Dave Gutting and I were at dinner in Washington, D.C. not long ago, catching up the way you do with someone you’ve known through a few chapters of the same business. We got to talking about our early Barkley days together, and at some point Dave reached into his pocket, pulled out his wallet, and worked out a piece of paper that had clearly been folded and unfolded more times than it was built for. He set it on the table, gave me a sly grin, and said, “This should be in the Smithsonian.”
It was the diagram. The same one, nine years later, still riding around in his wallet.
To explain why he’d hang onto it that long, I have to go back to the evening I drew it.
I ended my first day at Barkley the way I’d end a hundred more: at a restaurant table, talking about the business rather than doing it. This particular table was the furthest east one on the patio at Extra Virgin, September 2017, an Old Fashioned in front of me, Dave and Jimmy Keown across the table. The Meers team had just folded into Barkley. We didn’t have our sea legs yet, wouldn’t for months, but I already knew one thing worth knowing: both agencies answered to the same client, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City. Meers had held that business for nearly two decades. Barkley, meanwhile, was in the home stretch of launching something Blue KC called Spira Care, an Advanced Primary Care model that Dave and Jimmy had helped build from the ground up. I sat down that evening mostly to listen.
What I didn’t expect was that we’d talk for two hours and never once mention advertising.
We talked about why Blue KC needed Spira Care. Why they wanted it, which isn’t the same question, and the distinction mattered more than I initially realized. Why, in Dave and Jimmy’s telling, it represented something close to how healthcare ought to be delivered and paid for in this country. It was a conversation about product architecture, unit economics, and patient behavior. Two agency people, deep in a client’s actual business, with nothing resembling a creative brief anywhere in sight.
Somewhere in that conversation I understood what I was actually looking at. Proof that an agency, given room to operate, can produce something no campaign ever will: a roadmap. Product development. Distribution. Culture. Pricing. An overall operating model for a business. The kind of measurable case a client can walk into a boardroom and use to unlock a multi-million-dollar commitment from people who don’t care how clever the work is, only whether the math holds.
I pulled out a piece of note paper at that table and drew a diagram. Nothing elaborate: two axes, four boxes. That’s the piece of paper Dave would still be carrying nine years later, at a different dinner, in a different city.
What the diagram says
Draw a horizontal line: Financial on the left, Marketing on the right. Cross it with a vertical one: Tactics on the bottom, Strategy on top. Four quadrants. And if you plot the last seventy years of two entire professions onto that grid, you can watch, almost in real time, one industry lose the room and another one take it.
Through the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, advertising sat in Marketing Strategy, the top right, the boardroom quadrant. CEOs wanted their agency people at the table. Three TV networks, minimal fragmentation, and advertising moved the needle in ways a client’s own executives could see and feel. It was a genuine relationship, not a vendor arrangement.
Down in the bottom left, in Financial Tactics, sat the Big Eight accounting firms (Arthur Andersen, Deloitte & Touche, Coopers & Lybrand) doing the unglamorous work of auditing the books and filing the tax returns. They had one asset that mattered more than anyone realized at the time: a direct line to every client’s CFO.
Then came Enron. If you weren’t around for it, the short version is on Wikipedia and the long version is a documentary called The Smartest Guys in the Room. Either will do. What matters here isn’t the fraud, it’s what the fraud triggered. Enron’s collapse took Arthur Andersen down with it, a firm that had survived nearly a century, gone within months. But Andersen had a small consulting offshoot that survived the wreckage: Accenture. And Accenture had inherited the one thing that mattered: the CFO relationship, at every one of those client organizations.
That relationship was a door, and Accenture walked through it. If you already have the CFO’s trust, why stop there? Meet the CEO. The COO. The CIO. The CHRO. All the Cs. Accenture moved from Financial Tactics into Financial Strategy (real influence, not just audit sign-off), and the rest of the former Big Eight watched it work and followed, consolidating into consulting practices of their own.
Here’s the part I think agencies still haven’t fully absorbed. Once the consultancies owned Financial Strategy, they didn’t stay in their lane. They looked across the grid at Marketing Strategy, our quadrant, and asked the same question that had gotten them this far: why not here too? CRM. Data analytics. Measurement. Marketing metrics that feed business metrics. Capabilities agencies had always assumed were ours by default. In 2019, Accenture bought Droga5, one of the most respected creative shops in the country, for roughly $450 million, and folded it into what’s now Accenture Song. That deal wasn’t really about creative talent. It was the flag planted on the last quadrant agencies still held.
And just like that, the top-right corner of the grid, the one that had given agencies a boardroom seat and access to budgets nobody scrutinized too hard because the value was simply assumed, was gone. Most agencies never registered the loss as it happened. We settled, without much resistance, into what was left: Marketing Tactics, bottom right. Execution. The quadrant with the lowest margins and the least influence, and the one every procurement department in America has gotten very good at squeezing.
Where that leaves us
I don’t think this requires much convincing for anyone running an agency today. Billable hours. Margins around 20% in a good year, if you’re lucky. Budgets set by finance and procurement with input from the CMO. Relationships that rarely extend past the marketing function, and even those relationships weakened by media fragmentation and metrics nobody fully trusts. It’s a hard spot, and agency leaders who see it clearly have every right to feel some dread about it.
But I keep coming back to that table at Extra Virgin, because Spira Care is proof the quadrant isn’t permanent: it’s just where we’ve been standing. That work wasn’t a campaign. It was product development, pricing strategy, channel design, audience segmentation, all of it backed by metrics solid enough to take to a board of directors and justify real capital investment. That’s Financial Strategy and Marketing Strategy work, done by an agency, because a client trusted that agency to operate at that altitude.
After that dinner, I started drawing the diagram everywhere: whiteboards, windows, Post-it notes, any surface I could find around Barkley. Jimmy started noticing them showing up and gave them a name: Sam-a-Grams. My way of putting the argument in front of people until it stuck.
I’m not arguing every agency should become a consultancy. Plenty of agency leaders will say, reasonably, that’s not who they are, or they don’t have the bench for it. Those are legitimate choices. But choices have prices, and I want agency leaders to know what theirs is. Accenture does not take an engagement below 60% margin. If the work you’re doing genuinely moves a client’s business rather than just their media performance, it shouldn’t be priced like a production job. It should be priced like what it is. I’d put the floor at 50%.
That margin isn’t just profit. It’s the thing that lets you hire differently: people who can sit across from a CEO and hold their own, who belong in a Financial Strategy or Marketing Strategy conversation instead of waiting to be handed a brief after the real decisions are made. Without that margin, you can’t afford those people. With it, you can build a team that gets invited back into the room the industry quietly walked out of forty years ago.
That’s the wager behind the diagram, and it’s the one I keep making. Dave’s only half joking about the Smithsonian. It’s not museum-worthy art, just two axes and four boxes in ballpoint pen. But nine years on, in a different city, he’s still carrying it around, and the argument on that piece of paper hasn’t gotten any less true. It’s just waiting on more agencies to take the bet.