I've worked with good companies and bad companies. Good and bad here has nothing to do with nice or difficult. It means whether what they were selling was actually something people wanted.

When the good ones succeed, the agency gets some credit, fairly. When the bad ones fail, the agency usually gets the blame. That second part is where I stop agreeing.

Strategy, positioning, design, campaigns, all of it can be genuinely well done and still sit on top of a product nobody wanted. That's not a contradiction. It's the most common failure mode in business, and it has nothing to do with whether the creative work was good.

Why this distinction matters

I'm not taking the blame off the table entirely. Sometimes the work could have been better, sometimes we could have pushed harder or led more firmly. That's fair. But there's a real difference between work that underperformed and work that was fine, sitting under an offer that was never going to sell no matter who built the marketing around it.

If every failed engagement gets filed as an agency failure, the lesson everyone takes away is wrong. The client learns nothing about the product. The agency learns to avoid honest conversations about demand, because those conversations start to feel like covering yourself instead of just being accurate.

The demand question has to get asked before the work starts, not used as an excuse after it ends. Does anyone actually want this? Is the price right for what it is? Those aren't marketing questions. They're business questions marketing can't answer for you.

Good thinking. Honest positioning. Work that gives the real offer its best possible shot. Whether anyone wanted the offer in the first place was never mine to fix.