts per months at $400 each, with zero direction and feedback from the client.

The clients digital architecture was terrible, we had no access to their developers, so we weren't able to deliver lead pages or downloads.

Every time we told them good design and development costs money, we were ignored.

We were seriously thinking about firing them as a client.

We were actually glad when they decided not to work with us anymore."