I’m a Monty Python fan. I’ve come to accept that British humor isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, so I don’t usually lead with it. But I was having coffee with my friend and fellow Barkley and Carmichael Lynch alum, Laura Scobie, and she made an casual comment that stopped me mid-sip: the way agencies are ignoring every warning sign right now is exactly like King Arthur fighting the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
I’ve been unable to unsee it since.
If you don’t know the scene, here’s the setup. Arthur rides up to a knight guarding a bridge, admires how well he’s fought, and invites him to join the quest for the Holy Grail. The Black Knight isn’t interested.
The Black Knight: “None shall pass.”
Arthur tries diplomacy first. The Knight won’t move. So they fight, and Arthur cuts off one of his arms.
Arthur: “Surely we’re finished now.”
The Black Knight: “’Tis but a scratch.”
Arthur: “A scratch? Your arm’s off!”
The Black Knight: “No it isn’t.”
Twenty-five years ago, media planning and buying got unbundled from agencies. Whatever seat the media team held at the strategic table got reduced to tactical execution in the hunt for the lowest price-per-point. Today the exact same thing is happening to creative and content production, and AI is putting it on fast forward.
The Black Knight is in denial. So are a lot of agencies.
They get the brief from the client. They get the budget from the client. And with that, they’re expected to execute flawlessly and move the business forward. The best they can usually hope for is a voice in how the budget gets allocated. Agencies have been quietly excommunicated from the C-suite. Management consultancies have moved down into creative and content while agencies only visit the C-suite occasionally, and mostly in the language of strategy, not the actual practice of it. Accenture Song and Deloitte Digital didn’t out-execute agencies. They out-positioned them. They were in the room where the business problem got defined, and treated creative output as one deliverable among many, not the point of the exercise.
Arthur points out that the Black Knight’s arm is lying on the ground next to him.
The Black Knight: “It’s only a flesh wound. I’ve had worse.”
They keep fighting. Arthur takes the other arm. The Knight, now armless, starts trying to kick him. Arthur cuts off one leg. Then the other.
The Black Knight: “I’m invincible!”
Arthur: “You’re a loony.”
Here’s where I have to turn this on myself, because I spent 25 years running an agency and I recognize the denial from the inside, not the outside. There were stretches at Meers Advertising where a client conversation would start to drift toward “why do we even need an agency for this” and my instinct was to answer with craft. Better creative. Faster turnaround. A sharper campaign. I was defending the arm that was already on the ground, insisting it was a scratch, because craft was the fight I knew how to win. It rarely occurred to me that the actual fight had moved somewhere I wasn’t standing.
That’s the trap. Agencies focus on communications strategy, which answers the question “how do we say this well.” That’s a real skill. It is also a bounded one. Marketing and business strategy answer a bigger question: “what should this company be, and to whom, and why does that matter more than what we’re currently saying.” An agency that only ever gets asked the first question has already lost the argument about its own value, whether or not anyone’s said so out loud yet.
Clients eventually notice they’re paying strategy-level fees for a communications-tactics function, and once they notice, the relationship starts looking a lot like a fee negotiation instead of a partnership.
The short-sightedness here was never that agencies got worse at craft. Most of them didn’t. It’s that craft is the wrong hill to defend when the actual threat is being excluded from the decision that craft is supposed to serve. You can have the best creative department in your market and still be standing there on two stumps insisting you’re invincible, because the fight was never about how well you swing the sword. It was about whether you’re in the room when someone decides which battles get fought at all.
If you’re an agency leader reading this and something in your gut just tightened a little, that’s worth sitting with. Not as an indictment. As a diagnostic. Where in your business are you currently arguing “’tis but a scratch” about something that’s already on the ground?
Positioning isn’t a marketing exercise you bolt on after the strategy is set. It’s the argument for why you belong in the room where the strategy gets set in the first place. Miss that distinction, and you can win every fight and still lose the war, one limb at a time.