Marketing Agency Horror Stories Episode 6: Common Marketing “Scams”

In Episode 6 of our Marketing Agency Horror Stories series, we are covering three scenarios in which businesses were led in the wrong direction. Here is what each of those situations looked like and what to watch for.

1. UNSOLICITED EMAILS TELLING YOU YOUR WEBSITE IS BROKEN

If you’ve been running a business for any length of time, you have almost certainly received emails from strangers telling you that your website has serious problems. Poor SEO, bad content, outdated design — the message varies, but the structure is always the same: your site is failing, and they can fix it.

These emails are sent in bulk to thousands of businesses at a time. The person sending them has not reviewed your website, does not know your industry, and has no meaningful understanding of your actual situation. What they are counting on is that you do not know enough about search engine optimization, Google rankings, or website performance to push back on whatever claims they are making. 

They use that knowledge gap to their advantage — presenting enough technical-sounding language to make the problem feel real and the solution feel urgent. The goal is to get you to move forward with a new website, whether you need one or not. 

We’ve seen this happen repeatedly. A business responds to one of these emails, moves forward with a website project, and ends up with a result that does not serve them. The time and money lost in those situations were entirely avoidable.

If you have genuine questions about how your website is performing, work with a firm you have vetted and chosen. Do not act on the claims of someone who reached out to you cold.

2. THE CONSULTANT WHO BECAME THE AGENCY

This scenario does not involve a cold email or an obvious pitch. It involves a talented speaker and an unforthcoming message about what is best for your business.

We saw a company whose owner was spending a modest amount on marketing, and attended an event where a speaker made a compelling case that businesses should stop working with agencies and handle their marketing internally. The event was highly produced, the speaker was polished and confident, and the owner came away convinced it was the right direction.

The catch: working with the speaker's company required signing a 12-month consulting contract that functioned exactly like an agency relationship. They advised, executed, and billed like an agency — while publicly advocating against them. That may not rise to the level of a scam, but it is not forthright either.

The company ended up hiring multiple internal marketing positions while simultaneously paying for the consulting contract. On top of that, they had to manage everything that comes with building an internal team: hiring, onboarding, training, and turnover. Over the following 12 to 18 months, they ended up spending five times their original marketing budget and had worse results to show for it. Eighteen months of potential progress for the company were lost.

When to Hire Internally:

There is a point at which building an internal marketing team makes economic sense. Company size and marketing scope both factor into that decision. But that analysis needs to be done logically, with real numbers, not on the basis of a compelling stage presentation. 

Before making a major structural change to how your company handles marketing, think through the actual costs and what the realistic outcomes look like. Do not let a well-packaged message convince you that the grass is greener when the numbers do not support it.

3. AI CAN DO ALL YOUR MARKETING

Over the past several months, you’ve likely seen a surge of ads on social media claiming that AI can handle everything: your digital advertising, your website, your social media, your full marketing program. The pitch is that AI is essentially a switch you can flip, and your marketing will perfectly run itself.

To be clear, AI is not the scam here. It is a genuinely useful tool, and we have been leveraging it at Four Columns for several years. The capabilities have grown significantly, and it can assist meaningfully across many areas of marketing. The problem is the companies selling set-it-and-forget-it services built around it — the ones where you sign a contract, get plugged into a system, and “see what happens.”

AI cannot produce good output without good input. Whatever goes in directly shapes what comes out. No business is generic, and if the people running the system do not have a real understanding of your business, your markets, and your goals, the output will reflect that gap. 

Leveraging AI is a skill, and leveraging it well for marketing is a specific one. A system that replaces that expertise with automation is not a true marketing program, and it’s definitely not the most effective way to utilize AI for your company. Experienced marketers who understand your business and know how to skillfully work with AI are the ones who can actually use it to drive results. That combination is what to look for, not a platform that promises to handle everything automatically.

DON’T LET THE PITCH MAKE THE DECISION

The common thread across all three of these situations is that the companies acted without enough information. An unsolicited email, a polished speaking event, a social media ad — none of these are a substitute for a careful, informed evaluation of what your marketing actually needs and who is best equipped to deliver it.

If you have questions about your website performance, your current agency relationship, or how AI fits into your marketing strategy, reach out to us directly. We are glad to help you think through it.