I've always had a bad relationship with agencies. I started out as a photographer back in 2013. Picked up videography in 2017. By 2019 I was on the internal marketing side full time, and I haven't looked back. Since then I've done pretty much all of it. Content creation, directing shoots, brand design, catalog management, ad creation and management, SEO, and every other acronym you can throw at me. My whole career has been in-house, running marketing for multi-million dollar brands and manufacturers, sitting inside the business and watching the e-commerce dashboards in real time. I could see exactly which dollar brought in a sale and which one disappeared. When your paycheck depends on revenue you can actually point to, clever stops mattering pretty fast. What works is what matters. Honestly, most of what I've done in my career is come in behind agencies and clean up their mess. I've walked into companies and found the leftovers. Dashboards full of charts that don't connect to anything. Campaigns running with no way to tie a single conversion back to the spend. And nobody ever told the company, "hey, we can run this campaign, but we have no way to track if it actually works." So month after month they got handed impressions and clicks labeled as conversions. Numbers that photograph well in a deck and do nothing for a business trying to pay its people.