The PixelPickers Blog
What the industry doesn’t want you to know.
Practical, no-jargon writing for business owners navigating the world of marketing agencies.
SERIES 01
Defense Against the Dark Arts
A guide for businesses who are considering hiring a marketing agency, have been burned by one, or just want to go in with their eyes open. Thirteen techniques. No jargon. No hedging.
+6 more spells
Latest from the Series
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Defense Against the Dark Arts: A Guide for Businesses Who’ve Been Burned (or Just Don’t Want to Be)
Your agency has every incentive to keep you in the dark. This series exists to change that. Defense Against the Dark Arts is a guide to the thirteen techniques marketing agencies use to extract value without returning it — written by someone who’s seen them from the inside.
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Cherry Picking
If your agency’s reports only ever tell a good story, that’s not a coincidence — it’s a technique. Cherry Picking is one of the most common tactics in agency reporting, and most clients never see it happening. Here’s how it works, how to spot it, and how to make sure it stops working on you.
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The Vanity Mirror: Why Your Marketing Report Always Looks Good
The report lands in your inbox on the first of the month. Impressions: up. Reach: up. Engagement rate: up. Your account manager walks you through it on a call, upbeat, confident. You hang up feeling like things are moving. Three months later, the phone isn’t ringing any more than it was before. You’ve been looking…
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The Moving Goalpost
Six months in, you bring up the targets from the original proposal. The ones that got you excited enough to sign. The agency listens patiently, then explains that the market has shifted, the platform algorithm changed, your competitive landscape is more crowded than anticipated, and frankly, those initial projections were always ambitious. The goalposts have…
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The Walled Garden
You decide to leave your agency. Maybe results were disappointing. Maybe you found someone better. Maybe you want to bring the work in-house. You send the notice and ask for everything: the ad accounts, the content files, the analytics access, the campaign data, the login credentials. The agency is polite about it. They say they’ll…
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The Complexity Myth
At some point in the agency relationship, you float the idea of bringing some of the work in-house. Maybe you’ve hired someone who could handle it. Maybe you just want to understand it better. The agency responds thoughtfully. They explain the complexity of what they do — the tools, the expertise, the constantly shifting platform…
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